Declan Smithies

Phenomenological theories explain the nature of desire in terms of how it feels: to desire something is to feel—or to be disposed to feel—the desire for it. In contrast, functionalist theories explain the nature of desire in terms of what it does, rather than how it feels. This chapter presents three arguments for the phenomenological theory: it avoids counterexamples to the motivational theory of desire, it captures the normative significance of desire, and it explains how we can have introspective knowledge of what we desire. The chapter concludes by examining how we use the concept of desire in predicting and explaining behavior.

This chapter argues against experiential moral foundationalism, the thesis that experience is a source of foundational knowledge about morality. To provide us with foundational moral knowledge, experience must not only represent moral facts, but it must also block the regress of justification: it must justify belief without standing in need of any justification. I’ll argue that no experience satisfies both criteria. Perceptual experience blocks the regress of justification, it doesn’t represent moral facts. In contrast, some non-perceptual experiences represent moral facts, including experiences of moral emotion and moral intuition, but they cannot block the regress of justification. Hence, I conclude, no experience can give us foundational moral knowledge.

What is it to understand a concept? This paper has two main goals. The negative goal is to argue against inferentialism: the thesis that understanding a concept is having the capacity to make certain inferences. The positive goal is to argue for experientialism: the thesis that understanding a concept is the capacity to have certain cognitive experiences. On this view, the cognitive experience of thinking a thought is sufficient for understanding its content no matter how you’re disposed to use it in inference. There is no further requirement that these cognitive experiences must be disposed to play a certain role in inference.

This chapter is guided by the hypothesis that the point and purpose of using the concept of justification in epistemic evaluation is tied to its role in the practice of critical reflection. Section one proposes an analysis of justification as the epistemic property in virtue of which a belief has the potential to survive ideal critical reflection. Section two uses this analysis to argue for a form of access internalism on which one has justification to believe a proposition iff one has higher-order justification to believe that one has justification to believe that proposition. Section three distinguishes between propositional and doxastic versions of access internalism and argues that the propositional version avoids familiar objections to the doxastic version. Section four argues that the propositional version of access internalism explains and vindicates internalist intuitions about cases. Section five concludes with some reflections on the relationship between critical reflection, responsibility, and personhood.

What is the relationship between pleasure and desire? While some philosophers reduce pleasure to desire, this paper explores the prospects for a hedonic theory of desire, which reduces desire to pleasure instead. I argue that desiring that p is best analyzed not as a disposition to feel pleased that p when you believe that p, but rather as a disposition to feel pleasure in what you imagine when you imagine that p. I give three arguments for this hedonic theory of desire, defend it against objections, and consider its broader theoretical implications for current debates in ethics and philosophy of mind.

Which beings have moral status? I argue that moral status requires some capacity for hedonic feelings of pleasure or displeasure. David Chalmers rejects this view on the grounds that it denies moral status to Vulcans, which are defined as conscious creatures with no capacity for hedonic feelings. On his more inclusive view, all conscious beings have moral status. We agree that only conscious beings have moral status, but we disagree about how to explain this. I argue that we cannot explain why consciousness is necessary for moral status without denying that it is sufficient for moral status. Hence, we cannot exclude unconscious zombies without excluding conscious Vulcans too.

What is involved in making an inference? This chapter argues against what Paul Boghossian calls the Taking Condition: "Inferring necessarily involves the thinker taking his premises to support his conclusion and drawing his conclusion because of that fact" (2014: 5). I won’t argue that the Taking Condition is incoherent: that nothing can coherently play the role that takings are supposed to play in inference. Instead, I’ll argue that it cannot plausibly explain all the inferential knowledge that we ordinarily take ourselves to have. Moreover, I’ll argue that we don’t need it to understand the nature of inference.

This chapter defends the thesis that feeling conviction is sufficient for belief: if you feel conviction that p, then you believe that p. I begin with a neutral characterization of belief in terms of its normative profile: belief is a state that is subject to certain distinctive norms of rationality. The main argument of the chapter is that feelings of conviction are beliefs because they are subject to the same norms of rationality that govern our beliefs. Functionalists often deny that feelings of conviction constitute beliefs when they play dysfunctional causal roles, as in cases of mad belief or delusion or implicit bias, but this only serves to obscure the kind of irrationality involved in such cases. These are dysfunctional beliefs, rather than non-doxastic states, or "in-between" cases.

Chapter 9 argues that accessibilism is needed to explain the epistemic irrationality of epistemic akrasia—roughly, believing things you believe you shouldn’t believe. Section 9.1 defines epistemic akrasia and separates questions about its possibility and its rational permissibility. Section 9.2 argues from the premise that epistemic akrasia is never rationally permissible to the conclusion that the JJ principle is true. The remaining sections motivate the premise that epistemic akrasia is never rationally permissible: section 9.3 appeals to an epistemic version of Moore’s paradox, section 9.4 to the slogan that knowledge is the aim of belief, and section 9.5 to the connection between epistemic justification and reflection.

What is the connection between justification and truth in moral epistemology? The primary goal of this paper is to argue that you cannot have justified false beliefs about your own moral obligations. The secondary goal is to explain why not. Some epistemologists embrace a global truth-connection in epistemology, according to which epistemic justification is always factive. In contrast, I endorse a local truth-connection in moral epistemology, which says that epistemic justification is factive when it concerns your own moral obligations. To explain this, I appeal to a version of moral rationalism, which says there are necessary truths about morality that everyone has a priori justification to believe.

In The Epistemic Role of Consciousness, I argue that phenomenal consciousness plays an indispensable role in explaining our knowledge and justified beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. Without phenomenal consciousness, we cannot know anything at all. The book develops a systematic theory of epistemic justification that applies to knowledge of every kind. In this brief summary, however, I will focus on the epistemology of perception, since that is the main topic addressed by the commentators in this book symposium.

According to the Rationality Constraint, our concept of belief imposes limits on how much irrationality is compatible with having beliefs at all. We argue that empirical evidence of human irrationality from the psychology of reasoning and the psychopathology of delusion undermines only the most demanding versions of the Rationality Constraint, which require perfect rationality as a condition for having beliefs. The empirical evidence poses no threat to more relaxed versions of the Rationality Constraint, which only require only minimal rationality. Nevertheless, we raise problems for all versions of the Rationality Constraint by appealing to more extreme forms of irrationality that are continuous with actual cases of human irrationality. In particular, we argue that there are conceivable cases of “mad belief” in which populations of Lewisian madmen have beliefs that are not even minimally rational. This undermines Lewis’s claim that our ordinary concept of belief is a theoretical concept that is implicitly defined by its role in folk psychology. We argue that introspection gives us a phenomenal concept of belief that cannot be analyzed by applying Lewis’s semantics for theoretical terms.

This chapter provides a critical overview of several influential proposals about the epistemic function of higher-order evidence. I start by criticizing accounts of higher-order evidence that appeal to evidential defeat (§1), epistemic conflicts (§2), and unreasonable knowledge (§3). Next, I propose an alternative account that appeals to a combination of improper basing (§4) and non-ideal rationality (§5). Finally, I conclude by summarizing my reasons for preferring this account of higher-order evidence to the alternatives (§6).

What is the role of phenomenal consciousness in grounding epistemic justification? This paper explores the prospects for a global version of phenomenal conservatism inspired by the work of Michael Huemer, according to which all epistemic justification is grounded in phenomenal seemings. I’m interested in this view because of its global ambitions: it seeks to explain all epistemic justification in terms of a single epistemic principle, which says that you have epistemic justification to believe whatever seems to you strongly enough on balance to be true. One of the attractions of phenomenal conservatism is that it offers such a simple and unified framework for explaining the epistemic role of phenomenal consciousness. I will argue, however, that the simplicity of phenomenal conservatism is not a theoretical virtue, but a theoretical vice, since it distorts the epistemological phenomena it is supposed to explain. In effect, phenomenal conservatism seeks to explain all epistemic justification on the same model as perception. But this has the predictable effect of distorting the epistemology of other domains, including introspection, inference, and a priori justification.

What is the role of affective experience in explaining how our desires provide us with reasons for action? When we desire that p, we are thereby disposed to feel attracted to the prospect that p, or to feel averse to the prospect that not-p. In this paper, we argue that affective experiences – including feelings of attraction and aversion – provide us with reasons for action in virtue of their phenomenal character. Moreover, we argue that desires provide us with reasons for action only insofar as they are dispositions to have affective experiences. On this account, affective experience has a central role to play in explaining how desires provide reasons for action.

This chapter is guided by the hypothesis that the point and purpose of using the concept of justification in epistemic evaluation is tied to its role in the practice of critical reflection. In section one, I propose an analysis of justification as the epistemic property in virtue of which a belief has the potential to survive ideal critical reflection. In section two, I use this analysis in arguing for a form of access internalism on which one has justification to believe a proposition if and only if one has higher-order justification to believe that one has justification to believe that proposition. In section three, I distinguish between propositional and doxastic versions of access internalism and argue that the propositional version avoids familiar objections to the doxastic version. In section four, I argue that the propositional version of access internalism also explains and vindicates internalist intuitions about cases. In section five, I conclude with some reflections on the relationship between critical reflection, responsibility and personhood.

This chapter has two goals: to motivate the foundationalist solution to the regress problem and to defend it against arguments from Sellars, BonJour and Klein. Both the motivation and the defence of foundationalism raise larger questions about the relationship between foundationalism and access internalism. I argue that foundationalism is not in conflict with access internalism, despite influential arguments to the contrary, and that access internalism in fact supplies a theoretical motivation for foundationalism. I conclude that foundationalism and access internalism form a coherent and well-motivated package

This is the first in a series of two articles that serve as an introduction to recent debates about cognitive phenomenology. Cognitive phenomenology can be defined as the experience that is associated with cognitive activities, such as thinking, reasoning, and understanding. What is at issue in contemporary debates is not the existence of cognitive phenomenology, so defined, but rather its nature and theoretical role. The first article examines questions about the nature of cognitive phenomenology, while the second article explores the philosophical implications of these questions for the role of consciousness in theories of intentionality, introspective self-knowledge, and knowledge of the external world.