Brendan Balcerak Jackson

Much of the excitement about virtual reality and its potential for things like entertainment, art, education, and activism is its ability to generate experiences that are powerfully immersive. However, discussions of VR tend to invoke the notion of immersive experience without subjecting it to closer scrutiny; and discussions often take it for granted that immersive experience is a single unified phenomenon. Against this, we argue that there are four distinct types or aspects of immersive experience that should be distinguished: representational immersion, which corresponds roughly to what is sometimes called “psychological presence”; participatory immersion, which is related to the interactive aspects of VR experience; affective immersion, which has to do with the subject’s emotional relation to the experience; and narrative immersion, which captures the phenomenon of being caught up in the flow of events experienced. We argue that this four-way distinction helps us understand the powerfully immersive character of VR, while also recognizing its continuity with the immersion we experience with media such as novels, films, and music. We also argue that the account of immersion we offer here lets us better understand the connection between VR and empathy, charting a middle course between extreme enthusiasts who view VR as the ultimate “empathy machine” and extreme skeptics who argue that this attitude is misguided.

Speakers of a natural language regularly form justified beliefs about what others are saying when they utter sentences of the language. What accounts for these justified beliefs? At one level, we already have a plausible answer: there is a perfectly good ordinary sense in which users of a language know what its sentences mean, and it is very plausible that the hearer’s knowledge of the meaning of S helps explain her justification for her belief about what is said by an utterance of S. But what exactly does our knowledge of sentence meanings consist in? In this essay I advance and defend the view that we know the meanings of sentences in virtue of having a certain distinctive kind of know-how that I call inferential practical knowledge. I argue that this view provides the best explanation for the justification of our beliefs about what is said. In particular, it provides a better explanation than the more conventional and widely accepted view that we know the meaning of S in virtue of possessing the theoretical knowledge that S has such-and-such meaning.

Gilbert Harman’s famous principle of Clutter Avoidance commands that “one should not clutter one’s mind with trivialities". Many epistemologists have been inclined to accept Harman’s principle, or something like it. This is significant because the principle appears to have robust implications for our overall picture of epistemic normativity. Jane Friedman (2018) has recently argued that one potential implication is that there are no genuine purely evidential norms on belief revision. In this paper, we present some new objections to a suitably formulated version of the clutter principle qua norm on belief revision. Moreover, we argue that the clutter principle is best understood as a norm on non-doxastic stages of inquiry. In our view, it is a norm of asking and considering questions rather than a norm of settling on an answer to a question by forming a belief.

Philosophers have always recognized the value of reason, but the process of reasoning itself has only recently begun to emerge as a philosophical topic in its own right. Is reasoning a distinctive kind of mental process? If so, what is its nature? How does reasoning differ from merely freely associating thoughts? What is the relationship between reasoning about what to believe and reasoning about how to act? Is reasoning itself something you do, or something that happens to you? And what is the value of reasoning? Are there rules for good or correct reasoning and, if so, what are they like? Does good reasoning always lead to justified belief or rational action? Is there more than one way to reason correctly from your evidence? This volume comprises twelve new essays by leading researchers in the philosophy of reasoning that together address these questions and many more, and explore the connections between them.

In the early days of natural language semantics, Donald Davidson issued a challenge to those, like Richard Montague, who would do semantics in a model-theoretic framework that gives a central role to a model-relative notion of truth. Davidson argued that no theory of this kind can claim to be an account of real truth conditions unless it first makes clear how the relativized notion relates to our ordinary non-relativized notion of truth. In the 1990s, Davidson’s challenge was developed by Etchemendy into an argument against the model-theoretic account of logical consequence, one that also threatens the attempt to capture natural language entailment relations in modeltheoretic terms—one of the central desiderata of semantics. Nevertheless, the modeltheoretic framework has flourished within natural language semantics. But it has flourished without any consensus among semanticists as to how to answer Davidson’s challenge. The aim of this essay is to develop an answer. I argue that model-theoretic semantics is best understood as model-based science: a semantics for a natural language is a scientific model of truth conditions. This makes good sense of the way model-theoretic tools are used in natural language semantics. And it allows us to answer Davidson’s challenge by showing how a theory that employs a relativized notion of truth manages to tell us about ordinary truth conditions. Moreover, I argue that it helps us see how semantics can provide genuine explanations for natural language entailment and other truth-conditional phenomena.

Scott Soames’s book The World Philosophy Made is a history of ideas spanning from the ancient Greeks until today.1 1 At nearly 400 pages of tightly printed text, the book is enormous in its scope, surveying ideas not only in philosophy but also in physics, mathematical logic, cognitive science, economics, linguistics, social science, legal theory and more. Among the topics discussed in detail are: the debate about immanent vs. transcendent forms; the Thomistic synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology; the heliocentric model of the solar system and retrograde planetary motion; set-theoretic reductions of number and the question of whether set theory counts as logic; Gödel’s completeness and incompleteness proofs; the Chomskian revolution in linguistics; public choice theory; the representational theory of mind; special and general relativity; the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics; the libertarian challenge to Rawlsian liberalism; the relation between Marx’s philosophy and 20th century socialist political movements; the rise of the administrative state; the role of evolution and child development in the acquisition of moral sentiments; and death and the meaning of life. This is by no means a complete list.

Questions are known to play a crucial role in helping to structure linguistic communication. I argue that paying attention to questions is also necessary for understanding disagreement, and in particular for distinguishing between genuine and merely verbal disagreements. I argue, moreover, that some of the questions that play this role are essentially practical questions, questions about what to do. Such questions can remain open even after questions about what is the case have been settled. Essentially practical questions help structure discourse no less than ordinary questions. I argue that once we acknowledge them and their role in communication, we have new resources for making sense of cases of so-called “faultless disagreement” involving taste and aesthetic predicates within a standard, non-relativist semantics.

What accounts for the capacity of ordinary speakers to comprehend utterances of their language? The phenomenology of hearing speech in one’s own language makes it tempting to many epistemologists to look to perception for an answer to this question. That is, just as a visual experience as of a red square is often taken to give the perceiver immediate justification for believing that there is a red square in front of her, perhaps an auditory experience as of the speaker asserting that p gives the competent hearer immediate justification for believing that the speaker has asserted that p. My aim here is to offer reasons for resisting this temptation. I argue that the perceptual model cannot adequately account for the hearer’s justification in many cases. The arguments here also allow us to draw certain further morals about the role of phenomenology in the epistemology of perception.

A central question for ontology is the question of whether numbers really exist. But it seems easy to answer this question in the affirmative. The truth of a sentence like ‘Seven students came to the party’ can be established simply by looking around at the party and counting students. A trivial paraphrase of is ‘The number of students who came to the party is seven’. But appears to entail the existence of a number, and so it seems that we must conclude that numbers exist. This is sometimes called the puzzle of how we can get something from nothing. Most extant attempts to solve the puzzle take it for granted that is ontologically innocent, and focus their attention either on or on the transition from to. We argue that both attempts go wrong at the first step: the assumption that is ontologically innocent is undermined by a highly attractive and independently well-motivated degree-based account of number word constructions. Thus the degree-based account provides a straightforward linguistic resolution of the puzzle of how we can get something from nothing. But the paper also has a second aim. The semantics we present treats ‘seven’ as a referring expression that refers to a degree of a certain sort. But what are degrees? We consider various anti-platonist proposals that seek to account for degrees in terms of relations between concrete entities, and argue that they are incompatible with the Universal Density of Measurement hypothesis of Fox and Hackl. While the UDM cannot yet claim to be the consensus view among degree-based semanticists, our aim is to use it to illustrate how views about the nature of degrees can be evaluated by considering the properties degrees must have if they are to play the explanatory roles they are called upon to play in linguistics. In the present state of development of degree-based semantics there are difficult open questions about what these properties are. These questions need to be addressed if we are to develop a clear picture of what natural language semantics has to contribute to ontology and metaphysics.

Is there a principled difference between entailments in natural language that are valid solely in virtue of their form or structure and those that are not? This paper advances an affirmative answer to this question, one that takes as its starting point Gareth Evans’s suggestion that semantic theory aims to carve reality at the joints by uncovering the semantic natural kinds of the language. I sketch an Evans-inspired account of semantic kinds and show how it supports a principled account of structural entailment. I illustrate the account by application to a case study involving the entailment properties of adverbs; this involves developing a novel proposal about the semantics for adverbs like ‘quickly’ and ‘slowly’. In the course of the discussion I explore some implications of the account for the place of model-theoretic tools in natural language semantics.

The term ‘logical form’ has been called on to serve a wide range of purposes in philosophy, and it would be too ambitious to try to survey all of them in a single essay. Instead, I will focus on just one conception of logical form that has occupied a central place in the philosophy of language, and in particular in the philosophical study of linguistic meaning. This is what I will call the classical conception of logical form. The classical conception, as I will present it in section 1, has (either explicitly or implicitly) shaped a great deal of important philosophical work in semantic theory. But it has come under fire in recent decades, and in sections 2 and 3 I will discuss two of the recent challenges that I take to be most interesting and significant

In his essay ‘“Conceptual Truth”’, Timothy Williamson (2006) argues that there are no truths or entailments that are constitutive of understanding the sentences involved. In this reply I provide several examples of entailment patterns that are intuitively constitutive of understanding in just the way that Williamson rejects, and I argue that Williamson’s argument does nothing to show otherwise. Williamson bolsters his conclusion by appeal to a certain theory about the nature of understanding. I argue that his theory fails to consider the role that the structure of a sentence plays in determining its meaning. The cases I present suggest that this role imposes greater cognitive requirements on understanding than Williamson can acknowledge.

According to Conceptualism, philosophy is an independent discipline that can be pursued from the armchair because philosophy seeks truths that can be discovered purely on the basis of our understanding of expressions and the concepts they express. In his recent book, The Philosophy of Philosophy, Timothy Williamson argues that while philosophy can indeed be pursued from the armchair, we should reject any form of Conceptualism. In this paper, we show that Williamson’s arguments against Conceptualism are not successful, and we sketch a way to understand understanding that shows that there is a clear sense in which we can indeed come to know the answers to (many) philosophical questions purely on the basis of understanding.

These days it is widely agreed that there is no such thing as absolute motion and rest; the motion of an object can only be characterized with respect to some chosen frame of reference.1 This is a fact of which many of us are well-aware, and yet a cursory consideration of the ways we ascribe motion to objects gives the impression that it is a fact we persistently ignore. We insist to the police officer that we came to a full and complete stop at the stop sign, we fret that traffic is moving too slowly, we observe that the sun has dropped below the hills on the horizon, all without ever saying which frames of reference we have in mind.

One way to challenge the substantiveness of a particular philosophical issue is to argue that those who debate the issue are engaged in a merely verbal dispute. For example, it has been maintained that the apparent disagreement over the mind/brain identity thesis is a merely verbal dispute, and thus that there is no substantive question of whether or not mental properties are identical to neurological properties. The goal of this paper is to help clarify the relationship between mere verbalness and substantiveness. I first argue that we should see mere verbalness as a certain kind of discourse defect that arises when the parties differ as to what each takes to be the immediate question under discussion. I then argue that mere verbalness, so understood, does not imply that the question either party is attempting to address is a non-substantive one. Even if it turns out that the parties to the mind/brain dispute are addressing subtly different questions, these might both be substantive questions to which their respective metaphysical views provide substantive answers. One reason it is tempting to reach deflationary conclusions from the charge of mere verbalness is that we fail to distinguish it from the claim that a sentence under dispute is, in a certain sense, indisputable. Another reason is that we fail to distinguish mere verbalness from a certain sort of indeterminacy. While indisputability and indeterminacy plausibly capture forms of nonsubstantiveness, I argue that mere verbalness is insufficient to establish either indisputability or indeterminacy.

Pairs of sentences like the following pose a problem for ontology: (1) Jupiter has four moons. (2) The number of moons of Jupiter is four. (2) is intuitively a trivial paraphrase of (1). And yet while (1) seems ontologically innocent, (2) appears to imply the existence of numbers. Thomas Hofweber proposes that we can resolve the puzzle by recognizing that sentence (2) is syntactically derived from, and has the same meaning as, sentence (1). Despite appearances, the expressions ‘the number of moons of Jupiter’ and ‘four’ do not function semantically as singular terms in (2). Hofweber’s primary evidence for this proposal concerns differences in the focus-related communicative functions of (1) and (2). In this paper I raise several serious problems for Hofweber’s proposal, and for his attempt to support it by appeal to focus-related phenomena. I conclude by offering independent evidence for an alternative, purely pragmatic resolution of the ontological puzzle