Daniel Coimbra

The inception of modern science, in the 17th century, was accompanied by epistemological analyses that see its foundation as laid on observation and experiment — a stance often regarded as excluding (or, at least, devaluating) metaphysics, especially in the English-speaking world. Qualms about metaphysics were already noticeable in Locke’s Essay (1690), and were supposedly deepened by Hume, in the following century. For almost two hundred years, Hume’s philosophy was regarded as radically sceptical concerning metaphysics generally, but particularly about causality and the very existence of an external, objective reality. In this paper, we argue, following a more recent interpretive vein in Hume's scholarship, that Hume’s scepticism about these basic metaphysical issues was effectively “mitigated” (in his own words) by his pioneering adoption of a form of naturalised realism. According to it, belief in both causal relations and in the external world is taken as resulting from the natural operations of the human mind and, in this condition, as being justified, in an epistemologically non-ordinary sense of this notion. As a consequence, epistemology was seen by him as an undertaking akin to the natural sciences, both employing similar empirical methods and metaphysical hypotheses to explore the mind, in the former case, and the physical world, in the latter. Thus, instead of interpreting Hume as one of the forerunners of the anti-metaphysical trend within empiricism, we believe that his wide-ranging project of instituting a “science of man” made some room for metaphysics, as cultivated within the same fallibilistic, naturalistic approach of empirical science itself.

Investigamos o problema da continuidade entre (1) cognições básicas e (2) complexas, especificamente em relação à linguagem. Nossa hipótese é a de que visões contemporâneas da linguagem não inviabilizam necessariamente a abordagem bottom-up ― abordagens tipicamente enativistas. Primeiro apresentamos a posição de Daniel Hutto e Erik Myin (2013, 2017), representantes do Radically Enactive Cognition (REC), a qual assume o desafio da continuidade e identifica na linguagem o critério para uma distinção de tipo entre (1) e (2). Em seguida, estabelecemos a posição Wittgensteiniana defendida por Moyal-Sharrock (2019), na qual a linguagem seria apenas mais uma habilidade de possível desenvolvimento para (1) e (2). Haveria, portanto, somente uma distinção de grau , não de tipo. Por mais que a avaliação de Moyal-Sharrock seja interessante no sentido de que parece evitar um ceticismo de continuidade (identificado por ela no REC), também encontramos problemas em sua visão.

In a recent paper, Pruss proves the validity of the rule beta-2 relative to Lewis’s semantics for counterfactuals, which is a significant step forward in the debate about the consequence argument. Yet, we believe there remain intuitive counter-examples to beta-2 formulated with the actuality operator and rigidified descriptions. We offer a novel and two-dimensional formulation of the Lewisian semantics for counterfactuals and prove the validity of a new transfer rule according to which a new version of the consequence argument can be formulated. This new transfer rule is immune to the counter-examples involving the actuality operator and rigidified descriptions. However, we show that counter-examples to this new rule can also be generated, demanding that the Lewisian semantics be generalized for higher dimensions where counter-examples can always be generated.