•  4
    McCullagh on Explaining Substitution Failures
    Southwest Philosophy Review 39 (2): 49-51. 2023.
  •  8
    William James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning New by Todd Lekan (review)
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 59 (1): 105-109. 2023.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:William James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning New by Todd LekanHenry JackmanBy Todd LekanWilliam James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning New York: Routledge, 2022. 156pp., incl. indexWhile William James wrote just a single article in theoretical ethics, it has often been said that ethical concerns animate almost all of his work.1 Indeed, there has been a growing interest in James’s moral phil…Read more
  •  174
    While William James and Charles Sanders Peirce are considered the two fathers of American Pragmatism, Peircian Pragmatism is often being presented as the comparatively ‘objective’ alternative to metaphysical realism, with the Jamesian version being castigated as an overly ‘subjective’ departure from Peirce’s position. However, while James clearly does put more of an emphasis on ‘subjective’ factors than does Peirce, his doing so is often the result of his simply drawing out consequences of the …Read more
  •  416
    Was William James an Evidentialist?
    Southwest Philosophy Review 38 (1): 81-90. 2022.
    William James has traditionally been seen as a critic of evidentialism, with his claim that “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds” being understood as saying that in certain cases we have the right to believe beyond what is certified by the evidence. However, there is an alternate, “expansive”, reading of James (defended most recently by Cheryl Mis…Read more
  •  324
    “James’s Pragmatic Maxim and the ‘Elasticity’ of Meaning”
    In The Jamesian Mind. pp. 274-284. forthcoming.
    To the extent that William James had an account of ‘meaning,’ it is best captured in his “pragmatic maxim”, but James’s maxim has notoriously been open to many conflicting interpretations. It will be argued here that some of these interpretive difficulties stem from the fact that (1) James seriously understates the differences between his own views and those presented by Peirce in “How to Make our Ideas Clear”, and (2) James’s understanding of the maxim typically ties meaning to truth, but sin…Read more
  •  287
    “Putnam, James, and ‘Absolute’ Truth”
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 13 (2). 2021.
    While historians of pragmatism often present William James as the founder of the “subjectivist” wing of pragmatism that came back into prominence with the writings of Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam has argued that James’s views are actually much closer to Peirce’s (and Putnam’s own). Putnam does so by noting that James distinguishes two sorts of truth: “temporary truth,” which is closer to a subjective notion of warranted assertibility, and “absolute truth,” which is closer to Peirce’s own compara…Read more
  •  137
    "The Pragmatic Method"
    In Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John P. Hawthorne (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, Oxford University Press. pp. 193-209. 2016.
    While classical pragmatism quickly became identified with the theory of truth that dominated critical discussions of it, both of its founders, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, understood pragmatism essentially as a method. The article compares Peirce’s conceptions of pragmatism with James’s view that the pragmatic method would allow us to resolve many disputes in philosophy, and argues that their differences undermine any purely ‘Peircian’ reading of James’s Pragmatic Maxim. It then exa…Read more
  •  165
    While Aaron Zimmerman’s Belief is rightly subtitled “A Pragmatic Picture”, it concerns a set of topics about which Pragmatists themselves are not always in agreement. Indeed, while there has been a noticeable push back against evidentialism in contemporary analytic epistemology, the view can at times seem ascendant within the literature on pragmatism itself. In particular, Peirceians tend to presuppose something closer to evidentialism when they accuse Jamesians of taking pragmatism in an unpr…Read more
  •  719
    "William James on Moral Philosophy and its Regulative Ideals"
    William James Studies 15 (2): 1-25. 2019.
    James’s “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” sheds light not only on his views on ethics but also on his general approach to objectivity. Indeed, the paper is most interesting not for the ethical theory it defends but for its general openness to the possibility of our ethical claims lacking objective truth conditions at all. James will turn out to have a very demanding account of what it would take to construct something like objective ethical norms out of more naturalistically respectable…Read more
  •  178
    Temporal externalism, conceptual continuity, meaning, and use
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10): 959-973. 2020.
    ABSTRACT Our ascriptions of content to past utterances assign to them a level of conceptual continuity and determinacy that extends beyond what could be grounded in the usage up to their time of utterance. If one accepts such ascriptions, one can argue either that future use must be added to the grounding base, or that such cases show that meaning is not, ultimately, grounded in use. The following will defend the first option as the more promising of the two, though this ultimately requires unde…Read more
  •  129
    Construction and continuity: conceptual engineering without conceptual change
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10): 909-918. 2020.
  •  2
    Belief, Rationality and Psychophysical Laws
    The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 35 124-129. 1998.
    Davidson argues that the connection between belief and the "constitutive ideal of rationality" precludes the possibility of their being any type-type identities between mental and physical events. However, there are radically different ways to understand both the nature and content of this "constitutive ideal," and the plausibility of Davidson’s argument depends on blurring the distinction between two of these ways. Indeed, it will be argued here that no consistent understanding of the constitut…Read more
  •  219
    Interpretivism and "Canonical" Ascriptions
    Studia Philosophica Estonica 10 (2): 28-37. 2017.
    This paper investigates the crucial notion of a "canonical ascription statement" in Bruno Mölder's /Mind Ascribed/, and argues that the reasons given for preferring the book's approach of canonicallity to a more common understanding of canonicallity in terms of the ascriptions we would "ideally" make are not only unpersuasive, but also leave the interpretivist position more open to skeptical worries than it should be. The paper further argues that the resources for a more compelling justificatio…Read more
  •  72
    "Meaning Holism"
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2014.
    A general introduction to the issues surrounding the question of semantic holism.
  •  454
    William James on Conceptions and Private Language
    Belgrade Philosophical Annual 30 175-193. 2017.
    William James was one of the most frequently cited authors in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but the attention paid to James’s Principles of Psycho- logy in that work is typically explained in terms of James having ‘committed in a clear, exemplary manner, fundamental errors in the philosophy of mind.’ (Goodman 2002, p. viii.) The most notable of these ‘errors’ was James’s purported commitment to a conception of language as ‘private’. Commentators standardly treat James as committed…Read more
  •  328
    Radical interpretation and the permutation principle
    Erkenntnis 44 (3): 317-326. 1996.
    Davidson has claimed that to conclude that reference is inscrutable, one must assume that "If some theory of truth... is satisfactory in the light of all relevant evidence... then any theory that is generated from the first theory by a permutation will also be satisfactory in the light of all relevant evidence." However, given that theories of truth are not directly read off the world, but rather serve as parts of larger theories of behavior, this assumption is far from self-evident. A proper un…Read more
  •  470
    Semantic Norms and Temporal Externalism
    Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1996.
    There has frequently been taken to be a tension, if not an incompatibility, between "externalist" theories of content (which allow the make-up of one's physical environment and the linguistic usage of one's community to contribute to the contents of one's thoughts and utterances) and the "methodologically individualist" intuition that whatever contributes to the content of one's thoughts and utterances must ultimately be grounded in facts about one's own attitudes and behavior. In this dissertat…Read more
  •  493
    Externalism, metasemantic contextualism, and self-knowledge
    In Sanford Goldberg (ed.), Externalism, Self-Knowledge and Skepticism., Oxford University Press. pp. 228-247. 2015.
    This paper examines some of the interactions between holism, contextualism, and externalism, and will argue that an externalist metasemantics that grounds itself in certain plausible assumptions about self- knowledge will also be a contextualist metasemantics, and that such a contextualist metasemantics in turn resolves one of the best known problems externalist theories purportedly have with self-knowledge, namely the problem of how the possibility of various sorts of ‘switching’ cases can appe…Read more
  •  632
    Ordinary Language, Conventionalism and a priori Knowledge
    Dialectica 55 (4): 315-325. 2001.
    This paper examines popular‘conventionalist’explanations of why philosophers need not back up their claims about how‘we’use our words with empirical studies of actual usage. It argues that such explanations are incompatible with a number of currently popular and plausible assumptions about language's ‘social’character. Alternate explanations of the philosopher's purported entitlement to make a priori claims about‘our’usage are then suggested. While these alternate explanations would, unlike the …Read more
  •  8
    Belief, Rationality, and Psychophysical Laws
    The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 9 47-54. 2000.
    Davidson has argued that the connection between belief and the “constitutive ideal of rationality” precludes the possibility of their being any type-type identities between mental and physical events. However, there are radically different ways to understand both the nature and the content of this “constitutive ideal,” and the plausibility of Davidson’s argument depends on blurring the distinction between two of these ways. Indeed, it will be argued here that no consistent understandingthe const…Read more
  •  241
    Jamesian Pluralism and Moral Conflict
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 41 (1). 2005.
    While most pragmatists view themselves as pluralists of one sort or another, Talisse and Aikin argue thatthe two views are, in fact, "not compatible". However, while their charge may be true of the types of pluralism that they consider, these pluralisms all presuppose a type of realism about value that the pragmatic pluralist need not accept. In what follows, I'll argue that the 'non-realist' account of value that one finds in James underwrites a type of pluralism that is both substantial and c…Read more
  •  202
    This paper will appeal a recent argument for the indeterminacy of translation to show not that meaning is indeterminate, but rather that assertion cannot be explained in terms of an independent grasp of the concept of truth. In particular, it will argue that if we try to explain assertion in terms of truth rather than vice versa, we ultimately will not be able to make sense of the difference between assertion and denial. This problem with such 'semantic' accounts of assertion then illustrates wh…Read more
  •  349
    William James
    In Cheryl Misak (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 60-86. 2008.
    A brief (10,000 word) introduction to James's philosophy with particular focus on the relation between James's naturalism and his account of various normative notions like rationality, goodness and truth.
  •  355
    Deference and self-knowledge
    Southwest Philosophy Review 16 (1): 171-180. 2000.
    It has become increasingly popular to suggest that non-individualistic theories of content undermine our purported a priori knowledge of such contents because they entail that we lack the ability to distinguish our thoughts from alternative thoughts with different contents. However, problems relating to such knowledge of 'comparative' content tell just as much against individualism as non-individualism. Indeed, the problems presented by individualistic theories of content for self-knowledge are …Read more
  •  286
    Another paper exploring the relation between Temporal externalism and Epistemicism about Vagueness, but with slightly more emphasis on the role of constitutive norms relating to our concept of truth.
  •  196
    This paper argues that Davidson's claim that the connection between belief and the "constitutive ideal of rationality" precludes the possibility of any type-type identities between mental and physical events relies on blurring the distinction between two ways of understanding this "constitutive ideal", and that no consistent understanding the constitutive ideal allows it to play the dialectical role Davidson intends for it