Ittay Nissan-Rozen

This essay asks a new question: When someone with a firm understanding of basic operations nevertheless remains ignorant of a complex logical or mathematical truth, precisely what kind of information are they missing? I introduce “catenary truths,” a significant component of this non-omniscient shortfall. Traditional epistemologies of the a priori don't extend to catenary knowledge, so I offer a novel proposal for how we acquire catenary information. The proposal answers Benacerraf-inspired worries about access to abstracta by showing how processes of reasoning instantiate catenary truths. The proposal also sheds new light on whether logic is ampliative, how a calculation is like an experiment, higher-order doubts about deductive reasoning, the inconceivability of logically impossible worlds, and commonalities between mathematical and moral intuition.

The standard Bayesian solution to the paradox of the ravens maintains that the degree of confirmation provided by seeing a nonblack nonraven is positive but negligible compared to that provided by seeing a black raven. I show that, unless we impose severe and unmotivated restrictions on the subject’s priors, this has the consequence that the cumulative confirmation provided by all the nonblack nonravens the subject expects to see is nonnegligible compared to the cumulative confirmation provided by all the black ravens the subject expects to see. If this is so, however, then the paradox retains its full force.

Science has multiple goals: to describe the world, as it is now; to predict the future and to make inferences about the past. But science also aims to understand the world - to explain why it is the way it is. But what does it take to explain a phenomenon? What philosophical questions are at stake? In this thorough and clearly written introduction to scientific explanation, Arnon Levy explores the following problems and questions: the background to the topic of scientific explanation, particularly the questions of what an explanation is, what makes a good explanation and why seek them in the first place empiricism about explanation: Hempel's Deductive-Nomological model and criticisms of Hempel's theory unificationism about explanation: are good scientific explanations those fit into an overall 'explanatory store'? causation and explanation: Salmon's 'statistical relevance' and 'mark transmission' arguments causation and explanation: Lewis's description-based model, Woodward's interventionist view and Strevens's criterion of selection theory connections between explanation and understanding non-scientific explanation: metaphysics. Additional features, such as chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading and a glossary make this an excellent resource for students of philosophy of science, metaphysics and philosophy of psychology.

Several philosophers have proposed Knowledge-Based Decision Theories (KDTs)—theories that require agents to maximize expected utility as yielded by utility and probability functions that depend on the agent’s knowledge. Proponents of KDTs argue that such theories are motivated by Knowledge-Reasons norms that require agents to act only on reasons that they know. However, no formal derivation of KDTs from Knowledge-Reasons norms has been suggested, and it is not clear how such norms justify the particular ways in which KDTs relate knowledge and rational action. In this paper, I suggest a new axiomatic method for justifying KDTs and providing them with stronger normative foundations. I argue that such theories may be derived from constraints on the relation between knowledge and preference, and that these constraints may be evaluated relative to intuitions regarding practical reasoning. To demonstrate this, I offer a representation theorem for a KDT proposed by Hawthorne and Stanley (2008) and briefly evaluate it through its underlying axioms.

The central aim of this paper is to argue that there is a meaningful sense in which a concept of rationality can apply to a city. The idea will be that a city is rational to the extent that the collective practices of its people enable diverse inhabitants to simultaneously live the kinds of life they are each trying to live. This has significant implications for the varieties of social practices that constitute being more or less rational. Some of these implications may be welcome to a theorist that wants to identify collective rationality with a notion of justice, while others are unwelcome. There are some significant challenges to this use of the concept of rationality, but I claim that these challenges at the city level have parallels at the individual level, and may thus help deepen our understanding of rationality at all levels.