Jason DeWitt

Some philosophers argue that pragmatist accounts of causation require accepting perspectivalism—the view that causation depends on an agent’s perspective. This paper critically evaluates this inference by examining Price’s arguments for perspectivalism and against Woodward’s view. I demonstrate that Price’s positive argument rests on an unacceptable premise, and drawing on Woodward’s work, I propose a pragmatist realist view of causation that survives Price’s criticisms. This pragmatist realism identifies causes through human concerns and practices, but treats the causal relation as objective and independent of agential perspectives. The paper concludes by showing Ismael’s perspectivalist view is consistent with pragmatist realism.

Just as Quine and others have argued for a deflationism about the property of truth, Sinan Dogramaci has argued for a deflationism about rationality. Specifically, Dogramaci claims that we have no reason to think that the basic, deductive, epistemic rules we call “rational” have any sort of “unifying property.” A “unifying property” is a property that is necessary, sufficient, and explanatorily illuminating. My goal in this paper is to undermine Dogramaci’s argument for this radical position. I do this by first outlining Dogramaci’s distinctive view on the function of our epistemically evaluative terms. This view, called epistemic communism, has it that the function of terms like “rational” is to support the coordination of our community on a single set of epistemic rules. I offer a reconstruction of Dogramaci’s argument from epistemic communism to deflationism about rationality. I next raise an objection to Dogramaci’s argument: different sets of epistemic rules do not equally support the coordinative function. Dogramaci has a response to this objection, but I argue that this response is less than satisfactory. I illustrate that this response is unsatisfactory by employing work by David Enoch and Joshua Schechter. After pushing my objection to Dogramaci’s argument, I develop, on Dogramaci’s behalf, an objection to my non-deflationary attempt to undermine his argument. In the final section of the paper, I reply to this objection offered on Dogramaci’s behalf and conclude that whether we are epistemic communists or not, we need not accept deflationism.