Jody Azzouni

A study is undertaken of folk-psychological language and concepts, the psychological concepts that have developed out of folk psychology and the relationship of this language and concepts to introspection and the cognitive sciences. The background questions explored in the book are: How much does introspection contribute to our understanding of ourselves? Can we rely on folk psychology or on the more sophisticated psychological concepts that have developed from folk psychology to successfully characterize who we really are, psychologically speaking? How much can the cognitive sciences and, specifically, neuroscience, contribute to our understanding of ourselves? The interlinked answers are argued for on the basis of an analysis of contemporary cognitive science and how it bears on our introspective self-image. Our deep-seated image of ourselves as beings who know which faculties we’re employing at a moment—our senses, our memory, our ability to reason—is jointly undercut by results from the cognitive sciences and by a careful characterization of our introspective powers. The latter are impoverished because they provide only cues correlated to introspective labels that we use, “I remember,” “I’ve inferred,” and so on, and because these psychological labels don’t correspond to mental natural kinds of any sort. In turn, however, neuroscience cannot provide a successor set of concepts, anchored in science—and independent of our psychological concepts—despite the latter not corresponding to anything real. The result is that we’re trapped in an indispensable folk-psychological self-image that’s useful for prediction but can’t be taken to describe who we really are.

It is shown that we express ontological commitments in English purely by means of Gricean implicatures. That is, when we commit ourselves to the existence of bears as we do in conversation when we assert “There are bears,” or “Bears exist,” this is not because of the meaning (the semantics) of the phrase “there is” nor of the word “exist.” Rather it is because the sentences in which these words appear often exhibit implicatures that speakers and their audience experience as the assertion of ontological commitments. Alternative views of the linguistic phenomena, that these phrases are ambiguous or polysemous, are shown to face serious counterexamples. Positions that take phrases such as “real,” “taking place,” “obtains,” and so on to involve ontological commitment by virtue of their meanings are also undercut by the use of counterexamples.

Several disagreements between Carnap and Quine remain live: Descendant positions resembling the opposing stances that Carnap and Quine took on several issues are still debated. One dispute is over ontological disagreement. Positions like those of Carnap and Quine’s are playing out in the quantifier-variance literature. The disagreement over analyticity also remains live. The historical point made in this paper: The real dispute between Carnap and Quine is about how artificial languages are to be deployed to facilitate doing mathematics and science: How are the resources of artificial languages to replace/supplement/replicate what we “pre-formally” use when doing science and mathematics in natural languages? By calling this disagreement between them “the real dispute,” what is indicated is that Carnap and Quine’s respective positions on the other more publicized issues follow from their differing views about the relationships between artificial and natural languages. Neither philosopher had the resources to resolve this question definitively. We still can’t because of certain logical/empirical complexities the issue raises, and that are described in the paper.

Use/mention errors are everywhere in epistemology. They even show up in Gettier’s classic paper. They bedevil philosophical attempts to understand “know”, “belief”, as well as propositional-attitude expressions at the most basic level. What, for example, are propositional-attitudes attitudes towards? Not towards propositions, as it turns out. Use/mention errors confuse philosophers in the most simple of ways: For example, they allow philosophers to think that evidence and knowledge are propositional, in the sense that evidence is true propositions and that knowledge is knowledge of propositions. Similarly, propositional attitudes are seen as attitudes towards propositions rather than what propositions describe. It is shown specifically in detail how Williamson’s influential views about E=K—that evidence is what one knows is flawed because of use/mention errors.

When ordinary people--mathematicians among them--take something to follow (deductively) from something else, they are exposing the backbone of our self-ascribed ability to reason. Jody Azzouni investigates the connection between that ordinary notion of consequence and the formal analogues invented by logicians. One claim of the book is that, despite our apparent intuitive grasp of consequence, we do not introspect rules by which we reason, nor do we grasp the scope and range of the domain, as it were, of our reasoning. This point is illustrated with a close analysis of a paradigmatic case of ordinary reasoning: mathematical proof.

We talk about what doesn't exist. We say: "Mickey Mouse was invented by Walt Disney," and if we say this, we've said something true. But if something doesn't exist, it has no properties. (What, after all, is it that's supposed to have properties?) How, then, can anything we say be true (or false) of such things? This is the old problem of nonbeing, dating back to Plato and before. This original book shows the ways in which the true and the false are broader than what there is. It shows how what we say truly and falsely extends beyond ontology, in every sense that word is used.

Philosophical reasoning in ordinary language is subject to inference traps. There are several philosophical responses to such traps: mysticism (language and our senses, etc., are metaphysically misleading. We need mystical insight); the modern approach of deserting natural languages for artificial ones; that of cleaning up natural-language reasoning on an ad hoc basis; and the “it’s all good” approach—run with the reasoning as our ways of speaking seem to allow. An extended analysis of Markus Gabriel’s Why the world does not exist shows how he consistently engages in the “it’s all good” approach to motivate both his claim that the world does not exist as well as the claim that, nevertheless, everything in the world does exist. It is shown how he uses various fallacies involved in natural language—notably ones about the word “in” to facilitate his metaphysical arguments.

Can Quine’s criterion for ontological commitment be comparatively applied across different logics? If so, how? Cross-logical evaluations of discourses are central to contemporary philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics. The focus here is on the influential and important arguments of George Boolos and David Lewis that second-order logic and plural quantification don’t incur additional ontological commitments over and above those incurred by first-order quantifiers. These arguments are challenged by the exhibition of a technical tool—the truncation-model construction of notational equivalents—that compares the ontological role and increased expressive strength of non-first-order ideology to first-order ideology.

Two more isolated rule-following Robinson Crusoes are discussed. Crusoe 4 still recognizes himself to be speaking a disposition-meaning language because he has introspective access to the dispositions that generate his meaning-urges. But because those dispositions change relatively continuously, he cannot think of himself as speaking distinct languages. Instead, he thinks of his language as one in which he has better and worse dispositions at different times. Crusoe 5, however, has no or little introspective access to the dispositions that generate his meaning-urges. I show that, therefore, he must be like us: he must think of the terms of his language as obeying standards due to the way objects are in the world instead of as due to his dispositions. In this chapter, I explore what this means.

A summary of the entire book is given. Apart from descriptions of the contents of each chapter, several additional methodological points are made. I give reasons to avoid, as tools of philosophical analysis, concepts such as “understanding,” “meaning,” and “fact.” I also describe some significant differences between how I understand rule following and how Kripke does. In particular (and this is a difference between my approach and that of most philosophers concerned with this topic), I focus very much on “rule following” as it occurs in the application of tasks that the subject engages in during his interaction with the world, as opposed to intrinsic arithmetic exercises, such as counting numerals or adding them.

Starting-point epistemology (SPE) is a new position that, coupled with agent-centered rationality, is the key to resolving philosophical scepticism. SPE acknowledges that metacognitively-sophisticated agents know that they know things and know (something) about the methods by which this happens. Agent-centered rationality implies that a metacognitively-sophisticated agent should only desert a knowledge claim because of a challenge they recognize to be fatal to that claim. Scepticism is metacognitive pathology: Except in those rare cases when an individual is cognitively damaged, sceptical arguments should fail. This book studies the various ways the cognitively healthy can protect themselves from prematurely distrusting what they take themselves to know. A sceptical position results from an agent's failure to correctly monitor their own processes of knowledge-gathering.

A new approach to informal rigorous mathematical proof is offered. To this end, algorithmic devices are characterized and their central role in mathematical proof delineated. It is then shown how all the puzzling aspects of mathematical proof, including its peculiar capacity to convince its practitioners, are explained by algorithmic devices. Diagrammatic reasoning is also characterized in terms of algorithmic devices, and the algorithmic device view of mathematical proof is compared to alternative construals of informal proof to show its superiority.

Taking (a proposition) to be true is an epistemic theme appearing throughout George E. Smith’s work; this includes his marvelous new book with Raghav Seth, Brownian motion and molecular reality: A study in theory-mediated measurement (2020; hereafter Smith and Seth). They use this notion to categorize changes in scientific perspectives both towards the ontological claim that molecules exist and towards molecular-kinetic theory. They illustrate the shift in viewpoint occurring over the successive editions of Ostwald’s and Nernst’s respective textbooks. Nernst writes, in his 6th edition, that, “the theory begins to lose its hypothetical character”; later he writes, “… we may well acknowledge that the theory has lost its hypothetical character” (Smith and Seth, 3). Ostwald does an “about-face on atomism” (2): In earlier editions he characterizes the “atomic conception” as a “convenient mode of representation,” as having “enormous heuristic value” (2). In the 4th edition (1909) he writes (2)

Justin Clarke-Doane offers what purports to be a stand-alone argument, relying on Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, that if we hold that PA + Con(PA) and PA + ~ Con(PA) are equally true of their intended subjects, then there is no objective fact as to whether PA is consistent. It is shown that the argument is fallacious, although illuminating: The fallaciousness of the argument arises from a 20th-century shift in our understanding of interpreted languages from the view—derived from our experience of language—of sentences as intrinsically interpreted to one which sharply distinguishes syntax and semantics, and treats uninterpreted syntactic forms as endowed with interpretations by models. It is shown that this syntax/semantic distinction, because it is “unintuitive” induces fallacies such as the one that Clarke-Doane’s argument exemplifies.