Mark Satta

Orwell was not a philosopher by training. Still, his writing contains insightful reflections on a variety of topics that are of perennial interest to academic philosophers. These topics include social class, work, imperialism, socialism, democracy, totalitarianism, politics, liberty, equality, free expression, art, literature, metaphor, technology, the nature of truth, the ethics of war, and the power of language, among others. This article provides an introduction both to Orwell’s thought on these topics and to the ways in which academic philosophers have interpreted and used Orwell’s writing in fields ranging from epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language to political philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics.

Some of the most philosophical aspects of Orwell’s early writings concern the nature and significance of work. While Orwell sometimes identifies as apolitical in the 1920s and early 1930s, his views about work reveal a form of proto-democratic socialism as far back as the publication of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, in 1933. This paper first looks at some of Orwell’s early views about the significance of work for human life. It then offers arguments that these early views chart a natural path to Orwell’s democratic socialism, which he developed and defended in later works, including his famous dystopias. The paper focuses on three periods in Orwell’s career as a writer: (1) his early career, focusing on Down and Out, (2) his mid-career, focusing on The Road to Wigan Pier, and (3) his late career, focusing on Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In Outlines of Skeptical-Dogmatism, Mark Walker argues for Skeptical-Dogmatism about philosophical views—i.e., he argues that we should disbelieve most philosophical views. Walker argues for Skeptical-Dogmatism over both Dogmatism and Skepticism. In response, I defend Skepticism—i.e., the view that we should neither believe nor disbelieve most philosophical views. I argue that Walker’s arguments overlook some of the most plausible forms of philosophical Skepticism where the Skeptic suspends judgment about most disputed philosophical views without assigning a credence of 0.5 to those views. In doing so, I argue that suspension of judgment is the default justified doxastic attitude—i.e., the doxastic attitude one is epistemically justified in adopting absent any reason to do otherwise. I also champion Skepticism by offering modified versions of some of Walker’s thought experiments, posing challenges for Skeptical-Dogmatism, and arguing that Skepticism and Skeptical-Dogmatism share some common benefits.

Moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion. Recent philosophical work assumes that people can often accurately identify instances of grandstanding. In contrast, we argue that people are generally unable to reliably recognize instances of grandstanding and that we are typically unjustified in judging that others are grandstanding as a result. From there we argue that, under most circumstances, to judge others as grandstanders is to fail to act with proper intellectual humility. We then examine the significance of these conclusions for moral discourse. More specifically, we propose that moral discourse should focus on others’ stated reasons and whether their actions manifest respect.

Often, when we think about living an ethical life, we think about which of our actions are ethical or unethical. Philosopher and mathematician W. K. Clifford thought that ethics was about more than just actions. He also thought that ethical living required aligning one’s beliefs with one’s evidence. Specifically, he argued that it was always wrong to believe something based on insufficient evidence. This article provides an overview of the first section of Clifford’s essay “The Ethics of Belief,” in which he argues for this claim. As part of his argument, Clifford offers examples of people harming others because they believed things based on insufficient evidence. He argues that such cases are examples of unethical beliefs. From there, he turns to arguing for his more general principle. He also emphasizes the importance of inquiring into one’s beliefs and the social importance of our epistemic lives.

In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, a web designer sought a legal right to refuse to make wedding websites for same-sex couples while making wedding websites for other couples as a service provided by her business open to the public. The web designer also sought a legal right to post a notice on her business webpage stating that she would refuse to provide such services for same-sex couples’ weddings. Here, I argue that 303 Creative marks a fairly radical break from previous legal cases dealing with whether service providers have the legal right to deny services for same-sex weddings. This is because, if we take the web designer at her word, the web designer appears to have sought these legal rights, in significant part, in order to use an act of commercial discrimination as an act of religious message sending. In support of this conclusion, I argue that acts of selective commercial service constitute the primary means by which the web designer sought to promote her preferred religious messages and that these acts of selective commercial service are acts of discrimination. I also discuss some of the significance of this case for religion and politics in the United States.

Orwell’s views on the nature of free speech are significantly more complex than is often recognized. This paper examines what he had to say about freedom of speech and intellectual freedom. It seeks to provide a philosophical analysis of his understanding and use of these concepts and to address some apparent tensions in his thought. In so doing, the paper identifies five dominant aspects of Orwell’s account of free speech. He viewed free speech as closely related to intellectual freedom, which he highly valued; he treated free speech as primarily about the ability to say what one believes to be true; he thought that both government and various kinds of private actors posed serious threats to free speech; he believed that free speech required social safeguards, in addition to legal protection; and he recognized that free speech was a right with limits. He wrote little about the freedom of speech for liars. The paper concludes with the observation that he, therefore, left us with a number of crucial questions to discuss and think about for ourselves.

Collocations are recurrent combinations of words where one lexical item occurs near another lexical item with a frequency far greater than chance. Collocations can be used to study meaning. I argue that the collocational phrase ‘really know’, in conjunction with some reasonable interpretive conclusions, provides us with evidence that the verb ‘know’ has an infallibilist sense. I make my case, first, by arguing that ‘really’ when part of the phrase ‘really know’ is best understood as synonymous with ‘truly’. I then argue that there are two plausible interpretations of the function that ‘really’ plays in the phrase ‘really know’. On the first interpretation, ‘really’ helps distinguish claims about genuine infallibilist knowing from loose talk about ‘knowing’. On the second interpretation, ‘really’ is often used to disambiguate an infallibilist sense of ‘know’ from a fallibilist sense of ‘know’. On either interpretation, there is an infallibilist sense of ‘know’.

Susanna Rinard aims to show that it is possible to rationally persuade an external world skeptic to reject external world skepticism. She offers an argument meant to convince a skeptic who accepts her views on “several orthogonal issues in epistemology” to give up their external world skepticism. While I agree with Rinard that it is possible to reason with a skeptic, I argue that Rinard overlooks a variety of good epistemic grounds a skeptic could appeal to in rejecting her argument and its conclusion. More specifically, I argue that the external world skeptic can resist Rinard’s conclusion by (1) distinguishing between skepticism about knowledge and skepticism about justification, (2) by prioritizing obtaining accurate beliefs (maximizing true beliefs and minimizing false beliefs) over being rational, or (3) by treating suspension of judgment as the default rational doxastic attitude.

In order for a religious conviction to receive protection under the First Amendment or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), it must be a sincere religious conviction. Some critics of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby have suggested that the plaintiffs in that case and in related cases were motivated more by political ideology than by sincere religious conviction. The remedy, they argue, is for courts to be quicker to scrutinize claims of religious sincerity. In this article, I consider another possibility—namely, that current sociopolitical partisanship in the United States has eroded a clear distinction between political ideology and religious conviction for plaintiffs in cases like Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. If this theory is correct, it is far less obvious what the proper remedy is. I consider and reject the view that newly formed religious convictions with political origins should be treated as less than sincere on those grounds. However, I do argue that whether a religious conviction seems to have been newly generated by political circumstances should be taken into account when deciding religious free exercise cases. I suggest that this could best be accounted for if the courts adopted a balanced interests approach instead of the winner-takes-all “checklist” approaches that have developed under Employment Division v. Smith and RFRA.

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was a British essayist, journalist, and novelist. Orwell is most famous for his dystopian works of fiction, but many of his essays and other books have remained popular as well. His body of work provides one of the twentieth century’s most trenchant and widely recognized critiques of totalitarianism. This article focuses on philosophical topics and questions in political philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language, and aesthetics that Orwell dealt with in his writing. Continue reading Orwell, George →

Epistemic trespassers have competence in one field but pass judgment on matters in other fields where they lack competence. I examine philosophical questions related to epistemic trespassing by expert witnesses in courtroom trials and argue for the following positions. Expert witnesses are required to avoid epistemic trespassing. When testifying as an expert witness, merely qualifying one’s statements to indicate that one is not speaking as an expert is insufficient to avoid epistemic trespassing. Judges, litigators, and jurors can often recognize epistemic trespassing by examining a purported expert’s credentials and track record. Judges should not permit recognizable epistemic trespassers to testify as expert witnesses. Litigators should seek to expose recognizable epistemic trespassers during cross-examination. Jurors should treat recognizable instances of epistemic trespassing as a reason to downgrade the testimony of epistemic trespassers.

In this paper, I offer reasons to conclude that either belief impermissivism or credal impermissivism is false. That is to say, I argue against the conjunction of belief impermissivism and credal impermissivism. I defend this conclusion in three ways. First, I show what I take to be an implausible consequence of holding that for any rational credence in p, there is only one correlating rational belief-attitude toward p, given a body of evidence. Second, I provide thought experiments designed to support the intuition that there are at least a few credences in some cases for which more than one belief-attitude is rationally permissible. Third, I provide one possible theoretical grounding for my position by appeal to Jamesian values.

Much attention has been devoted recently to cases where a controversial speaker is invited to speak on campus and subsequently some members of the university seek to have that speaker disinvited. Debates about such scenarios often blur together legal, normative, and empirical considerations. I seek to help clarify issues by separating key legal, normative, and empirical questions. Central to my examination is the idea of the university as a multi-forum institution—i.e. a complex public institution whose parts contain different types of forums. I conclude that it is sometimes legally and normatively permissible (1) for universities to disinvite speakers, and (2) for students to seek to get speakers they consider unacceptable disinvited. I also suggest that my arguments sometimes extent to shouting down speakers

Mark Murphy has argued that the relationship between a creator and their creatures is not a special relationship that generates new moral obligations for the creator. Murphy’s position is grounded, in part, on his claim that there are no good arguments to the contrary and that the creator-creature relationship is not a relationship between equals. I argue that there are good reasons to think that a creator and creature being equals is not required for such an obligation. I offer an argument for such an obligation based on the moral significance of thrusting upon sentient or rational beings significant, unsought, and wholly new circumstances. More specifically, I argue that it is reasonable to conclude that a creator enters into a duty-generating special relationship with their creatures to promote their creatures’ well-being, when the creator is the voluntary source of the creatures’ wholly new and unconsented to circumstances from which to flourish or languish and it would cost the creator virtually nothing to promote the creatures’ welfare.

Physicists Brian Greene and Max Tegmark both make variants of the claim that if the universe is infinite and matter is roughly uniformly distributed, then there are infinitely many “people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices.” In this paper I argue that--while our current best theories in astrophysics may allow one to conclude that we have infinitely many duplicates whose lives are identical to our own from start to finish--without either further advances in physics or advances in fields like biology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, Greene’s and Tegmark’s claims about the ways in which our duplicates lives will differ from our own are not a consequence of our best current scientific theories. Rather, I argue that Greene and Tegmark’s conclusions rely on philosophically imprecise usages of the language of “possibility.”

The ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ is the view that ‘knows’ and its cognates have more than one sense, and that which sense of ‘knows’ is used in a knowledge ascription or denial determines, in part, the meaning (and as a result the truth conditions) of that knowledge ascription or denial. In this paper, I argue that the ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ ought to be taken seriously by those drawn to epistemic contextualism. In doing so I first argue that the ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ is a distinct view from epistemic contextualism. Second, I provide independent philosophical and linguistic considerations to motivate the ambiguity theory. Third, I argue that the ambiguity theory has the same central, generally agreed upon virtues ascribed to epistemic contextualism (namely, the ability to solve certain persistent epistemological problems relating to skeptical arguments and the ability to preserve the truth of most of our everyday, ordinary usages of ‘knows’ and its cognates). Finally, I provide an ambiguity-theory-friendly account of why contextualism may be initially appealing, and why this shouldn’t dissuade us from taking the ambiguity theory seriously nonetheless.

The ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ is the view that ‘knows’ and its cognates have more than one propositional sense – i.e. more than one sense that can properly be used in ‘knows that’ etc. constructions. Given that most of us are ‘intuitive invariantists’ – i.e. most of us initially have the intuition that ‘knows’ is univocal – defenders of the ambiguity theory need to offer an explanation for the semantic blindness present if ‘knows’ is in fact ambiguous. This paper is an attempt to offer such an explanation. Section 1 contains a general argument for the ubiquity of semantic blindness for ambiguous words; the upshot being that semantic blindness for the ambiguity of ‘knows’ is thus unsurprising. Section 2 offers more specific arguments for why ‘knows’ is the type of ambiguous word that we’re very unlikely to quickly recognize is ambiguous.

In his book Knowledge and Practical Interests Jason Stanley offers an argument for the conclusion that it is quite unlikely that an ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ can be “linguistically grounded”. His argument rests on two important assumptions: that linguistic grounding of ambiguity requires evidence of the purported different senses of a word being represented by different words in other languages and that such evidence is lacking in the case of ‘knows’. In this paper, I challenge the conclusion that there isn’t a linguistic grounding for an ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ by making cases against both of Stanley’s major assumptions. I will do this by making a case for a prime facie linguistic grounding for a polysemy theory of ‘knows’ without appealing to word use in other languages. Given that a polysemy theory of ‘knows’ is a type of ambiguity theory of ‘knows’, if I succeed in linguistically grounding a polysemy theory of ‘knows’, then I have shown that at least one type of ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ can be linguistically grounded.

The ambiguity theory of “knows” is the view that knows and its cognates have more than one propositional sense—i.e., more than one sense that can properly be used in “knows that” etc. constructions. The ambiguity theory of “know” has received relatively little attention as an account of the truth-conditions for knowledge ascriptions and denials—especially compared to views like classical, moderate invariantism and epistemic contextualism. In this paper, it is argued that the ambiguity theory of knows has an advantage over both classical, moderate invariantism and epistemic contextualism. This advantage is that it is the only one of these views that can account for “diverging knowledge responses without inconsistency” —i.e., cases in which, for the same subject S and proposition p, one and the same speaker says truly “S knows p” but instead could have truly said “S does not know p” and vice versa. This paper argues both for the existence of DRWI scenarios and the ability of the ambiguity theory of knows to best explain their existence.