Seyed Mohammad Yarandi

I focus on an overlooked aspect of the challenge of irrelevant influences. The challenge is often framed in terms of whether recognizing the presence of irrelevant factors in the pedigree of a belief provides a defeater. I argue that the epistemic significance of irrelevant factors goes beyond their status as defeaters. I focus on what I call gray cases, where learning about such factors causes epistemic worry without justifying giving up the belief. I argue that in gray cases, the subject finds a commendatory epistemic practical reason to engage in an activity intended to assuage that epistemic worry.

I present a puzzle regarding the norms of disagreement and inquiry. The puzzle mainly concerns a special type of peer disagreement that I call “mild disagreement”, in which the parties to the disagreement believe a proposition but with different degrees of confidence. The puzzle is best formulated as an inconsistent triad: (NJ1) The state of mild disagreement provides the involved parties with no epistemic reason to drop their belief regarding the disputed judgment. (NJ2) The state of mild disagreement provides a practical reason for the involved parties to launch an inquiry into the disputed judgment. (NJ3) If the state of disagreement provides a reason to launch an inquiry into the disputed judgment, the involved parties have a reason to drop their belief regarding the disputed judgment. After discussing some possible responses to the puzzle, I offer my own solution, which involves introducing a new take on how to understand inquiry. This new take on the nature of inquiry can provide us with an alternative to the influential account recently defended by Jane Friedman.

The thesis concerns the semantics of proper names in the context of propositional attitude reports. The semantic contribution of names in the scope of attitude verbs famously generates a puzzle, known as Frege’s puzzle. In the thesis, different semantic theories of propositional attitude have been categorized based on their strategy to solve the puzzle. The thesis consists of two parts. The first part (chapters 1-4) critically surveys different solutions of the puzzle in the literature. The discussion of different theories and their shortcomings sets the stage for the second part. The second part (chapters 5-6) provides a new solution to the puzzle. The solution is based on a new theory concerning the mechanism of reference and meaning of proper names. The meaningful use of proper names is argued to require the satisfaction of a competence condition which is used to explain peculiarities of reference found in both their regular contexts, as well as in the context of propositional attitude verbs