Olav Gjelsvik

This chapter presents and discusses Donald Davidson's contribution to the debate about what freedom to act is, and the relationship between this contribution and Davidson's causal theory of action. It presents and evaluates issues in accounting for the content of “can x” (where “can” seems to stand for a capacity or an ability) by conditionals with “would do x” in the consequent. The discussion also throws light on the relationship between Davidson's work on the freedom issues and that of predecessors like Moore and Austin.

Sandra Lapointe: Bolzano, Quine, and Logical Truth: According to the standard interpretation, the similarity between Bolzano and Quine comes from the fact that they are both “demarcating logic […] with the help of a set of logical particles which are held constant, while the other non‐logical expressions are freely substituted for each other.” This interpretation assumes that Bolzano and Quine share at least some substantial views about what makes a term a “logical” term. My paper has four parts. First, I give some background to Bolzano's theory, focusing on his views on syntax and form. Second, I show why it is mistaken to assume that Bolzano and Quine mean the same when they speak of logical concepts/words. Third, I discuss Bolzano's views on logical truth and sentences that can be turned into logical truth by putting synonyms for synonyms and compare them to Quine's. I conclude by asking whether Bolzano's theory succeeds where Quine fails. I answer, with a twist, in the affirmative.

ABSTRACT This paper engages in a discussion about a select few of the crucial questions raised by Jon Elster's paper on Enthusiasm and Anger in History. It focusses on enthusiasm and engages in particular with Elster's questions and arguments about whether enthusiasm is an emotion or not. In doing so, I am led to ask some general questions about current theories of emotions in the discipline of psychology and their relationship to common sense psychological notions of emotional types. I argue that we need common sense psychological notions in historical explanations, as shown by Elster's examples, and suggest ways of handling a possible mismatch between common sense psychology and more theoretical approaches in psychology that develop somewhat different classifications of emotions and emotional types. The problem of whether enthusiasm really is an emotion can in this way be dissolved, and we are free to explain the historical events employing the common-sense notions as Elster indeed does.

ABSTRACT This article reports the result of a survey about causal beliefs, normative conceptions and moral evaluations of addicts and addiction in the general population. Specifically, we focused on four issues: To what extent are the normative conceptions of addiction current in the philosophical and scientific literature reflected in laypersons' conception of addiction? How do laypersons rate addicts on perceived responsibility? Which factors influence laypersons' responsibility attributions in the context of addiction? What feelings and attitudes (anger/sympathy/help-giving intentions) do laypersons have toward addicts? We found that, although laypersons seem to assume a weakness view of addiction, their patterns of responsibility attributions vary depending on type of drugs combined with perceived severity of outcome, where the latter even overrides the attributional effects of the actor's perceived control over events. Some explanations of the data are suggested, and various consequences with respect to help-giving behavior, are discussed

In this paper I discuss Fred Dretske's account of knowledge critically, and try to bring out how his account of informational content leads to cases of extreme epistemic good luck in his treatment of knowledge. My main interest, however, is to establish that the cases of epistemic luck arise because Dretske's account of knowledge in a fundamental way fails to take into account the role our actual recognitional capacities and powers of discrimination play in perceptually based knowledge. This result is, I believe, new. The paper has three sections. In Section 1 I give a short exposition of Dretske's theory, and make some necessary qualifications about how it is to be understood. In Section 2 I discuss in greater detail how the theory actually works, and provide some examples I think are very troublesome for Dretske. In Section 3 I argue that these cases establish my main claim. I also show that there are cases of epistemic bad luck due to Dretske's account of how information causes belief

David Hunter has recently argued that Donald Davidson and Elizabeth Anscombe were in basic agreement about practical knowledge. In this reply, it is my contention that Hunter’s fascinating claim may not be satisfactorily warranted. To throw light on why, a more careful consideration of the role of the notion of practical knowledge in Anscombe’s approach to intentional action is undertaken. The result indicates a possible need to distinguish between what is called ‘practical knowledge’ and ‘ knowledge of what one is doing’, and shows that Hunter’s claim concerning the closeness of Anscombe to Davidson only has plausibility for knowledge of what one is doing. Contrary to an interesting suggestion by Hunter, the paper argues that it is hard to see how Davidson’s position can benefit substantially from making use of the notion of knowledge of what one is doing.

In his target article and recent interesting book about addiction and the brain, Marc Lewis claims that the prevalent medical view of addiction as a brain disease or a disorder, is mistaken. In this commentary we critically examine his arguments for this claim. We find these arguments to rest on some problematical and largely undefended assumptions about notions of disease, disorder and the demarcation between them and good health. Even if addiction does seem to differ from some typical brain diseases, we believe contrary to Lewis, that there are still good reasons to maintain its classification as a mental or behavioral disorder.

Cappelen and Dever have recently defended the view that indexicals are not essential: They do not signify anything philosophically deep and we do not need indexicals for any important philosophical work. This paper contests their view from the point of view of an account of intentional agency. It argues that we need indexicals essentially when accounting for what it is do something intentionally and, as a consequence, intentional action, and defends a view of intentional action as a possible conclusion of practical reasoning where the indexical is essential for the content of such a conclusion.

This paper inquires into some problems for a thesis about the aim of belief, expressed in normative terms along the lines that we ought to have correct or true beliefs. In particular, the paper aims to disarm the important blind-spot objections to such a view. What these objections seek to establish is that there are pretty simple truths we cannot have beliefs about, and since ought implies can, we ought not to have beliefs about these truths. It follows that there cannot be a correct normative property of the sort indicated that characterizes belief. The paper questions this conclusion without questioning the general thesis that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. It is hoped that the way we disarm the blind-spot objections will exhibit an attractive view on epistemic normativity, as well as a normative property belief might indeed have. It will be the task of another paper to argue that this normative property thus identified characterizes belief essentially.