Olav Gjelsvik

This chapter starts with Harry Frankfurt’s pioneering account of bullshit, and goes on to consider Gerald A. Cohen’s criticism of Frankfurt and his alternative view. The chapter maintains, contrary to Cohen, that we should not give up seeing bullshit as a single and unified phenomenon. The thesis it goes on to defend is that bullshitting and its product bullshit are to be characterized by a certain state of mind of the producer, a state of mind that is to be identified by its relation to assertion. But it is not the state of mind Frankfurt suggested (the state of being unconcerned with truth), for which Cohen has provided counterexamples. The state of mind that produces bullshit, it is argued, is the state of not being concerned, as we should be, with knowledge. And that, in its turn, throws an interesting light on what assertion is, and which norm governs it.

This chapter defends an aspect of the standard view that procrastination is doing things later in time than you should and does so by accounting for normative aspects of time discounting and preference reversals as a result of time’s passing. The possible wrongness of the procrastination-relevant preference reversals is traced to fundamental issues about rationality and particularly about the consistency of preferences, both at one time and over time. The wrongness is related to the wrongness of preference inconsistency. The chapter, in dealing with these normative questions, also addresses some issues about internal and external reasons, as this is needed to account for the normative rightness of consistency.

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

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.

ABSTRACT This introductory paper raises, partly as a preparation for the other papers in this issue, questions about how philosophy ought to proceed in the light of knowledge we have in surrounding disciplines, with a focus on the case of addiction. It also raises issues about how addiction research might be enlightened by philosophical work. In the background for the paper are two competing approaches to the evidential grounding of philosophical insight. According to a widespread view, philosophical knowledge rests on a set of intuitions. According to another, philosophy has no special evidential grounding. This paper resists the attractions of the first picture, and argues against the separateness of philosophy that it lends support. I try to make plausible that such a picture is harmful both for philosophy and for empirical science. We should replace it with a mild form of unity of science or unity of inquiry, in the spirit of the founder of this journal

This chapter has as its point of departure the criticism of Davidson’s notion of radical interpretation in Ludwig and Lepore (2005), and thus of Davidson’s account of thought. The chapter agrees with them in their criticism of Davidson to this extent: as Davidson conceives of evidence available to the third-person point of view in radical interpretation, we are left with a massive and deeply problematic underdetermination of content. There are further questions, however, about how we ought to conceive of the evidence available to the third-person point of view. Davidson’s mistake, it is argued, lies in his quite standard conception of this evidence and not in his basic methodological assumptions, which really do change the philosophical landscape radically. The paper reaches this conclusion about which conception of evidence we ought to have by focusing on cases of error. It establishes a need to employ factive notions when ascribing mental/intentional states to a person if we are to deal properly with error both in thought and action. An account of thought or action not only needs to allow for the possibility of error, but must also give a correct account of error: that is, an account where the errors which speakers actually make arise as errors according to the account of thought and action. The claims of the paper are briefly these. We need a rich conception of evidence in order to account for error; this rich conception of evidence is here made available, it is not incompatible with Davidson’s basic methodological assumptions, and with this conception of evidence we are no longer vulnerable to the arguments levelled by Lepore and Ludwig against Davidson.

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