Robert M. Farley

Pessimists about moral testimony argue that moral deference is rarely, if ever, appropriate. Optimists about moral testimony argue that it is often appropriate. In this paper, I defend a middle way—realism about moral deference—according to which there is a significant epistemic asymmetry between moral and non-moral testimony that nevertheless accommodates an attenuated form of optimism. I argue, contra most optimists, that moral deference to friends, allies, and exemplars is generally inappropriate, because their assertions about controversial moral issues are usually the products of bias. Nevertheless, there are a non-trivial number of cases in which speakers make controversial moral assertions that run contrary to their known biases, a phenomenon I call testimony against interest. In these cases, the presumption of bias is defeated, so moral deference can be and often is appropriate.

Phenomenal conservatives claim that seemings are sui generis mental states and can thus provide foundational non-doxastic justification for beliefs. Many of their critics deny this, claiming, instead, that seemings can be reductively analyzed in terms of other mental states—either beliefs, inclinations to believe, or beliefs about one’s evidence—that cannot provide foundational non-doxastic justification. In this paper, I argue that no tenable semantic reduction of ‘seems’ can be formulated in terms of the three reductive analyses that have been proposed by critics of phenomenal conservatism. This is because Moore-paradoxical statements are generated when each of the reductive analyses is substituted for ‘seems’ in statements like ‘The stick is straight, but it does not seem to me that it’s straight.’ Since the latter statement is not Moore-paradoxical, the three proposed reductive analyses of ‘seems’ are unsuccessful. Absent a successful semantic reduction, however, there is no good reason to think a successful metaphysical reduction of seemings is forthcoming. Thus, there is an additional reason, unnoticed in the existing literature, to think that seemings are sui generis mental states.

Normativism is the view that logic provides rules for correct reasoning. Some influential critics of normativism, such as Gilbert Harman, claim that logical rules provide reasoners with bad or misleading standards. Others, such as Gillian Russell, claim that logic is a descriptive subject and thus cannot, given Hume’s law, provide rules for reasoning. We think these critics are mistaken. Our aim in this paper is to defend normativism by sketching an alternative way of thinking about the normative force of logical rules. On our view, logical rules are best characterized, in a broadly Rossian manner, as intellectual prima facie duties; i.e., they provide standards for evaluating reasoning and reasoners that are universal and authoritative, but not absolute. This position accommodates the inherent normativity of logic, contra Russell, while circumventing the challenges to normativism raised by Harman.

In A Priori Justification, Albert Casullo argues that extant attempts to explicate experiential justification—by stipulation, introspection, conceptual analysis, thought experimentation, and/or appeal to intuitions about hypothetical cases—are unsuccessful. He draws the following conclusion: “armchair methods” such as these are inadequate to the task. Instead, empirical methods should be used to investigate the distinction between experiential and non-experiential justification and to address questions concerning the nature, extent, and existence of the a priori. In this essay, I show that Casullo has not refuted armchair explications of experiential justification, in particular those that appeal to introspectively accessible phenomenology. I do this by presenting a phenomenal theory of experiential justification that (a) has a significant degree of initial plausibility and (b) survives Casullo’s general attack on such theories. As a result, a premise in the central argument for Casullo’s signature proposal concerning the a priori is undermined.

One of the central challenges to internalist foundationalism is posed by the Sellarsian dilemma, according to which the non-doxastic mental states identified as justifiers by internalist foundationalists are either (a) incapable of conferring genuine epistemic justification or (b) can do so only in virtue of features that generate a demand that they themselves be justified. In this essay I defend internalist foundationalism from the threat posed by the Sellarsian dilemma. I do this by arguing that seemings—the non-doxastic mental states identified by the principle of phenomenal conservativism as the source of epistemic justification—possess features that are sufficient to confer foundational justification on beliefs, but lack the features needed to generate a demand for additional epistemic justification.