Ryan Cox

According to philosophical orthodoxy, we each possess exactly one distinctively first-personal concept of ourselves. Call this view de se monism. According to a relatively unexplored alternative, we each possess more than one distinctively first-personal concept of ourselves. Call this view de se pluralism. In this paper, I clarify what is at issue between de se monism and de se pluralism, show why de se monism is so widely assumed without argument, and then make the case for de se pluralism as an alternative to monism. I first offer an intuitive initial argument for pluralism before showing how pluralism can be developed within a formal framework for thinking about the content of de se thought.

This essay provides meta-ethical foundations for an approach to political realism. The foundations appeal to the kind of non-objectivity of morality involved in taking a critical and reflective perspective on our own moral and political outlooks. The essay argues that the distinctive methodology of an approach to political realism can be derived from these non-objectivist foundations. This methodology requires political philosophy to be more critical and reflective than it usually is, for it to be more deeply engaged with history, sociology, and other human sciences, and for it to look less like applied moral philosophy.

This chapter deals with Armstrong’s self-scanning theory of self-knowledge. Armstrong held the view that when we know that we are in some mental state, it’s a question of scanning our own internal states. The chapter claims that, for Armstrong, this follows from a combination of a traditional view of perception, and something like the central-state materialist view that mental states are internal states of the brain. This made Armstrong very keen to reject another traditional view, namely, that we have incorrigible access to our own mental states. He rejected this, this chapter states, because he thought if our access were incorrigible, this would be inconsistent with this combination of views. This leads to Armstrong’s own argument for why we should expect our beliefs about our own mental states to be fallible, which hangs on the idea that our beliefs about mental states, and the states they are beliefs about are distinct, given Hume’s dictum that there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. The chapter then considers the various ways in which we might think about the idea of distinctness, and contrasts Armstrong’s view with Shoemaker’s view, according to which they are not distinct.

This article argues for an expansion of the egalitarian toolbox for critiquing systems of education. It begins by examining familiar egalitarian approaches to equality of opportunity and social justice before examining more recent approaches to expanding the egalitarian toolbox defended by Elizabeth Anderson and Debra Satz. It argues that while both the familiar and new approaches form an important part of the egalitarian toolbox, they both have limitations which call for an approach to educational justice more directly concerned with social equality. The article then develops such an approach informed by sociological work on social class and social status.

How are sentences that express reason explanations related to sentences that express rationalizing psychological explanations? How are sentences like ‘Jane is going to the pub because John is there’ related to sentences like ‘Jane is going to the pub because she knows that John is there’? Are the former merely elliptical, in some sense, for the latter? Are the former used to express nothing more and nothing less than the latter are used to express? If so, then what explains this? Are the sentences syntactically ambiguous, context-dependent, lexically ambiguous, or is there some merely pragmatic explanation available? This paper examines various linguistic hypotheses which would support the “ellipsis hypothesis” and argues that they all fail to support the hypothesis. It then argues that this has deeper implications for first-order action theory than one might think, as the failure of these hypotheses lends support to an alternative first-order action theory I call _analytic anti-psychologism_.

Claims about the distinctness or non-distinctness of introspective beliefs from the mental states they are about have played a central role in the philosophy of introspection in the past fifty years or so. In A Materialist Theory of the Mind and work leading up to it, David Armstrong famously argued against infallibilist theories of introspection, and in defence of his own self-scanning theory of introspection, on the ground that introspective beliefs are distinct from the mental states they are about. Sydney Shoemaker, one of Armstrong’s most ardent critics, famously argued against Armstrong’s self-scanning theory of introspection, and in favour of his own constitutive theory of introspection, on the ground that introspective beliefs are not distinct from the mental states they are about. Yet the relevant sense or senses of distinctness involved here, and the role such claims about distinctness plays in such arguments, is notoriously hard to pin down. This essay explores some of the issues concerning distinctness and non-distinctness in the philosophy of introspection and in the dispute between Armstrong and Shoemaker and offers a reassessment of some of the central arguments offered in that dispute.

This essay is about two familiar theses in the philosophy of mind: constitutivism about instrumental desires, and constitutivism about introspective beliefs, and the arguments for and against them. Constitutivism about instrumental desire is the thesis that instrumental desires are at least partly constituted by the desires and means-end beliefs which explain them, and is a thesis which has been championed most prominently by Michael Smith. Constitutivism about introspective belief is the thesis that introspective beliefs are at least partly constituted by the mental states they are about, and is a thesis which has been championed most prominently by Sydney Shoemaker. Despite their similarities, the fortunes of these two theses could not be more opposed: constitutivism about instrumental desire is widely accepted, and constitutivism about introspective belief is widely rejected. Yet, the arguments for both theses are roughly analogous. This essay explores these arguments. I argue that the argument which is widely taken to be the best argument for constitutivism about instrumental desires---what I call the argument from necessitation---does not provide the support for the thesis it is widely taken to provide, and that it fails for much the same reasons that it fails to provide support for constitutivism about introspective belief. Furthermore, I argue that the best argument for constitutivism about instrumental desires---what I will call the argument from cognitive dynamics---is also a good argument, if not equally good, for constitutivism about introspective belief (at least when the thesis is suitably qualified).

This article sets out an argument from legitimacy for the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament in Australia. The article first sets out an understanding of political legitimacy and of legitimacy deficits and argues that the Australian Government faces a legitimacy deficit with respect to its exercise of political power and authority over Indigenous Australians. The deficit arises, it is argued, because Indigenous Australians face significant structural injustice and there is little hope of redressing this injustice within the prevailing governing conventions. The article then argues that the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament ought to be seen as part of a package to address this legitimacy deficit by resetting the governing conventions of Australian society. The argument from legitimacy is then compared favorably with more familiar arguments from sovereignty and the right to self-determination.

This essay explores the relation between democracy and social equality. It critically evaluates the relational egalitarian view that democracy is necessary for full social equality and that democracy is an important constituent of social equality. On such a view, inequalities in power an de facto authority are taken, in certain circumstances, to constitute a form of social inequality. On the basis of a series of cases, I argue that such a view is mistaken, and that political inequalities are, at best, empirically and contingently related to social inequality. I argue that what is primarily wrong with inequalities in power and de facto authority is not that, in certain circumstances, they constitute a form of social inequality, but rather that they can be used to extract greater consideration for those with greater power.

Are why-interrogatives just like other wh-interrogatives, syntactically speaking? Are they filler-gap constructions? This essay presents the case for thinking that they are. It brings together the standard arguments for thinking that they are and presents a new argument for thinking so. It then critically examines the justly influential arguments of Sylvain Bromberger for thinking that why-interrogatives are not syntactically just like other wh-interrogatives and argues that they do not establish their conclusion.

Are the limits on what we can do, morally speaking—our “moral incapacities” as Bernard Williams calls them—imposed on us from within, by reason itself, or from without, by something other than reason? Do they perhaps have their source in the will, as opposed to reason? In this essay, I argue for a theory of moral incapacity on which our moral incapacities have their source in reason itself. The theory is defended on the grounds that it provides the best explanation of our knowledge of our own moral incapacities. I argue that just as an agent’s reflective commitments play an essential role in the explanation of their knowledge of their moral incapacities, they play an essential role in the explanation of moral incapacities themselves. Since reflective commitments are rational commitments, and rational commitments have their source in reason, moral incapacities have their source in reason itself. The theory of knowledge of moral incapacity offered in this essay draws on elements of Richard Moran’s “deliberative” theory of self-knowledge and elements of that theory are used to offer a theory of moral incapacities which extends and improves on Bernard Williams’ “deliberative” theory of moral incapacities. The resulting theory is then defended against objections and alternatives.

How do why-interrogatives work? How do they express the questions they express, in the contexts in which they express them? In this essay, I argue that, at a fundamental level, why-interrogatives work just like other wh-interrogatives, particularly other adjunct wh-interrogatives, and they express the questions they express, in the contexts in which they express them, by the same means that other wh-interrogatives do. These conclusions go against a trend in recent work on why-interrogatives, which holds that they are syntactically and semantically unlike other wh-interrogatives. Since the claim that why-interrogatives are unlike other wh-interrogatives has been taken to support various philosophical theses about the nature of why-questions and explanation, showing that why-interrogatives are just like other wh-interrogatives undermines this line of support for these theses.

While it is widely held that normative reflection is an effective means of controlling our emotions, it has proven to be notoriously difficult to provide a plausible model of such control. How could reflection on the normative status of our emotions be a means of controlling them? Higher-order models of reflective control give a special role to higher-order beliefs and judgments about the normative status of our emotions in controlling our emotions, but in doing so claim that higher-order beliefs and judgments have more control over our emotional lives than they in fact have, and fail to explain some of the central features of reflective control. First-order models of reflective control give a special role to first-order evaluative beliefs and perceptions about the objects of our emotions in controlling our emotions, but in doing so fail to explain how normative reflection could be a distinctive means of controlling our emotions at all. In this essay, I defend a model of reflective control which avoids the twin pitfalls of the higher-order and first-order models of reflective control, while learning from them both. I defend a model according to which normative reflection is a means of bringing our emotions under the control of reflective reason, where an emotion’s being under the control of reflective reason is to be understood in terms of its being under the control of one’s first-order evaluative beliefs and perceptions in accordance with one’s reflective commitments.

In this essay, I argue that we have a non-inferential way of knowing particular explanations of our own actions and attitudes. I begin by explicating and evaluating Nisbett and Wilson’s influential argument to the contrary. I argue that Nisbett and Wilson’s claim that we arrive at such explanations of our own actions and attitudes by inference is not adequately supported by their findings because they overlook an important alternative explanation of those findings. I explicate and defend such an alternative explanation of how we can know such explanations in a non-inferential way, drawing on recent work in the philosophy of self-knowledge.