Tim Kenyon

William Paley s'oppose aux arguments sceptiques de David Hume contre le témoignage de miracle en affirmant ce qui ressemble à un principe méthodologique d'argumentation: ne rejeter un témoignage partagé provenant de multiples sources crédibles que si une explication alternative raisonnable du témoignage est disponible. Appelons ça le Principe de Paley. D’autres auteurs, de Plutarque à Richard Dawkins, ont soit directement soutenu Paley dans cette affirmation, soit proposé des réflexions similaires sur l’importance des explications alternatives. J'explore le type de norme ou d'obligation que le principe de Paley pourrait exprimer et je discute de certaines preuves empiriques concernant l'efficacité des explications alternatives pour changer l'opinion des gens. Un élément défendable de l’affirmation de Paley est davantage une question de la manière dont nous traitons nos interlocuteurs que de la manière dont nous traitons les preuves. Mais les deux se chevauchent lorsque les preuves citées dans un argument sont testimoniales.

To assert is to utter a sentence under certain conventions, claims Michael Dummett. This view runs afoul of empirical evidence indicating the widespread assertoric use of non‐elliptical words and phrases. Dummett also advances two theses apparently related to his sentence conventionalism: that word meaning depends on sentence meaning, and that language is (in some sense) prior to thought. I argue that these latter two theses are independent of the empirically dubious Sentential Thesis. Plausibly, the wider Dummettian logico‐metaphysical programme is not impugned by the existence of non‐sentential assertions.

The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting. By Marc J. Gotlieb (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996) 255 pages, $45.00, £33.50 cloth. Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays. By David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace (eds.) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) xii + 211 pp., £35.00 cloth, £12.99 paper. Gestalt Psychology in German Culture 1890–1967. Holism and the Quest for Objectivity. By Mitchell G. Ash (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) xii + 513 pp., £35.00/$54.95 cloth. The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics. By Jerry A. Fodor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) 125 pp., $19.95 cloth. Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture. By Laura Doyle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 268 pp., £30.00 cloth, £14.99 paper. Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery. 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Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration. By Russell King, John Connell and Paul White (eds.) (London and New York: Routledge, 1995) xvii + 284 pp. Italian Journalism: A Critical Anthology. By Robert Lumley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) 133 pp., £14.99. Printed Commonplace‐Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. By Ann Moss (Oxford: Clarendon/oxford University Press, 1996) 338 pp., £40.00 cloth. The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy and the American Future. By Joshua Mitchell (Chicago/london: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 273 pp., $34.95/£27.95 cloth. After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain: Essays in Memory of John Clive. By Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler (eds.) (London/new York: Routledge, 1994) v + 260 pp., £40.00 cloth. Reading Holinshed's Chronicles. By Annabel Patterson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) xviii + 339 pp., £34.50/$49.50 cloth, £13.50/$19.50 paper. The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti. By Louis Joughin and Edmund M. Morgan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 596 pp. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. By Robert D. Richardson Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) xiii + 671 pp., n.p.g. Erasmus on Women. By Erika Rummel (ed.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) 251 pp. The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigée‐Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art. By Mary D. Sheriff (Chicago/london: University of Chicago Press, 1996.) 353 pp., $40.00 cloth. Russian Literature 1988–94: The End of an Era. By N. N. Shneidman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 245 pp., $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth‐Century Thought. By Ruth Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 484 pp. Bulgaria in a Time of Change: Economic and Political Dimensions. By Iliana Zloch‐Christy (ed.) (Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1996) 221 pp., £35.00 cloth. La Régression Démocratique. By Alain‐Gérard Slama (Paris: Fayard, 1995) 285 pp., 120.00FF, paper. Mass Enlightenment: Critical Studies in Rousseau and Diderot. By Julia Simon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) xii + 236 pp., $19.95 paper. Cassell Guide to Literature in French. By Valerie Worth‐Stylianou (ed.) (London/new York: Cassell, 1996) 274 pp., $24.95. The King's Army: Warfare, Soldiers, and Society during the Wars of Religion in France, 1562–1576. By James B. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xvi + 349 pp., £45.00/ $69.96. The International Politics of Russia and the Successor States. By Mark Webber (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) 366 pp., £45.00 cloth, £14.99 paper. The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel. By Nachman Ben‐Yehuda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) xxi + 401 pp., $54.00/£20.50 cloth. Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. By Seyla Benhabib (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) 373 pp., $59.50/£35.00 cloth, $19.95/£16.95 paper. The Path to Christian Democracy: German Catholics and the Party System from Windthorst to Adenauer. By Noel D. Cary (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) xi + 355 pp., $49.95 cloth. The Aldo Moro Murder Case. By Richard Drake (Cambridge/london: Harvard University Press, 1995) xi + 318 pp., $45.00 cloth. An Unnecessary Man: The Life of Apollon Grigor'ev. By Wayne Dowler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995) 286 pp. $55.00/£42.90/ $66.00 Europe. The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic. By Linda Gregerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 280 pp., £35.00/$49.95 cloth. Kant, Critique and Politics. By Kimberly Hutchings (London/new York: Routledge, 1996) xi + 219 pp., £37.50 cloth, £12.99 paper. Fra Angélico: Dissemblance and Figuration. By Georges Didi‐Huberman, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) xiv + 274 pp., n.p.g. Existence et démocratie. By Robert Misrahi (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995) 247 pp., 145 FF. Le Processus de Paix au Moyen‐Orient. By Maurice Konopnicki and Simon Petermann (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995) 127 pp., n.p.g. Privatizing Russia. By Maxim Boycko, Andrei Shleifer, Robert Vishny (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995) ix+ 165 pp., $18.95.

We shall see that both these projects are deeply misguided. The first suffers from Searle’s misrepresentation, en masse and individually, of the various materialist theories. To show this, I will focus on the basic claims of token identity specifically, and draw out the inaccuracy of Searle’s straw materialism. This is a shortcut; by showing one conjunct to be false, we may show the conjunction of Searle’s summaries to be false. And, after all, token identity is the most widely held current view. Searle’s second project, I will argue, is characterized by two unfortunate traits: it makes some confused and unsupported claims about supervenience and causality, and, when interpreted most charitably, it is fundamentally indistinguishable from a prevalent account of token identity augmented by supervenience.

Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are notoriously uninterested in truthtelling. They also often appear uninterested even in constructing plausible falsehoods. What stands out above all is the brazenness and frequency with which they repeat known falsehoods. In spite of this, they are not always greeted with incredulity. Indeed, Republicans continue to express trust in Donald Trump in remarkable numbers. The only way to properly make sense of what Trump and Johnson are doing, we argue, is to give a greater role to audience relativity - and in some cases, audience participation - in notions like bullshitting and bald-faced lying. In this paper, we develop a new understanding of bullshitting, one that includes bald-faced lying, and recognizes that different communicative acts may be directed at different audiences with a single utterance. In addition, we argue for recognition of the category of bald-faced bullshitting, a particular speciality of both Trump and Johnson, and one especially useful to authoritarian leaders.

L’épistémologie du désaccord s’est développée autour d’une notion idéalisée de pairs épistémiques. L’analyse d’exemples dans la littérature a quelque peu enraciné cette idéalisation, surtout lorsque les exemples étudiés sont des désaccords tirés du canon philosophique contemporain et qu’ils opposent des interlocuteurs identifiés. Il est difficile, pour des raisons socio-professionnelles, de souligner les manières ordinaires par lesquelles ces collègues disciplinaires peuvent se tromper. Il est probablement d’autant plus facile de négliger ces possibilités que les attitudes concernant l’importance du génie dans la pratique de la philosophie sont fort répandues dans le domaine. L’utilisation de ces exemples limite donc la prise en compte de toutes les caractéristiques épistémiquement pertinentes des désaccords.

This dissertation comprises four papers , each of which focuses on some aspect or application of the philosophical view known as semantic anti-realism, developed mainly by Michael Dummett. According to this view, reality is essentially knowable; as a corollary of this, the notion of truth is to be understood in terms of the availability of evidence. Chapter One considers a proposal for an anti-realist truth predicate advanced by Crispin Wright. I examine and reject various objections to Wright's proposal, before raising an objection of my own. Chapter Two reviews a potential objection to Dummett's philosophy of language, finding it not so much incorrect as harmless. Chapter Three sets the stage for a discussion of contemporary realism towards the states and properties of intentional psychology, by way of critically evaluating John Searle's claim to offer an alternative to contemporary theories of mind. And the final chapter synthesizes much of the preceding material, as I examine instrumentalism towards the mind: the thesis according to which mental states are merely what we propose in a rough-and-ready predictive heuristic, and are not actual states or objects. I reject this view, but not for the reasons often given. I then sketch the outlines of a realist theory of the mind that respects certain widespread intuitions about the normativity of mental state ascription: semantic anti-realism serves as a general theory against which this theory of mind may be developed

This article considers a Quine-Dennett style of argument from the indeterminacy of intentional content against the reducibility of mental states to neurological states. The most compelling version of such an argument, I suggest, is one that exploits a semantic anti-realist notion of truth; this holds out the promise of a relatively sophisticated story about the respects in which mental state attributions may be true or false of physical systems, without those states themselves being physical states.

The context or manner of an utterance can alter or nullify the speech-act that would normally be performed by utterances of that sort. Coercive contexts have this effect on some kinds of seeming assertions: they end up being non-assertoric, and are merely capitulations. An earlier version of this view is clarified, defended, and extended partly in response to a useful critique by Roy Sorensen. I examine some complications that arise regarding resistance to speaking under coercion when ideological or religious commitments are implicated

To assert is to utter a sentence under certain conventions, claims Michael Dummett. This view runs afoul of empirical evidence indicating the widespread assertoric use of non‐elliptical words and phrases. Dummett also advances two theses apparently related to his sentence conventionalism: that word meaning depends on sentence meaning, and that language is (in some sense) prior to thought. I argue that these latter two theses are independent of the empirically dubious Sentential Thesis. Plausibly, the wider Dummettian logico‐metaphysical programme is not impugned by the existence of non‐sentential assertions.

There are empirical grounds to doubt the effectiveness of a common and intuitive approach to teaching debiasing strategies in critical thinking courses. We summarize some of the grounds before suggesting a broader taxonomy of debiasing strategies. This four-level taxonomy enables a useful diagnosis of biasing factors and situations, and illuminates more strategies for more effective bias mitigation located in the shaping of situational factors and reasoning infrastructure—sometimes called “nudges” in the literature. The question, we contend, then becomes how best to teach the construction and use of such infrastructures.

Critical thinking is often taught with some emphasis on categories and operations of cognitive biases. The underlying thought is that knowledge of biases equips students to reduce them. The empirical evidence, however, doesn’t provide much support for this thought. We have previously argued that the emphasis on debiasing in critical thinking education is worth preserving, but in light of a more explicit and broader conception of debiasing. We now argue that this broader conception of debiasing strategies obliges critical thinking instructors and curriculum designers to reflect on the teaching approaches that might facilitate the use of those strategies. We propose some teaching techniques to expand the scope of debiasing in the classroom—some untested, some only rarely and recently characterized as critical thinking strategies, rather than as pragmatic considerations in, e.g., design, engineering, marketing. These methods and others like them, we suggest, broaden the prospects for teaching a range of effective critical thinking techniques for debiasing.

It is widely held that proper names are ambiguous in some sense, a view commonly associated with the theory that names are, when suitably idealized, semantically “rigid designators”. In this brief paper I suggest that, while some refinement of the concept of a name is surely appropriate, proper names do not very clearly meet the standards normally used to determine ambiguity. There is reason to regard shared names as semantically univocal, including some evidence from development linguistics to regard a grasp of names as having a metalinguistic descriptive aspect.

Social epistemology has paid little attention to oral historiography as a source of expert insight into the credibility of testimony. One extant suggestion, however, is that oral historians treat testimony with a default trust reflecting a standing warrant for accepting testimony. The view that there is such a standing warrant is sometimes known as the Acceptance Principle for Testimony. I argue that the practices of oral historians do not count in support of APT, all in all. Experts have commonly described oral traditions as oriented towards political, cultural and entertainment ends, and not only—or not even—towards an accurate depiction of past events. Even when accuracy is the emphasis, many historians of oral tradition do not trust such testimony as APT would suggest; the importance of gathering supporting evidence is a consistent emphasis. Yet oral historiography, both of traditions and more generally, does hold out lessons for the epistemology of testimony, implicating a wider range of social..

Graham Solomon, to whom this collection is dedicated, went into hospital for antibiotic treatment of pneumonia in Oc- ber, 2001. Three days later, on Nov. 1, he died of a massive stroke, at the age of 44. Solomon was well liked by those who got the chance to know him—it was a revelation to?nd out, when helping to sort out his a?airs after his death, how many “friends” he had whom he had actually never met, as his email included correspondence with philosophers around the world running sometimes to hundreds of messages. He was well respected in the philosophical community more broadly. He was for several years a member of the editorial board for the Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. While he was employed at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, several of us at the University of Wat- loo always regarded our own department as a sort of second academic home for him. We therefore decided that it would be appropriate to hold a memorial conference in his honour. Thanks to the generous?nancial support of the Humphrey Conference Fund, we were able to do so in May 2003. Many of the papers in this volume were presented at that conf- ence.

An influential idea in the epistemology of testimony is that people often acquire justified beliefs through testimony, in contexts too informationally poor for the justification to be evidential. This has been described as the Scarcity of Information Objection (SIO). It is an objection to the reductive thesis that the acceptance of testimony is justified by evidence of general kinds not unique to testimony. SIO hinges on examples intended to show clearly that testimonial justification arises in low-information contexts; I argue that the common examples show no such thing. There is a great deal of information available in testimonial contexts, including in the examples alleged to show otherwise – enough information to render SIO implausible. Purported SIO examples tend to give a wrong impression about the informational richness of testimonial contexts, I argue, due to the lack of detail in which they are presented

False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead people in contexts of disagreement to overestimate the differences between their respective views. I propose to treat FP as a problem of applied social epistemology—a barrier to reliable belief-formation in certain social domains—and to ask how best one may debias for FP. This inquiry leads more generally into questions about effective debiasing strategies; on this front, considerable empirical evidence suggests that intuitively attractive strategies for debiasing are not very effective, while more effective strategies are neither intuitive nor likely to be easily implemented. The supports for more effective debiasing seem either to be inherently social and cooperative, or at least to presuppose social efforts to create physical or decision-making infrastructure for mitigating bias. The upshot, I argue, is that becoming a less biased epistemic agent is a thoroughly socialized project