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"Cogburn, Jon"
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Pritchard’s Epistemology and Necessary Truths
Duncan Pritchard has argued that his basis-relative anti-luck construal of a safety condition on knowing avoids the problem with necessary truths that safety conditions are often thought to have, viz., that beliefs the contents of which are necessarily true are trivially safe. He has further argued that adding an ability condition to truth, belief, and his anti-luck safety conditions yields an adequate account of knowledge. In this paper, we argue that not only does Pritchard’s anti-luck safety condition have a problem with necessary truths, adding an ability condition is of no help. Indeed, the same sort of case that precipitates Pritchard’s introduction of an ability condition shows the inadequacy of his completed anti-luck account of knowledge. Moreover, reconstruing safety as an anti-risk condition as Pritchard has recently done does not fix the problem we’ve identified. We conclude by entertaining a radical suggestion to the effect that the failures of safety-based accounts of modal knowledge are due to failures of doxastic success rather than failures to satisfy an anti-luck (or anti-risk) condition. Accepting this radical suggestion makes available the view that there is, after all, no special problem between safety and necessary truths.
Journal Article
Against Brain-in-a-Vatism: On the Value of Virtual Reality
The term “virtual reality” was first coined by Antonin Artaud to describe a value-adding characteristic of certain types of theatrical performances. The expression has more recently come to refer to a broad range of incipient digital technologies that many current philosophers regard as a serious threat to human autonomy and well-being. Their concerns, which are formulated most succinctly in “brain in a vat”-type thought experiments and in Robert Nozick's famous “experience machine” argument, reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that such technologies would probably have to work. They also considerably underestimate the positive contributions that virtual reality (VR) technologies could make to the growth of human knowledge. Here, we examine and critique Nozick's claim that no reasonable person would want to plug into his hypothetical experience machine in light of a broadly enactivist understanding of how future VR technologies might be expected to function. We then sketch out a tentative theory of the phenomenon of truth in fiction, in order to characterize some of the distinct epistemic opportunities that VR technologies promise to provide.
Journal Article
COMPUTABILITY THEORY AND ONTOLOGICAL EMERGENCE
It is often helpful in metaphysics to reflect upon the principles that govern how existence claims are made in logic and mathematics. Here, Cogburn and Silcox emphasize that in order to provide an inductive definition of a class of mathematical entities, one must first define a base class and then stipulate further conditions for inclusion by reference to the properties of members of the base class. They examine further the concept behind computability theory and ontological emergence.
Journal Article
Manifest Invalidity: Neil Tennant's New Argument for Intuitionism
In Chapter 7 of \"The Taming of the True\", Neil Tennant provides a new argument from Michael Dummett's \"manifestation requirement\" to the incorrectness of classical logic and the correctness of intuitionistic logic. I show that Tennant's new argument is only valid if one interprets crucial existence claims occurring in the proof in the manner of intuitionists. If one interprets the existence claims as a classical logician would, then one can accept Tennant's premises while rejecting his conclusion of logical revision. Thus, Tennant has provided no evidence that should convince anyone who is not already an intuitionist. Since his proof is a proof for the correctness of intuitionism, it begs the question.
Journal Article
Paradox Lost
Frederic Fitch's celebrated reasoning to the conclusion that all truths are known can be interpreted as a reductio of the claim that all truths are knowable. Given this, nearly all of the proof's reception has involved canvassing the prospects for some form of verificationism. Unfortunately, debates of this sort discount much of the philosophical import of the proof. In addition to its relevance for verificationism, Fitch's proof is also an argument for the existence of God, one at least as strong as the traditional demonstrations. Perhaps unlike other such proofs, Fitch's also operates as a key lemma in a proof that (if sound) establishes that God can't exist. While the implications of Fitch's proof are thus very important for our understanding of key concepts in the philosophy of religion, they are also relevant to the proof's traditional reception. With these results, I am able to provide a principled motivation for Neil Tennant's recent defense of a restricted form of verificationism.
Journal Article
Logical Revision Re-Revisited: On the Wright/Salerno Case for Intuitionism
In \"Revising the Logic of Logical Revision\" (Philosophical Studies 99, 211-227) J. Salerno attempts to undermine Crispin Wright's recent arguments for intuitionism, and to replace Wright and Dummett's arguments with a revisionary argument of his own. I show that Salerno's criticisms of Wright involve both attributing an inference to Wright that no intuitionist would make and fallaciously treating a negative universal as an existential negative. Then I show how very general considerations about the nature of warrant undermine both Wright and Salerno's arguments, when these arguments are applied to discourses with defeasible warrants. While Salerno explicitly restricts his discussion to mathematics, Wright and Dummett intend their revisionary arguments to have much wider scope.
Journal Article
Inferentialism and Tacit Knowledge
A central tenet of cognitivism is that knowing how is to be explained in terms of tacitly knowing that a theory is true. By critically examining canonical anti-behaviorist arguments and contemporary appeals to tacit knowledge, I have devised a more explicit characterization in which tacitly known theories must act as justifiers for claims that the tacit knower is capable of explicitly endorsing. In this manner the new account is specifically tied to verbal behavior. In addition, if the analysis is correct then it follows that the scope and nature of cognitivist appeals to tacit knowledge are largely mistaken.
Journal Article
Slouching towards Vienna: Michael Dummett and the epistemology of language
Michael Dummett, Neil Tennant, and Crispin Wright all appeal to a priori restrictions on a philosophical explanation of linguistic competence (the “theory of meaning”) to criticize classical logic and semantics. They also use these restrictions to defend verificationsim. In the negative part of my project I uncover interesting structural analogies between the Dummettian arguments for logical revision to show that they all require the truth of a stronger, and less plausible, form of verificationism than even the logical positivists were willing to countenance. This result, I argue, genuinely is a modus tollens from which we should conclude that the explanatory demands Dummett and others place on the theory of meaning are mistaken. I then draw from the linguistic, lexicographic, and psychological literature to undermine the Dummettian view that an explanation of competence should recursively correlate dispositions necessary and sufficient for grasp of meaning with the aspects of meanings generated by a compositional semantics. Thus is eliminated the Dummettian impetus to identify such dispositions with the ability to recognize verifications. In the positive discussion I: (1) characterize and defend a conception of tacit knowledge which renders the postulation of the mental reality of classical semantics both explanatory and plausible, (2) show that many traditional philosophical questions concerning the epistemology of language can and should be recast as questions concerning how the theory of sentence meaning (compositional semantics) interacts with the theory of word meaning (lexical semantics), and (3) defend a roughly Davidsonian alternative to Dummett's theory of grasp of meaning.
Dissertation
