scholarly journals Epistemic Infrastructure for a Scientific Metaphysics

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Amanda Bryant
Keyword(s):  
Normative Force ◽  
Scientific Metaphysics ◽  
Analytic Metaphysics

A naturalistic impulse has taken speculative analytic metaphysics in its critical sights. Importantly, the claim that it is desirable or requisite to give metaphysics scientific moorings rests on underlying epistemological assumptions or principles. If the naturalistic impulse toward metaphysics is to be well-founded and its prescriptions to have normative force, those assumptions or principles should be spelled out and justified. In short, advocates of naturalized or scientific metaphysics require epistemic infrastructure. This paper begins to supply it. The author first sketches her conception of suitably naturalized or scientific metaphysics. She then lays out a number of candidate epistemic principles centring around the notion of theoretical constraint. The author offers several arguments for the principles, based on statistical likeliness, agreement, falsity avoidance, and methodological efficiency and inefficiency. Finally, she shows how scientific metaphysics satisfies the epistemic principles and is therefore preferable to its traditional rivals.

On Haslanger’s Meta-Metaphysics: Social Structures and Metaphysical Deflationism

Disputatio ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (50) ◽  
pp. 201-216
Author(s):  
E. Díaz-León
Keyword(s):  
Social Structures ◽  
Gender And Race ◽  
Area Of Concern ◽  
Analytic Metaphysics

Abstract The metaphysics of gender and race is a growing area of concern in contemporary analytic metaphysics, with many different views about the nature of gender and race being submitted and discussed. But what are these debates about? What questions are these accounts trying to answer? And is there real disagreement between advocates of differ- ent views about race or gender? If so, what are they really disagreeing about? In this paper I want to develop a view about what the debates in the metaphysics of gender and race are about, namely, a version of metaphysical deflationism, according to which these debates are about how we actually use or should use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ (and other related terms), where moral and political considerations play a central role. I will also argue that my version of the view can overcome some recent and powerful objections to metaphysical deflationism of- fered by Elizabeth Barnes (2014, 2017).

Towards Scientific Metaphysics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Śleziński
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Metaphysics

Moving Past the ABCs of Time

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Callender
Keyword(s):  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Time ◽  
Safety Zone ◽  
History Of ◽  
Traditional Work ◽  
Scientific Results ◽  
Analytic Metaphysics

How do the views developed in this book connect with traditional work in analytic metaphysics on time? After giving a potted history of the field, the chapter then displays many connections and modifications between that work and the present one. It highlights one major problem with traditional analytic philosophy of time, namely, its focus on bare existence, i.e., what events exist as of when. Almost by definition, existence will play no role in science, so philosophy of time will never be threatened by scientific results. The irony about this maneuver is that creating this safety zone around time leaves philosophers of time unable to do their original job, explaining the temporal phenomena.

scholarly journals Epistemic Blame and the Normativity of Evidence

Erkenntnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Conclusive Evidence ◽  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Reasons ◽  
Epistemic Norms ◽  
Plausible Assumption ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
Epistemic Trust ◽  
Conceptual Connection ◽  
Epistemic Blame

AbstractThe normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism.

Tort’s Indifference: Conformity, Compliance, and Civil Recourse

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Ahson Azmat
Keyword(s):  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Tort Law ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Reasons For Action ◽  
Internal Point ◽  
Loss Allocation ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
Extensional Structure ◽  
Do So

AbstractLeading accounts of tort law split cleanly into two seams. Some trace its foundations to a deontic form of morality; others to an instrumental, policy-oriented system of efficient loss allocation. An increasingly prominent alternative to both seams, Civil Recourse Theory (CRT) resists this binary by arguing that tort comprises a basic legal category, and that its directives constitute reasons for action with robust normative force. Using the familiar question whether tort’s directives are guidance rules or liability rules as a lens, or prism, this essay shows how considerations of practical reasoning undermine one of CRT’s core commitments. If tort directives exert robust normative force, we must account for its grounds—for where it comes from, and why it obtains. CRT tries to do so by co-opting H.L.A. Hart’s notion of the internal point of view, but this leveraging strategy cannot succeed: while the internal point of view sees legal directives as guides to action, tort law merely demands conformity. To be guided by a directive is to comply with it, not conform to it, so tort’s structure blocks the shortcut to normativity CRT attempts to navigate. Given the fine-grained distinctions the theory makes, and with the connection between its claims and tort’s requirements thus severed, CRT faces a dilemma: it’s either unresponsive to tort’s normative grounds, or it’s inattentive to tort’s extensional structure.

Artefacts in Analytic Metaphysics

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wybo Houkes ◽  
Pieter E. Vermaas ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Analytic Metaphysics

Attachment to Territory: Status or Achievement?

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avery Kolers
Keyword(s):  
Normative Force ◽  
Successful Theory ◽  
Territorial Rights

It is by now widely agreed that a theory of territorial rights must be able to explain attachment or particularity: what can link a particular group to a particular place with the kind of normative force necessary to forbid encroachment or colonization? Attachment is one of the pillars on which any successful theory of territory will have to stand. But the notion of attachment is not yet well understood, and such agreement as does exist relies on unexamined assumptions. One such assumption is that attachment is an achievement of some sort, as opposed to some kind of brute ascriptive status that a claimant has irrespective of anything it might do.But achievements do not come for free. ‘Achievement’ is a success term, and any theory predicated on success, no matter how minimal, requires a theory of failure. Yet theorists of territory have not grappled with the problem of failure.

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