In defence of explanatory realism

Explanatory realism is the view that explanations work by providing information about relations of productive determination such as causation or grounding. The view has gained considerable popularity in the last decades, especially in the context of metaphysical debates about non-causal explanation. What makes the view particularly attractive is that it fits nicely with the idea that not all explanations are causal whilst avoiding an implausible pluralism about explanation. Another attractive feature of the view is that it allows explanation to be a partially epistemic, context-dependent phenomenon. In spite of its attractiveness, explanatory realism has recently been subject to criticism. In particular, Taylor (Philos Stud 175(1):197–219, 2018). has presented four types of explanation that the view allegedly cannot account for. This paper defends explanatory realism against Taylor’s challenges. We will show that Taylor’s counterexamples are either explanations that turn out to provide information about entities standing in productive determination relations or that they are not genuine explanations in the first place.

Linguistic Mistakes

Ever since the publication of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, there’s been a raging debate in philosophy of language over whether meaning and thought are, in some sense, normative. Most participants in the normativity wars seem to agree that some uses of meaningful expressions are semantically correct while disagreeing over whether this entails anything normative. But what is it to say that a use of an expression is semantically correct? On the so-called orthodox construal, it is to say that it doesn’t result in a factual mistake, that is, in saying or thinking something false. On an alternative construal it is instead to say that it doesn’t result in a distinctively linguistic mistake, that is, in misusing the expression. It is natural to think that these two construals of semantic correctness are simply about different things and not necessarily in competition with each other. However, this is not the common view. Instead, several philosophers who subscribe to the orthodox construal have argued that the alternative construal of correctness as use in accordance with meaning doesn’t make any sense, partly because there are no clear cases of linguistic mistakes (Whiting in Inquiry, 59:219–238, 2016, Wikforss in Philos Stud 102:203–226, 2001). In this paper I develop and defend the idea that there’s a distinctively linguistic notion of correctness as use in accordance with meaning and argue that there are clear cases of linguistic mistakes.

Group (epistemic) competence

In this paper, I present an account of group competence that is explicitly framed for cases of epistemic performances. According to it, we must consider group epistemic competence as the group agents’ capacity to produce knowledge, and not the result of the summation of its individual members’ competences to produce knowledge. Additionally, I contend that group competence must be understood in terms of group normative status. To introduce my view, I present Jesper Kallestrup’s (Synthese 1–19, 2016) denial that group competence involves anything over and beyond the aggregation of individual competences. I have divided my response into two parts. First, I compare two conceptions of competence from Ernest Sosa’s reliabilist virtue epistemology (Sosa in Philos Stud 142:5–15, 2009; Philos Perspect 24:465–475, 2010a; Knowing full well, Princeton University Press, 2010b; Judgment & agency, Oxford University Press, 2015; Epistemology, Princeton University Press, 2017; in: Silva-Filho, Tateo (eds), Thinking about oneself: The place and value of reflection in philosophy and psychology, Springer, 2019) and David Löwenstein’s (Know-how as competence. A Rylean responsibilist account, Vittorio Klostermann, 2017) account of know-how. Second, I take the results from this comparison and apply them to the issue of group know-how, by the hand of Orestis Palermos and Deborah Tollefsen’s twofold approach to the topic (Palermos and Tollefsen, in: Carter, Clark, Kallestrup, Palermos, Pritchard (eds) Socially extended epistemology, Oxford University Press, 2018). Finally, I return to Kallestrup’s denial to make my point in favour of the conception of genuine group competence as the group normative status to achieve success.

Strong knowledge, weak belief?

According to the knowledge norm of belief (Williamson in Knowledge and its limits, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 47, 2000), one should believe p only if one knows p. However, it can easily seem that the ordinary notion of belief is much weaker than the knowledge norm would have it. It is possible to rationally believe things one knows to be unknown (Hawthorne et al. in Philos Stud 173:1393–1404, 2016; McGlynn in Noûs 47:385–407, 2013, Whiting in Chan (ed) The aim of belief, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). One response to this observation is to develop a technical notion of ‘outright’ belief. A challenge for this line of response is to find a way of getting a grip on the targeted notion of belief. In order to meet this challenge, I characterize ‘outright’ belief in this paper as the strongest belief state implied by knowledge. I show that outright belief so construed allows this notion to play important theoretical roles in connection with knowledge, assertion and action.

Naturalizing the contributory

This paper has two aims. First, I critically discuss Daniel Whiting’s (Philos Stud 195(9):2191–2208, 2018) recent proposal that a reason to ϕ is evidence of a respect in which it is right to ϕ. I raise two objections against this view: (i) it is subject to a modified version of Eva Schmidt’s (Ethics 127(3):708–718, 2018) counterexample against the influential account of reasons in terms of evidence and ‘ought’, and—setting aside judgments about specific cases—, (ii) it is also in an important sense uninformative. Interestingly, it turns out that this last objection cannot be helpfully understood in terms of circularity. This leads to a more general question about the criteria of adequacy for reductive accounts of reasons: In what sense, if any, should such accounts be informative? The second aim of this paper is to clarify one such sense, which is suggested by reflection on Whiting’s proposal. In particular, I argue that successful reductive accounts naturalize the contributory—by which I mean, roughly, that they explain the specifically contributory nature of reasons in fully non-normative terms. Moreover, I explain how views that fail this criterion are unable to meet certain key explanatory desiderata for reductive accounts of reasons. After broaching some of the wider implications for the project of understanding the notion of a reason in other terms, I conclude that the notion of naturalizing the contributory is a helpful notion for structuring the debate over reductive accounts of reasons.

Frege and saving substitution

Goodman and Lederman (Philos Stud 177(4):947–952, 2020) argue that the traditional Fregean strategy for preserving the validity of Leibniz’s Law of substitution fails when confronted with apparent counterexamples involving proper names embedded under propositional attitude verbs. We argue, on the contrary, that the Fregean strategy succeeds and that Goodman and Lederman’s argument misfires.

More Aboutness in Imagination

In Berto’s logic for aboutness in imagination, the output content of an imaginative episode must be part of the initial content of the episode (Berto, Philos Stud 175:1871–1886, 2018). This condition predicts expressions of perfectly legitimate imaginative episodes to be false. Thus, this condition is too strict. Relaxing the condition to correctly model these cases requires to consider a language with predicates and constants. The paper extends Berto’s semantics for aboutness in imagination to a semantics for such a language. The new semantics models contents of formulas along the lines of Hawke’s issue-based theory of topics (Hawke, Australas J Philos 96:697–723, 2017), while remaining faithful to the (in)validities discussed by Berto. Several relations between issues and topics are defined, which allow to overcome shortcomings of Hawke’s initial framework. These relations are then discussed with respect to their usefulness in the truth condition for the imagination operator.

Explaining value: on Orsi and Garcia’s explanatory objection to the fitting-attitude analysis

Orsi and Garcia (Philos Stud, 2020, 10.1007/s11098-020-01471-6) argue that fitting-attitude analysis of value (FA-analysis, for short) is vulnerable to an explanatory objection. On FA-analysis, for an object to be valuable is for it to be a fitting target of an attitude—a pro-attitude if its value is positive and a con-attitude if it is negative. For different kinds of value different kinds of attitudes are fitting: desire for desirability, admiration for admirability, etc. To explain the fittingness relation we therefor need to appeal to the features of the relevant attitude, but these seldom, if ever, are needed for explaining the object’s value. This explanatory disparity between the analysans and the analysandum implies that FA-analysis must be incorrect. In our reply to Orsi and Garcia, we provide a refutation of their objection. We argue that the features of a fitting attitude do have a right place in the explanation of an object’s value, even though they are not among the properties that make the object valuable. They help to explain this value-making relation itself.

The Hardest Paradox for Closure

According to the principle of Conjunction Closure, if one has justification for believing each of a set of propositions, one has justification for believing their conjunction. The lottery and preface paradoxes can both be seen as posing challenges for Closure, but leave open familiar strategies for preserving the principle. While this is all relatively well-trodden ground, a new Closure-challenging paradox has recently emerged, in two somewhat different forms, due to Backes (Synthese 196(9):3773–3787, 2019a) and Praolini (Australas J Philos 97(4):715–726, 2019). This paradox synthesises elements of the lottery and the preface and is designed to close off the familiar Closure-preserving strategies. By appealing to a normic theory of justification, I will defend Closure in the face of this new paradox. Along the way I will draw more general conclusions about justification, normalcy and defeat, which bear upon what Backes (Philos Stud 176(11):2877–2895, 2019b) has dubbed the ‘easy defeat’ problem for the normic theory.

A note on deterministic updating and van Fraassen’s symmetry argument for conditionalization

In a recent paper, Pettigrew (Philos Stud, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01377-y) argues that the pragmatic and epistemic arguments for Bayesian updating are based on an unwarranted assumption, which he calls deterministic updating, and which says that your updating plan should be deterministic. In that paper, Pettigrew did not consider whether the symmetry arguments due to Hughes and van Fraassen make the same assumption (Hughes and van Fraassen in: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. pp. 851–869, 1984; van Fraassen in: Rescher N (ed) Scientific inquiry in philosophical perspective. University Press of America, Lanham, pp. 183–223, 1987). In this note, I show that they do.