books — The Brains Blog

2. Reference and Justification

In my first post I sketched an argument for a principle connecting aboutness and justification. Here is the sketch version again as a little graphic: The resulting principle, which I call in the book ‘Reference and Justification’, brings out the significance for accounts of aboutness of the fact that justification is …

1. The Theory of Reference is Retro-chic

Imogen Dickie April 17, 2017 April 17, 2017 Concepts / Content / Epistemology / Imogen Dickie: Fixing Reference / philosophy of language / Philosophy of Mind

Remember the causo-descriptivist wars? If your education was anything like mine, at some point you were walked across the old battlefield and shown some of the main sights: early naïve descriptivism about proper names; its cluster theoretic successor; Kripke’s attack on descriptivism in Naming and Necessity; his causal inheritance picture; …

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John Schwenkler April 17, 2017 April 28, 2017 Imogen Dickie: Fixing Reference

We are grateful to Imogen Dickie for blogging this week on Fixing Reference (Oxford, 2016). To view all of Imogen’s posts on a single page, click here.

4. Inference and Experience: conceptual challenges to inferentialism

Susanna Siegel April 9, 2017 April 9, 2017 Belief / Epistemology / perception / Susanna Siegel: The Rationality of Perception

I find the challenges to the coherence of inferentialism much more powerful than the objections inherent in alternatives. That’s why I devote more time in the book to making the case that inferentialism is coherent, and to explaining what form it could take. Perhaps a first type of challenge to …

3. Weakening the power of experience

Susanna Siegel April 8, 2017 April 9, 2017 Belief / Epistemology / perception / Susanna Siegel: The Rationality of Perception

In previous posts, I discussed the problem generated by the case of Jack and Jill. When Jill’s fear influences her visual experience that presents Jack as angry, does Jill get as much reason from her experience to believe her eyes, as she could if her fear didn’t influence her experience? …

2. (Ir)rational perception

Susanna Siegel April 5, 2017 April 8, 2017 Epistemology / perception / Susanna Siegel: The Rationality of Perception

Recall the example discussed in my earlier post: Jill and Jack: Jill fears (without good reason) that Jack is angry with her. As a result of her fear, Jack’s face looks angry to her when she sees it. If you saw Jack, you’d see his neutral expression for what it is. There’s …

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John Schwenkler April 4, 2017 April 17, 2017 Susanna Siegel: The Rationality of Perception

We are grateful to Susanna Siegel for blogging this week on her new book The Rationality of Perception (Oxford, 2017). To view all of her posts on a single page, click here.