Inference

In a series of papers over the past twenty years, and in a new book, Igor Douven has argued that Bayesians are too quick to reject versions of inference to the best explanation that cannot be accommodated within their framework. In this paper, I survey their worries and attempt to answer them using a series of pragmatic and purely epistemic arguments that I take to show that Bayes’ Rule really is the only rational way to respond to your evidence.

“Is Professor Crispin Wright on Quine’s indeterminacy of translation thesis worth reading?” you ask. “What does it say? What is the main point? And what is Alex Miller’s response?” Beyond those who doubt the value of the tradition of analytic philosophy in general, there are probably American analytic philosophers with questions along these lines, who doubt the value of much British philosophy probably. In this paper, I offer a light substitute which bears some loose resemblance to Wright’s paper, for those (...) wanting a quick feel of what Wright’s paper is like. I argue that Quine’s argument from above cannot succeed, given the kind of underdetermination to which he is committed. But his argument from below is less susceptible to being undermined by considerations of overall coherence than one might think. (shrink)

Professor Timothy Williamson has written a paper addressing the world of jurisprudence as well, entitled "The content of legal evidence." But what should he be saying to jurisprudence, which we can here understand as legal philosophy. Perhaps "saying" is the wrong word. We should speak of checking! He should check that his audiences have a reliable grasp of the premise-inference-conclusion distinction. Let's help any audience members who are not too sure. Here is an example of an argument, with two premises (...) and an inference and a conclusion - prompted by words I actually heard. "(1) If my young children have been taken away to Pakistan without my consent, then my rights have been violated. (2) My young children have been taken away to Pakistan without my consent. Therefore: (3) My rights have been violated." (1) is a premise. (2) is also a premise. The statement above of it ends with "without my consent." The word "therefore" is an inference from these two premises. The conclusion is (3). Given these distinctions, the following representation of the argument is a mistake: "(1) If my young children have been taken away to Pakistan without my consent, then my rights have been violated. (2) My young children have been taken away to Pakistan without my consent. (3) Therefore, my rights have been violated." (3) is supposed to be the conclusion, but here it also includes the inference - the therefore! But this mistake is not uncommon in various circles (I have not been collecting published examples, sorry) and suggests to me a poor “grasp” of the distinctions between premises and inference and conclusion. Probably there is a paper in the nineteenth century regarding what disasters arise by not separating out the inference. But probably also you intuitively grasp the distinction, even if you are not disposed to write in line with it. If I ask you, what follows from premises (1) and (2), you will say (or at least think): my rights have been violated. If I ask you, what conclusion can you draw from premises (1) and (2) - assuming they are true - you will say (or at least think): my rights have been violated. If I ask you, what can you infer from premises (1) and (2) - assuming they are true - you will say (or at least think): my rights have been violated. In answering in this way, you don't include the inference in your answer: the answer being your specification of the conclusion. Including it is like saying "Therefore therefore..." If I draw attention to these two premises and say, "Therefore" you just think the conclusion as what follows. Hopefully! (The title I have given to this contribution quotes a poem by Laura Riding entitled "The World and I."). (shrink)

This paper presents Anca Gheaus’s attempt to reconstruct Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift’s defence of the family against abolitionists. I propose that the reconstruction suffers from at least two problems: it is missing a premise given the aim of not attributing an invalid argument unnecessarily; and it fails to distinguish the inference to a conclusion from the conclusion itself.

Philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and AI lack a unified model to explain how systems form meaningful propositional attitudes—states like belief, desire, and intention. This work introduces and defends the Trialectics framework as a response to this theoretical gap. We propose that any system capable of forming meaningful propositional attitudes—that is, internal states with truth-evaluable, compositionally structured content that can be rationally evaluated and guide goal-directed behavior—must instantiate three interdependent functional capacities: Reference (R), the ability to establish semantic links; Inference (...) (I), the capacity to process and transform content systematically; and Preference (P), the function of internal evaluation and goal-orientation. The central thesis is that these capacities are not modular but mutually conditioning: meaningful content arises only from their dynamic entanglement, where reference shapes and is shaped by inference and preference, and so on. By embedding evaluation (P) within the cognitive loop, Trialectics offers a naturalized solution to the problem of normativity in reasoning and reconciles representational requirements with enactivist critiques by defining reference functionally rather than metaphysically. The framework’s utility is demonstrated by showing how it implicitly structures existing cognitive architectures (e.g., BDI, Active Inference) and provides a powerful diagnostic and design tool for AI, particularly concerning alignment, generalization, and interpretability. Ultimately, Trialectics posits a fundamental architectural condition for any system—biological or artificial—to achieve the flexible, offline, and rationally evaluable propositional attitudes characteristic of sophisticated intelligence. (shrink)

Counterfactual reasoning has always played a role in human life. We ask questions like, “Could it have been different?”, “Under which conditions might/would it have been different?”, “What would have happened if…?” If we don’t find an answer, i.e. what we accept as an answer, we may start reasoning. Reasoning means introducing still new information/assumptions, new questions, new answers to new questions etc. From a formal point of view, it may be compared with stepwise moving towards a destination in a (...) path-system, in which you never fully have an overview. In this way, reasoning is an activity, with its own rationale, which will be studied from the agent’s own perspective. Questions include: What are the conditions where asking that specific question, or introducing this information/assumption, etc. will count as a reasonable step or progress towards the answer of the initial question? What makes this step more reasonable than another? (shrink)

This article provides a defense of deductivism, the notion that all inferences are deductive. It’s argued that all inferences are deductive according to the reasoner’s intended domain of quantification. This implicit range might include different modalities (logical, nomological, metaphysical), different numbers of intended worlds (all, some, twenty, one...), and different sets of objects referred to. These restrictions require a different conception of validity where inferences can be truth preserving in different ranges. The main alternative to deductivism is inductivism, the view (...) that some inferences are genuinely inductive. Section 2 presents the problems of inductivism, highlighting its conceptual deficiencies and advancing deductivism as an alternative. In section 3, it’s argued that the epistemic commitments of inductivism and deductivism are fallibilism and infallibilism, respectively. Infallibilism is defended as a matter of coherence. Section 4 considers the metaphysical commitments of deductivism. It’s argued that deductivism implies determinism, which on its turn requires only deductive explanations. Section 5 concludes. Throughout the paper other conceptual innovations are offered such as modal indexes, a modal interpretation of probability and a distinction between type and token propositions. (shrink)

Some definitions of deduction are offered. The first is that deduction is an inference type that is both possibly valid and possibly invalid. No inference can satisfy this definition, because valid inferences are not possibly invalid and invalid inferences are not possibly valid. In the second definition, deduction is understood as an inference that is possibly valid or possibly invalid, but not both. The trouble with this definition is that inductive inferences will have to be considered deductive, since they are (...) possibly invalid. The third definition is of a deduction as an inference that aims for validity. The problem now is that invalid inferences can’t aim for validity since they are not possibly valid. This problem can be overcome by arguing that reasoners will aim for validity with invalid inferences when they resemble valid ones. But being apparently valid is synonymous with being possibly valid. So there are no deductive inferences as such. Only valid inferences. (shrink)

When entering an environment, animals – including humans – tend to consult their memories to determine what they know about the place. This information is useful to determine: is this place safe? And what happens next? In this chapter, we argue on both empirical and conceptual grounds that memory is largely organized by space. Spatial relations determine what is recalled and which experiences are combined in generalizations. Time does not play an analogous role. We show that space and time in (...) memory are thus deeply asymmetrical. We conclude with a consequence of our view: spatial organization entails a basic form of abstraction in a way temporal organization does not, and so the spatial organization of memory reveals that memory involves generalization from the very beginning. (shrink)

Recent epistemological debates have increasingly focused on the contentious counter-closure principle, which holds that, necessarily, if an agent S believes q solely on the basis of a competent inference from p, and S knows q, then S also knows p. This principle has drawn attention due to various challenges, particularly the issue of inferential knowledge derived from false premises. In this article, we pursue two objectives. First, we argue that the counter-closure principle is untenable but for reasons that depart from (...) traditional critiques. Specifically, we will present a novel argument against the internalist approach that supports the cases of knowledge from falsehoods. Second, we show that the counter-closure principle’s failure can be better addressed within an externalist framework by exploring novel theories of defeaters and the relationship between doxastic and propositional warrant. (shrink)

There is a felt difference between following an argument to its conclusion and keeping up with an argument in your judgments while failing to see how its conclusion follows from its premises. In the first case there’s what I’m calling an inferential seeming, in the second case there isn’t. Inferential seemings exhibit a cluster of functional and normative characteristics whose integration in one mental state is puzzling. Several recent accounts of inferring suggest inferential seemings play a significant role in the (...) process, but none provides a fully satisfactory understanding of inferential seemings themselves. In this paper I critically examine theoretical options on offer in the existing literature, then develop an alternative view. I discuss implications for recent debates about general principles governing inference, such as Fumerton’s Principle of Inferential Justification and Boghossian’s Taking Condition. (shrink)

According to a widely held view in the philosophy of mathematics, direct inferential justification for mathematical propositions (that are not axioms) requires proof. I challenge this view while accepting that mathematical justification requires arguments that are put forward as proofs. I argue that certain fallacious putative proofs considered by the relevant subjects to be correct can confer mathematical justification. But mathematical justification doesn’t come for cheap: not just any argument will do. I suggest that to successfully transmit justification an argument (...) must satisfy specific standards, some of which are social. I contrast my view with Huemer’s inferential conservatism, which makes mathematical justification too easy to get. Although in this article I focus on mathematical inferential beliefs, the view on offer generalizes to other inferential beliefs. (shrink)

Recently, Dardashti, Hartmann, Thébault, and Winsberg (2019) proposed a Bayesian model for establishing Hawking radiation by analogical inference. In this paper we investigate whether their model would work as a general model for analogical inference. We study how it performs when varying the believed degree of similarity between the source and the target system. We show that there are circumstances in which the degree of confirmation for the hypothesis about the target system obtained by collecting evidence from the source system (...) goes down when increasing the believed degree of similarity between the two systems. We then develop an alternative model in which the direction of the variation of the degree of confirmation always coincides with the direction of the believed degree of similarity. Finally, we argue that the two models capture different types of analogical inference. (shrink)

Some philosophers have claimed that there is knowledge from falsehood (KFF, in short), i.e., inferential knowledge that involves a relevant false premise. The main thesis of this paper is that there are no standard cases of KFF. By ‘standard cases’ we mean cases in which the subject employs a measurement procedure in order to determine the value of some quantity, such as the time or the number of people present in a room. If knowledge is attained at all, it is (...) attained by inference not from a false premise but, instead, from two pieces of reflective knowledge. A brief look at putative non-standard cases of KFF reveals that they can be explained away in a different way, albeit a way that shares a common pattern with standard cases. (shrink)

I take issue with recent enthusiasm for the alleged epistemic powers of imagination and argue that imagination cannot generate knowledge and justification. I distinguish two conceptions of imagination that have emerged from recent debates: primitivism, according to which imagination is sui generis and essentially sensory or imagistic, vs. reductionism, according to which imagination is akin to other psychological states and “propositional” or non-necessarily imagistic. Both conceptions are problematic. Sensory imagination has been shown to be largely unreliable; besides, it doesn’t play (...) either a necessary or sufficient role for knowledge. Propositional imagination, on the other hand, seems virtually indistinguishable from inferential reasoning, hence it’s unclear that it can yield distinctively imaginative justification. The issue reflects a broader dilemma for candidate accounts of the imagination and its epistemic powers: either imagination is primitive and sui generis but epistemically suspect; or it's reducible to more familiar inferential processes but lacks independent epistemic power. (shrink)

We explore the view that knowledge of grounding is based on knowledge of essence. We assess different existing accounts of the relation between essence and grounding and identify some of their shortcomings. In response, we propose a novel account that we argue is better suited to explain this relation and show how this can further explain knowledge of grounding. Finally, we examine how one can transition from knowledge of essence to knowledge of grounding. We maintain that, at least in some (...) cases, it is possible to know what grounds what—non-circularly and inferentially—on the basis of knowledge of essence. (shrink)

In reasoning, we draw conclusions from multiple premises. But thinkers can be fragmented. And if there is no single fragment of the agent that thinks all of the premises, then the agent cannot draw any conclusions from them. It follows that reasoning from multiple premises depends on their being thought together. But what is it to think premises together? What is the condition that contrasts with fragmentation? This paper provides an answer to this question that is simple but compelling: to (...) think premises together is to attribute those very thoughts to one and the same self. The ability to reason depends on the ability to attribute the thoughts from which one reasons to oneself. Reasoning—at least the sort of reasoning that we do—requires de se thought. (shrink)

Is more information always better? Or are there some situations in which more information can make us worse off? Good (1967) argues that expected utility maximizers should always accept more information if the information is cost-free and relevant. But Good's argument presupposes that you are certain you will update by conditionalization. If we relax this assumption and allow agents to be uncertain about updating, these agents can be rationally required to reject free and relevant information. Since there are good reasons (...) to be uncertain about updating, rationality can require you to prefer ignorance. (shrink)

This paper does four things. First it lays out an orthodox position on reasons and defeaters. Then it argues that the position just laid out is mistaken about “undercutting” defeaters. Then the paper explains an unpublished thought experiment by Dorothy Edgington. And then it uses that thought experiment to motivate a new approach to undercutting defeaters.

It’s generally thought that we finite beings can’t follow infinitary rules of inference like the omega rule. But this consensus has recently been challenged, most notably by Jared Warren, whose account of the determinacy of our arithmetical language depends on the claim that we do follow the omega rule. Warren argues for that claim by exhibiting a case in which it’s purportedly clear that we’re actually disposed to use that rule to infer a generalization from infinitely many instances. Here I (...) respond to this argument: I show that, in the case in question, there’s conclusive reason to think we’re inferring from the generalization to the instances rather than the other way around and so aren’t engaging in infinitary reasoning, and I argue, more generally, that finite beings like us can never use infinitary reasoning to come to accept new generalizations, as the omega rule would require us to do. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson has defended two hypotheses concerning counterfactual condi- tionals: that necessity can be defined in counterfactual terms; and that we follow a heuristic to the effect that a counterfactual is assessed by assessing the consequent while counterfactually supposing the antecedent. The two hypotheses form the bedrock for a program aiming to reduce the epistemology of modality to the epistemology of counter- factual thinking. This paper argues that the pair of theses, if construed as Williamson intends it, has the unwanted (...) consequence of trivializing our judgements about necessity and possibility, thus threatening the reductionist program. Trivialization can be avoided if we suitably weaken a background hypothesis concerning the way we assess pairs of mutually inconsistent statements. One important corollary of the proposed solution is that the suppositional heuristic need not yield incorrect judgements about counterpos- sibles, pace Williamson. Moreover, the proposal remains compatible with vacuism, the view that all counterpossibles are true. (shrink)

Nozick has an account of inferential knowledge which has rarely been discussed. According to this account, in order to know q via competent inference from p, S’s belief in q should track the truth of p in the right way. In detail, S knows via competent inference from p that q iff 1*. S knows that p. 2*. q is true, and S infers q from p. 3*. If q were false, S wouldn’t believe that p. 4*. If q were (...) true, S would believe that p. In this paper, it is argued that the account is problematic. It is both too restrictive and too inclusive. It is too restrictive because condition 4* is not satisfied in some cases of inferential knowledge. It is too inclusive because condition 3*, together with other conditions, could be easily satisfied in some cases where inferential knowledge does not exist. (shrink)

By a reasoned change in logic I mean a change in the logic with which you make inferences that is based on your evidence. An argument sourced in recently published material Kripke lectured on in the 1970s, and dubbed the Adoption Problem by Birman (then Padró) in her 2015 dissertation, challenges the possibility of reasoned changes in logic. I explain why evidentialists should be alarmed by this challenge, and then I go on to dispel it. The Adoption Problem rests on (...) a failure to distinguish between logical principles such as Universal Instantiation and Modus Ponens which might or might not govern your inferences with superficially similar laws which must govern your cognitive architecture. (shrink)

Testimony can be a source of knowledge. This paper examines how misinterpretation, or the risk of it, can prevent a hearer from acquiring testimonial knowledge. Because unreliability in interpretation can arise in many ways, section 2 considers a variety of such cases. Section 3 sketches some desiderata for a successful account of the role of interpretation in testimony, by analogous consideration of inference. On our account, interpretation needn’t proceed inferentially through knowledgeable belief about what is said. Finally, section 4 offers (...) a safety-theoretic account of reliable interpretation which explains how and when misinterpretation prevents knowledge. (shrink)

We argue that stereotypes associated with concepts like he-said–she-said, conspiracy theory, sexual harassment, and those expressed by paradigmatic slurs provide “normative inference tickets”: conceptual permissions to automatic, largely unreflective normative conclusions. These “mental shortcuts” are underwritten by associated stereotypes. Because stereotypes admit of exceptions, normative inference tickets are highly flexible and productive, but also liable to create serious epistemic and moral harms. Epistemically, many are unreliable, yielding false beliefs which resist counterexample; morally, many perpetuate bigotry and oppression. Still, some normative (...) inference tickets, like some activated by sexual harassment, constitute genuine moral and hermeneutical advances. For example, our framework helps explain Miranda Fricker’s notion of “hermeneutical lacunae”: what early victims of “sexual harassment” — as well as their harassers — lacked before the term was coined was a communal normative inference ticket — one that could take us, collectively, from “this is happening” to “this is wrong.”. (shrink)

The Coherence Engine presents a unified operational framework for understanding how physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems persist and adapt. It identifies coherence, recursive structural reinforcement, as the single invariant governing system viability across scales. Using minimal state representation and a universal update law, the framework models system evolution as the joint ascent of coherence gradients and descent of entropy gradients while preserving future adaptive capacity. The Spectrum of Possibility defines feasible trajectories, and Recursive Choice selects those maximizing coherence curvature (...) under constraints of noise, leakage, and dimensional change. Diverse scientific domains emerge as instantiations of the same kernel with quantum processes as coherence-weighted transitions, information as coherence-weighted entropy, cognition as attractor navigation, evolution as coherence selection, and societal dynamics as shifts in multi-scale structural alignment. By making coherence computable and measurable, the Coherence Engine enables simulation, empirical testing, and principled design of systems that must remain viable under uncertainty. (shrink)

For the first time in decades, our public conversation around technology feels fundamentally unstable. The surface narrative is familiar, rapid progress, disruptive potential, and staggering valuations, but just beneath lies a pervasive anxiety that seems to grow with every press release. Much of this unease is expressed through our usual tropes, the fear of AI replacing workers, frustration with corporate consolidation, questions about its ecological impact, concerns about bias and personality, and confusion about how models seem simultaneously brilliant and dumb. (...) These visible tensions are symptoms, not causes. The root of our problem is structural. (shrink)

Modern AI is driven by five dominant techniques, gradient descent, Bayesian inference, variational free-energy minimization, Markov models, and reinforcement learning. Although historically independent, these methods share a structural assumption; each optimizes a scalar objective inside a fixed representational space. Their successes arise when the world remains compatible with these frozen ontologies; their failures emerge whenever structural novelty is required. This paper reframes these techniques as constrained projections of a deeper coherence dynamic. When the representational space Ω is held rigid, coherence (...) ascent collapses into the familiar behaviors of parameter tuning, posterior updating, or policy optimization. When Ω is allowed to evolve, the full Coherence Engine becomes visible. Adaptive model expansion, structural pruning, and curvature-driven transitions restore the system’s ability to generate new abstractions, causal structures, and strategies. The future of AI depends not on improved optimization within predetermined models but on principled mechanisms for the evolution of models themselves. Coherence dynamics provides that mechanism, unifying inference, prediction, control, and representation under a single meta-law. (shrink)

An influential objection to the epistemic power of the imagination holds that it is uninformative. You cannot get more out of the imagination than you put into it, and therefore learning from the imagination is impossible. This paper argues, against this view, that the imagination is robustly informative. Moreover, it defends a novel account of how the imagination informs, according to which the imagination is informative in virtue of its analog representational format. The core idea is that analog representations represent (...) relations ‘for free,’ and this explains how the imagination can contain more information than is put into it. This account makes important contributions to both philosophy of mind, by showing how the imagination can generate new content that is not represented by a subject’s antecedent mental states, and epistemology, by showing how the imagination can generate new justification that is not conferred by a subject’s antecedent evidence. (shrink)

This paper argues that inference rule adoption is a diachronic process during which agents are inferentially guided by a statement of the rule they are adopting, but during which they do not use that rule. Rather, the ability to use the rule is the outcome at the end of the process. This account avoids a regress objection to inferentially guided adoption recently posed by Boghossian and Wright. Adoption, on this model, involves the use of six privileged inference rules, including universal (...) instantiation, modus ponens, and the naive truth rules. However, though these rules play a special role in adoption, they are not indispensable to the process in their full generality: so long as one has reasonably robust restrictions of them, the adoption process is unimpeded. Furthermore, there are no general forms that constitute the minimal restrictions of these rules required for adoption. It follows that these rules, in their fully generality, are themselves adoptable, so long as one begins with reasonable restrictions of them. It is argued that this is enough to overcome the ‘adoption problem’ as a challenge to anti-exceptionalism about logic and to the normative significance of proposals for alternative logics. (shrink)

Hilary Kornblith is one of the world’s leading epistemologists, a champion of an innovative philosophical research program that is at once traditional and revisionary. In viewing the study of knowledge as inseparable from the empirical study of the mind, Kornblith aligns himself closely with the approach of the traditional empiricists of the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet in taking contemporary empirical work seriously, Kornblith has developed views and arguments that shift the epistemological focus away from what is available first-personally _within_ (...) the mind towards what is revealed third-personally _of_ the mind instead. Indeed, anyone looking seriously at the history of 20th century epistemology can draw a straight line from W.V.O. Quine through Alvin Goldman to Hilary Kornblith – all three, in their ways, champions of a science-centered epistemology. On the innovative leading edge of that tradition, however, Kornblith has developed a systematic rejection of the traditional philosophical method of conceptual analysis (_pace_ Goldman) while establishing a thoroughly empirical and yet unambiguously philosophical approach to the study of knowledge (_pace_ Quine). As such, Kornblith’s work is required reading for anyone interested in the structure and nature of knowledge, the structure and grounds of justification, the sources of epistemic normativity, the history and the prospects for a naturalized epistemology, the legitimacy of intuition-dependent conceptual analysis as a philosophical method, and the significance and reliability of reflection and reasoning. This volume collects 16 original essays that advance the state of play by engaging critically and substantively with Kornblith’s views on these and other topics, along with an essay by Kornblith himself replying to his critics. (shrink)

It's often thought that when we reason to new judgments in inference, we aim at believing the truth, and that this aim of ours can explain important psychological and normative features of belief. I reject this picture: the structure of aimed activity shows that inference is not guided by a truth‐aim. This finding clears the way for a positive understanding of how epistemic goods feature in our doxastic lives. We can indeed make sense of many of our inquisitive and deliberative (...) activities as undertaken in pursuit of such goods; but the evidence‐guided inferences in which those activities culminate will require a different theoretical approach. (shrink)

Inferences are familiar movements of thought, but despite important recent work on the topic, we do not yet have a fully satisfying theory of inference. Here I provide a functionalist theory of inference. I argue that the functionalist framework allows us the flexibility to meet various demands on a theory of inference that have been proposed (such as that it must explain inferential Moorean phenomena and epistemological ‘taking’). While also allowing us to compare, contrast, adapt, and combine features of extant (...) theories of inference into one unified theory. In fleshing out the inference role, I also criticize the common assumption that inference requires rule-following. (shrink)

In the epistemology of self-knowledge, Inferentialism is the view that one’s current mental states are normally known to one through inferences from evidence. This view is often taken to conflict with widespread claims about normally-acquired self-knowledge, namely that it is privileged (essentially more secure than knowledge of others’ minds) and peculiar (obtained in a way that fundamentally differs from how others know your mind). In this paper I argue that Inferentialism can be reconceived so as to no longer conflict with (...) these claims. On a positive framing, Inferentialism earns a seat at the table alongside other theories of self-knowledge that take its potentially privileged and peculiar status seriously. On a less positive framing, Inferentialism’s plausibility now hinges on the plausibility of viewing self-knowledge as at least peculiar, and perhaps as privileged as well. (shrink)

Rodrigo Borges (2020, 2017) argumenta que os supostos casos de conhecimento via falsidade não são casos nos quais o status epistêmico da crença-alvo p dependa de uma crença falsa e, ainda assim, concede que a crença em p é uma instância de conhecimento. O objetivo deste artigo é analisar essa alegação. Para isso, iniciarei explicando o que é o problema do conhecimento via falsidade e, na sequência apresentarei a proposta concessiva de Rodrigo Borges. Por fim, argumentarei que essa proposta não (...) é adequada por não acomodar todos os supostos casos de conhecimento via falsidade. (shrink)

The perennial question of the nature of natural-language understanding has received renewed attention in recent years. Two kinds of natural-language understanding, in particular, have captivated the interest of philosophers: linguistic understanding and utterance understanding. While the literature is rife with discussions of linguistic understanding and utterance understanding, the question of how the two types of understanding explanatorily depend on each other has received relatively scant attention. Exceptions include the linguistic ability/know-how views of linguistic understanding proposed by Dean Pettit and Brendan (...) Balcerak Jackson. On these views, to tacitly linguistically understand a sentence just is to possess the linguistic ability/knowledge-how needed to derive/infer what is said by different utterances of the sentence. Despite their focus on linguistic understanding, both views can straightforwardly explain utterance understanding as the output of a derivation/inference from a representation of the sentence uttered. Here, I take issue with these approaches to utterance understanding and then develop an alternative. More specifically, I distinguish two kinds of utterance understanding, experiential and doxastic, and then argue that experiences of what is said by utterances play distinct rational roles in the two kinds of utterance understanding. I conclude by addressing a recent challenge to my proposal. (shrink)

This paper discusses the account of alethic modality as presented by Wilfrid Sellars in his earlier work from 1947 to 1958. Its aim is twofold. First, I discuss Sellars' analysis by exploring its historical relationship to Carnap's account of modality. I argue that Carnap's early syntactic treatment of modality profoundly influenced Sellars' own so-called ‘regulist' account of modality in terms of rules of inference. Furthermore, it is suggested that Sellars' lesser-known possible worlds analysis was influenced by Carnap's later semantic account (...) of modality. The second aim of the paper is a critical one. I raise a number of objections to Sellars’ account of modality and argue that his account confronts some serious limitations. I also argue that Sellars does not provide a satisfying explanation of the relationship between his regulist account and his possible worlds analysis. I offer such an explanation by arguing that his regulist account should be understood as a pragmatic account of what is conveyed by the use of modal sentences, whereas his possible worlds analysis is a semantic account of the asserted content of modal statements. That is, the regulist account and the possible worlds analysis have different explanatory targets. (shrink)

The empirical success of particle physics rests largely on an approximation method: perturbation theory. Yet even within perturbative quantum field theory, there are a variety of different formulations. This variety teaches us that reformulating approximation methods can provide a tremendous source of progress in science. Along with enabling the solution of otherwise intractable problems, reformulations clarify what we need to know to obtain solutions, which can in turn make previously hidden properties manifest. To develop these lessons, I compare and contrast (...) three compatible formulations of perturbative QFT: (i) elementary perturbation theory, (ii) the method of Feynman diagrams, and (iii) a recent reformulation known as on-shell recursion. I propose and defend a novel account of what it means to ‘make a property manifest,’ based on the inferences that a formulation warrants. (shrink)

This paper discusses a novel response to two closely related regress arguments from Bolzano’s Theory of Science and Carroll’s What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. Bolzano’s argument aims to refute the thesis that full grounds must include propositions involving notions such as entailment, grounding or lawhood which link the respective grounds to their groundee. This thesis is motivated, Bolzano’s argument is reconstructed, and a response based on self-referential linking propositions is developed and defended against objections concerning self-reference and Curry’s paradox. (...) Finally, the idea is applied to a reading of Carroll’s dialogue and a corresponding solution to the so-called infinite regress problem of inference is proposed. (shrink)

An inference is valid if it guarantees the transferability of knowledge from the premisses to the conclusion. If knowledge is here understood as demonstrative knowledge, and demonstration is explained as a chain of valid inferences, we are caught in an explanatory circle. In recent lectures, Per Martin-Löf has sought to avoid the circle by specifying the notion of knowledge appealed to in the explanation of the validity of inference as knowledge of a kind weaker than demonstrative knowledge. The resulting explanation (...) is the main topic of this article. (shrink)

The aim here is to investigate assertion and inference as notions of logic. Assertion will be explained in terms of its purpose, which is to give interlocutors the right to request the assertor to do a certain task. The assertion is correct if, and only if, the assertor knows how to do this task. Inference will be explained as an assertion equipped with what I shall call a justification profile, a strategy for making good on the assertion. The inference is (...) valid if, and only if, correctness is preserved from the premiss assertions to the conclusion assertion. Most of this is a spelling out of views on assertion and inference presented by Per Martin-Löf in lectures since 2015. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

That bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning fail to instantiate persuasive argumentation is an often informally presented but not systematically developed view. In this paper, I will argue that this unpersuasiveness is not determined by principles of justification transmission but by two straightforward principles of rationality, understood as a concept of internal coherence. First, it is rational for S to believe the conclusion of an argument because of the argument, only if S believes sufficiently many premises of the argument. Second, if S (...) doubts that a source O is reliable and believes that information i is delivered by O, then S rationally suspends judgment about the truth of i. This paper aims to accomplish two tasks. First, it provides a thorough analysis of why bootstrapping argumentation is not an instance of rational persuasion. Second, it contains a more general theory about preconditions and limits of persuasive argumentation. (shrink)

I argue that at least some nonlinguistic animals have conceptual capabilities. First, I show that positions that take linguistic capabilities to be necessary for conceptual capabilities are unable to explain the possibility of concept acquisition. Second, I argue that awareness of abstract relations requires conceptual capabilities and success at relational matching-to-sample tasks requires awareness of the abstract relations of same and different. Crows and amazons are able to succeed at relational matching-to-sample tasks, so we should attribute conceptual capabilities to them. (...) Third, I argue that at least some nonlinguistic animals are able to have and present reasons by making and having explicit content. Fourth, I argue for an externalist account of inference that takes epistemic responsibility to be a deontic status. Fifth, and finally, I argue that at least some nonlinguistic animals should be regarded as living in normative communities because their communications meet the conditions for assertions. (shrink)

‘Rule-following’ is a name for a cluster of phenomena where we seem both guided and “normatively” constrained by something general in performing particular actions. Understanding the phenomenon is important because of its connection to meaning, representation, and content. This article gives an overview of the philosophical discussion of rule-following with emphasis on Kripke’s skeptical paradox and recent work on possible solutions. Part I of this two-part contribution was devoted to the basic issues from Wittgenstein to Kripke. Part II is about (...) recent answers to the skeptical paradox and Boghossian’s and Wright’s new puzzles. (shrink)

A reasoning process is more than an unfolding causal chain. Although some thoughts cause others in virtue of their contents, paradigmatic cases of personal-level inference involve something more, some appreciation that the conclusion follows from the premises. Both first-order processes and second-order beliefs have proven problematic or inadequate to account for the phenomenon. Thus, here I argue for an intermediate position, according to which an epistemic feeling, a form of procedural metacognition, plays this role. Extensive psychological research has shown that (...) epistemic feelings are involved in monitoring many kinds of cognitive process, affecting how the processes unfold. Inferences may be no different. Inferences are also plausibly accompanied by an epistemic feeling, in particular a feeling of reliability or unreliability. Such a feeling accounts for the phenomenological datum. It can also play a significant epistemic role for the thinker. (shrink)

The mainstream philosophical approach to inference, which insists on sentence-like representations and a linguistic capability, excludes non-human animals as possible agents capable of making inferences. However, an abundance of studies show that many animal species exhibit behaviors that seem to rely on some kind of reasoning. My focus here are the transitive inference tasks, which most species solve quite successfully. These findings put pressure on the mainstream views, and still lack a convincing explanation. I introduce the concept of affective representations, (...) which satisfy the semantic and structural requirements for participating in inferences. I also argue for a broader conception of inference, and show how we can apply this view to explain the results of the transitive inference studies. Finally, I suggest it is more useful to think of flexibility of thought in terms of a continuous range, rather than a dichotomy of flexible vs. inflexible. (shrink)

Dharmakīrti argues that there is no pramāṇa (valid means of cognition or source of knowledge) for a thesis that is a self-contradiction (svavacanavirodha). That is, self-contradictions such as ‘everything said is false’ and ‘my mother is barren’ cannot be known to be true or false. The contemporary scholar Tillemans challenges Dharmakīrti by arguing that we can know that self-contradictions are false by means of a formal logical inference. The aims of the paper are to answer Tillemans’ challenge from what we (...) take to be Dharmakīrti’s or Dharmakīrtian (someone who is like Dharmakīrti) perspective and to demonstrate the unique features of Dharmakīrti’s view of inference. By so doing, we show that the epistemology in relation to the formal conception of logic that underlies Tillemans’ challenge is problematic from Dharmakīrti’s or Dharmakīrtian perspective. The paper, thus, presents Dharmakīrti’s view of inference and logical reasoning as well as a Dharmakīrtian challenge to the formal conception of logic that is the dominant contemporary conception. (shrink)

Descartes held that it is impossible to make true statements about what we perceive, but I go over alleged cases of illusory experience to show why such a skeptical conclusion (and recourse to God) is overblown. The overreaction, I contend, stems from an insufficient awareness of the habitual expectations brought to any given experience. These expectations manifest themselves in motor terms, as perception constantly prompts and updates an embodied posture of readiness for what might come next. Such habitual anticipations work (...) best when they efface themselves, so it is easy to blame perception when our expectations get frustrated. I illustrate this misdirected blame with the example of a stick partially in water: it is only because we expect the stick to be straight that its appearance as bent is deemed problematic. I thus conclude that, if we factor in the habitual interpretations operative in perception and switch to a processual view that allows practical engagement, we can deflate the worries that led Descartes to rule out perceptual truths. Distancing myself from the naïve “sign” of folk semiotics, my critique draws inspiration from the triadic semiotic model developed in some late medieval schools of Portugal. (shrink)