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An epistemology for the Platonist? Platonism, Field’s Dilemma, and Judgment-Dependent Truth
Full text linkAccording to Hartry Field, the mathematical Platonist is hostage of a dilemma.
Faced with the request of explaining the mathematicians’ reliability, one option
could be to maintain that the mathematicians are reliably responsive to a realm
populated with mathematical entities; alternatively, one might try to contend
that the mathematical realm conceptually depends on, and for this reason is
reliably refl ected by, the mathematicians’ (best) opinions; however, both alternatives
are actually unavailable to the Platonist: the fi rst one because it is in tension
with the idea that mathematical entities are causally ineff ective, the second
one because it is in tension with the suggestion that mathematical entities are
mind-independent. John Divers and Alexander Miller have tried to reject the
conclusion of this argument—according to which Platonism is inconsistent with
a satisfactory epistemology for arithmetic—by re-describing the second horn of
the dilemma in light of Crispin Wright’s notion of judgment-dependent truth;
in particular they have contended that once arithmetical truth is conceived in
this way the Platonist can have a substantial epistemology which does not confl
ict with the idea that the mathematical entities exist mind-independently. In
this paper I analyze Wright’s notion of judgment-dependent truth, and reject
Divers and Miller’s argument for the conclusion that arithmetical truth can be
so characterized. In the fi nal part, I address the worry that my argument generalizes
very quickly to the conclusion that no area of discourse could be characterized
as judgment-dependent. As against this conclusion, I indicate under
what conditions—notably not satisfi ed in Divers and Miller’s case, but possibly
satisfi ed in others—a discourse’s judgment-dependency can be successfully
vindicated.
Ayer's Metaphysical Analyticity
No full textIn "Language, Truth and Logic" Ayer explicitly defends the notion of analyticity that is nowadays discussed under the label, introduced by P. Boghossian, of «metaphysical analyticity». According to Ayer, this notion of analyticity is key to defending the empiricist principle that all knowledge of reality stems from and is justified by experience from the objection that some propositions are known a priori. In this paper I argue for two negative claims. The first claim is that even if all a priori knowledge were knowledge of metaphysical analyticities, it would still not follow that it is not knowledge about reality. The second claim is that Ayer's metaphysical analyticity is not a property that any sentence could intelligibly instantiate
Counterfeiting Perceptual Experience: Scepticism, Internalism, and the Disjunctive Conception of Experience
No full textAlong with what McDowell has called the disjunctive conception of experience (DCE), and against a venerable tradition, the veridical experience that P and the subjectively indistinguishable hallucination that P are not type-identical mental states. According to McDowell, a powerful motivation for DCE is that it makes available the sole internalistically acceptable way out of a sceptical argument targeting the possibility of perceptual knowledge. In this paper I state in explicit terms the sceptical argument McDowell worries about, and show that DCE has not the epistemological merits that McDowell ascribes to it. To begin with, I join a series of commentators in arguing that the way out of the sceptical argument made available by DCE is not internalistically acceptable, and so argue that it is not a way out that an internalist about epistemic justification would have any special reason to prefer to a parallel externalist way out that does not commit to DCE. Secondly, I show that the internalist can resist the sceptical argument by denying a different premise of it that McDowell takes for granted. I conclude by maintaining that McDowell's epistemological motivation for DCE is undercut
The evidence from the Senses is no Evidence from the senses. Husserl’s Sixth Logical Investigation on the Justification of Perceptual Beliefs
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