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Current Dissertations |
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Sharon Berry |
| The Marriage of Rationalism and Empiricism: A New Approach to the Access Problem |
| Mathematical facts are abstract in a way that makes our knowledge of them seem hard to explain. I argue that we can explain knowledge of mathematics by drawing on knowledge of combinatorial possibility (possibility with regard to the most general principles about how any objects can be related by any relations), together with observations about patterns of behavior of concrete physical objects. Our observations of the actual relationships between concrete objects can ground true beliefs about how it is combinatorially possible for any objects to be related by any relations. In getting largely correct principles for reasoning about what is combinatorially possible, I argue, we can get largely correct axioms and inference rules for reasoning about mathematical objects as well. |
Colin Chamberlain |
| Living in a Broken World: Malebranche on the Passions |
| Desire, aversion, love, joy, sadness: these are some of the passions, the unruly creatures in our mental lives. According to Nicholas Malebranche (1638-1715), the passions infuse every aspect of our experience, though we often fail to notice their influence. All of our thinking – even when it is concerned with the most abstract subjects, like mathematics or philosophy – is infected and colored by the passions. And this claim should be surprising, since it seems that at least some of our activities, our purely intellectual pursuits perhaps, are entirely dispassionate. No wonder, then, that Malebranche spends an entire book of The Search After Truth developing a sophisticated theory of what the passions are, what the passions do, and what we're supposed to do with them. But somehow Malebranche has been forgotten, especially in the English-speaking world. These days, when philosophers do read Malebranche, they focus on isolated parts of his system: his occasionalist theory of causation, according to which God is the only true cause in nature, or his equally startling claim that we see all things in God. And so Malebranche's theory of the passions has been neglected. My dissertation brings this important piece of Malebranche's philosophy to light, revealing him to be a thinker with great insight into to the emotional aspects of our experience. |
Nicolas Cornell |
| Wrongs without Rights |
This dissertation concerns the question of how rights relate to moral complaints. That is, it concerns the relationship between our moral entitlements — the obligations that are owed to us — and the moral complaints that can we make — our claims to have been done an injustice, or to have been wronged. It is a familiar and natural thought that these two concepts are flipsides of the same coin. To have a right is to be in the position of potentially having a complaint; and to be wronged is to have had one’s right violated.
I argue that this view is incorrect. My thesis is that our ex ante normative relations — like rights and directed duties — do not map straightforwardly onto our ex post moral relations — like having a complaint or being wronged. Rights and wrongings are, I argue, both conceptually and extensionally distinct. |
Chris Furlong |
| Skepticism, Deliberation and Responsibility |
| This dissertation is an extended argument against moral skepticism understood as the view that key features of ordinary moral practice are without justification. I begin by addressing familiar arguments in the metaethical literature concerning the explanatory irrelevance of moral and other normative properties as well as neo-Humean arguments about the motivational irrelevance of categorical requirements. To the latter, I offer a qualified concession that, in some of its uses, the concept of a reason is indeed rendered otiose by categoricity. But I employ a broadly quasi-realist strategy to show that a number of key features of ordinary moral practice are unaffected by this concession. Against the argument from explanatory irrelevance I argue that it misconstrues the central function of moral judgment. Moral judgments are about about what to do, not about what is the case and so they oughtn't be held to the ordinary empirical standards of positing only what serves a genuine explanatory function. But this strategy of response raises another worry. Even if I'm right that moral judgments are about what to do rather than about what is the case and are therefore not directly incompatible with any empirically respectable view of what the world is like the prospect remains that the *activity* of moral judgment commits us to an empirically untenable view of ourselves. Kant, for example, believed that one's own freedom is a necessary presupposition of the activity of practical deliberation; you might also think that another's freedom is a presupposition of the activity of moral assessment. In the remainder of the dissertation I argue along broadly compatibilist lines that the activity of first-person practical deliberation as well as third personal moral assessment do not presuppose a naturalistically problematic conception of our own or of others' freedom. |
David Miguel Gray |
| What Lies Within: Essays on Phenomenology, Psychology, & Self-Knowledge |
What Lies Within: Essays on Phenomenology, Psychology, and Self-Knowledge develops a distinctive account of cognitive phenomenology and its causal and epistemic contributions to our beliefs. It argues for an accepted, yet undefended, assumption in cognitive psychology: that there is a kind of phenomenology which determines whether or not a thought is experienced as one‘s own. Ignored by philosophers of mind, this feature of mental life not only provides the best possibility for a defense of non-imagistic cognitive phenomenology, but also acts as an explanation for an extraordinary feature of schizophrenic experience.
Phenomenology is traditionally thought to be an aspect of sensory experience: for example, what it is like to have a dull pain. Those who believe in cognitive phenomenology claim that there is also something it is like to think. One sort of cognitive phenomenology could be imagistic: for example, what it is like to imagine a red cup. Another sort could be non-imagistic: for example, what it is like to think that p. This second sort of phenomenology, associated with the contents of conscious mental states, is what I am interested in. This phenomenology is said to be distinctive because what it is like to think that p is different from what it is like to think that q.
In my first essay, I rebut a recently popular position: that there is a distinctive and non-imagistic cognitive phenomenology (hereafter 'cognitive phenomenology') that is part of the content of thoughts. Many philosophers suspicious of cognitive phenomenology deny that it shares characteristics with the paradigmatic cases of sensory experience. In response, I provide a method to determine whether there is cognitive phenomenology. While this method weakens the case for the existence of cognitive phenomenology associated with the content of mental states, they do allow for a different sort of cognitive phenomenology which prima facie warrants the ascription of introspection-based thoughts to oneself (or to others!).
In my next essay, I argue for the existence of this different sort of cognitive phenomenology by
examining a positive symptom of schizophrenia known as 'thought insertion'. In cases of thought insertion, a schizophrenic reports introspectively experiencing a thought, but claims that it has been inserted into her mind by someone else. While schizophrenics are able to report the content of their thoughts, they sometimes misascribe their thoughts to others. I use recent work in cognitive psychopathology to argue that the best explanation of thought insertion is that there is a phenomenal aspect to experiencing thoughts as inserted. Furthermore, this experience prima facie warrants ascriptions of these thoughts to someone else. My explanation of thought insertion is unique because it reveals that there is also a phenomenology to experiencing thoughts as one‘s own. Likewise, this phenomenal aspect of experience provides prima facie warrant for our beliefs that our thoughts are our own.
My third essay defends and supplements the model of schizophrenia put forward in my second essay. While this model is not sufficient to explain fully the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, it is adequate to account for abnormal experiences. I argue that if we supplement this model with an account of the inferences schizophrenics make (both rational and irrational), we can explain how abnormal experiences result in reports of schizophrenic experience. My purpose in explaining these failures of self-knowledge is to uncover unacknowledged aspects of mental states |
Gabrielle Jackson |
| Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adverbialist Theory of Mind |
My thesis develops Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “adverbialist” theory of mind and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary theories of action and embodied cognition and perception.
The folk concept of physical actions, whereby our minds cause our bodies to move, can be formulated as the “Two-Part” view. The Two-Part view answers the question, “what is the difference between an action and a mere bodily happening?” in terms of their causal histories: an action is caused by a mental event internal to the agent herself (e.g., an intention, a volition, a willing); a mere bodily happening is caused by a non-mental, physical event. The Two-Part view also answers the question, “what particular action does the agent perform?” in terms of the content of the mental event that causes the behavioral event. I aim to undermine the Two-Part view by developing a theory whereby mentality and bodily behavior form inseparable non-causal unities in physical actions. I do this through a close historical study of the theories of Ryle and Merleau-Ponty.
In Chapter One, I challenge the commonly held belief that Ryle and Merleau-Ponty could not be more different by first demonstrating that each targeted the Two-Part view—a view they (rightly or wrongly) attributed to René Descartes. They both identified a Cartesian notion of physical actions whereby the soul wills the body to move and, owing to a causal connection, the body so moves. This Cartesian notion persisted into the 20th century without much scrutiny, Ryle and Merleau-Ponty argued. To illustrate the significance of their claim even into the present-day, I relate their Cartesian notion of physical actions to contemporary causal theories of action.
In Chapter Two, I present Ryle’s critique of the Two-part view. Ryle claimed that mental events cannot cause behavioral events without generating two logical regresses. He argued that this is because mental events and behavioral events, as conceived by the Two-Part view, are not the right logical types to be causally related to one another. Ryle posited a new category of “mental-conduct concepts” in which the mental and the behavioral are united in “adverbial” actions. So constituted, adverbial actions create no logical muddles.
In Chapter Three, I present Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the Two-Part view. He described characteristics of normal and pathological experiences that exist only if mental life is structured in a particular way. The views that emerged from this phenomenology have a feature in common: they eschew the dichotomies and causal explanations supposed by the Two-Part view. Merleau-Ponty proposed a “hybrid theory” consisting of “motor-intentional” actions in which the mental and the behavioral are inseparably unified.
In Chapter Four, I combine Ryle’s logic and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to formulate an adverbialist theory of skillful physical actions. Ryle wrote of adverbial actions, the paradigm case of which was “knowing-how.” Merleau-Ponty wrote of motor-intentional actions, specifically of “the knowing-body.” So, on the combined view, for physical actions subsumed under the title “skillful,” mentality and bodily behaviors form inseparable non-causal unities. Ryle and Merleau-Ponty’s adverbialist theory of mind is significant in its own right as a viable alternative to the Two-Part view. But it also prefigures contemporary theories of embodied cognition and perception that reject a causal relation between mentality and bodily behavior, but have been unsuccessful in justifying the constitutive relation they wish to posit in its stead. I argue that Ryle and Merleau-Ponty’s idea of skillful physical actions can correct this shortcoming. Thus, today’s theories of embodiment should take heed of Ryle and Merleau-Ponty’s adverbialism about the mind. |
Allison Kuklok |
| Locke's Divine Nominalism |
In my dissertation, I provide an account of the role that divine ideas play in grounding facts about essences and classification in Locke’s metaphysics. I argue that, consonant with many of the late scholastics, Locke locates the source of the objectivity of kinds in divine ideas, in accordance with which ideas God designs and creates the world. Lockean material substances are God’s artifacts, whose characteristic properties are essential to them in virtue of His intention to create certain kinds of substances. |
Adrian Kwek |
| Three Studies in Function |
Some causal patterns seem to be widely shared in spite of vastly different physical conditions. All hearts pump blood despite having different anatomical structures in different organisms. All beliefs that water slakes thirst cause their believers to want to drink water if thirsty, despite being had by brains that are never molecularly identical. These causal patterns play an important role in our causal explanatory practices. We have good reasons to call the effects in these causal patterns the ‘functions’ of hearts and beliefs respectively; and to think that hearts and beliefs are what they are in virtue of their functions. My dissertation studies three problems that threaten our functional explanatory practices. My aim is to show that the problems can be resolved, and thus to vindicate the explanatory value of appeals to function.
The first study, The Promiscuity Problem and the Systemic Theory of Function, attempts to counter an arbitrariness objection to systemic theories of functions. Systemic theories hold that functions are the causal contributions of systemic components to the overall capacities of their containing systems. The objection charges that lots of ‘systems’ can be identified in nature that fit the criteria given by systemic theories, even though the effects of the ‘components’ are not functions. I propose that a principled naturalistic basis for functional ascription within the framework of systemic theories can be obtained by adding a feedback condition to systemic theories.
The second study, The Malfunction Problem and the Functional Individuation of Biological Traits, attempts to dissolve an apparent paradox about functionally individuated biological traits and the fact that biological trait tokens can malfunction. The malfunction problem articulates the apparent paradox: A ‘malfunctioning’ trait token seems to no longer belong to its functional type and hence cannot malfunction. I show that distinguishing between the functional type that a token belongs to and the way in which it belongs to the type dissolves the paradox.
The third study, The Necessitation Problem and the Causal Relevance of Functional Properties, attempts to address a circularity worry about causal explanation that seems to arise when a causally relevant property referred to by a causal explanation is individuated by its very effects. Since functional properties are individuated by their functions and functions are effects, the circularity worry threatens the causal explanatory role of these properties. I argue that causally relevant functional properties are individuated by ideal effects, whereas the effects that they causally explain are non-ideal. Since the effects individuating causally relevant properties are distinct from the effects that are causally explained, the circularity worry does not arise. |
David Langlois |
| The Normativity of Structural Rationality |
| According to common sense, rationality requires that we have our attitudes structured in certain ways. For example, we ought not to have inconsistent beliefs and we ought not to have a pair of intentions which we believe are incompatible. But philosophers have had a hard time justifying the common-sense thought. In my dissertation, I argue that the apparent difficulty is the result of an assumption, shared by most prevailing views in practical/theoretical reason, according to which we ought to do something only if we have decisive reason to do that thing. I argue that this assumption is mistaken. I defend normative pluralism, according to which there may be more than one legitimate sense of “ought”. I argue that the “ought” of structural rationality is a wholly normative and binding “ought”, but that it is not the “ought” of reasons. There are some things we ought to do even though we have absolutely no reason to do them, and having certain arrangements of attitudes is one of those things. |
Jon Litland |
| Topics in Philosophical Logic |
| My dissertation is composed of three papers. In "Proof-Theoretic Justification of Logic" I develop a theory for justifying introduction rules in natural deduction systems on the basis of elimination rules in natural deduction systems, and show that intuitionistic logic is the strongest logic which can be justified in this way. In "The Barcan Formula(e) for Determinacy" I argue that there is a logical problem with denying the Barcan Formula for a determinacy operator, and I develop a novel intuitionistic quantified modal logic to get around this problem. In "Is the Vagueness Argument Valid?" I argue that Sider’s Vagueness Argument for unrestricted composition isn’t valid and that its invalidity shows that, contrary to much theorizing, A’s failing to supervene on B does not entail that A is metaphysically independent of B. |
Douglas Marshall |
| Investigations into the Applicability of Geometry |
| Philosophical reflection about the sciences has persistently given rise to worries that mathematics, while true of its own special objects, is inapplicable to the physical world. Drawing on the histories of philosophy and science, I articulate a series of challenges to the applicability of geometry based on the general idea that geometry fails to fit (or correspond to) nature. I then examine how two 17th century thinkers, Galileo and Leibniz, develop notions of approximation as a way of overcoming these challenges. I conclude with an argument that the applicability of geometry—which by present‐day standards is an established fact in need of explanation—imposes. |
Elizabeth Miller |
| Philosophical Reflections on Physics |
| I explore metaphysical, epistemological, and metaontological consequences of some cases from physics. In the first of three papers, I argue against the standard characterization of quantum holism as a failure of whole-on-part supervenience. In the second, I investigate whether we, as epistemic agents, must operate with some sort of locality assumption in making predictions about the future evolutions of physical systems, and if so, whether this assumption is justified in a world containing the sort of non-local influence that figures in quantum mechanics. In the third paper, I ask whether a certain line of inquiry, which ultimately leads to the resolution of disagreements in some cases from physics, is an available and effective response to ontological disputes about how many things exist. |
Paul Schofield |
| The Commonwealth as Agent: Group Activity, the Common Good, and the General Will |
Moral and political philosophers often assume that there are deep moral differences between individual persons and commonwealths. Persons are thought to have extensive moral permission to decide which ends they will pursue, and to balance burdens and benefits in pursuit of their overall good. On the other hand, commonwealths are believed to be more constrained, lacking broad permission to balance burdens and benefits between members and to enlist citizens in the pursuit of collective ends. I disagree that the differences are necessarily so stark. In my dissertation, I argue that democratic commonwealths are more similar to individual persons than is typically acknowledged. Drawing upon Rousseau, I claim that democratic commonwealths form a collective agent with a General Will, which possesses the authority to pursue the people’s common good.
I start by advancing a view in moral philosophy about why individual persons have an extensive moral permission to exercise control over their futures. Parfit claims that belief in such a permission is usually grounded in a belief in a metaphysically deep, irreducible self that persists from the present into the future. He then argues that no such thing exists, casting doubt upon the claim that an individual actually has any special authority over her future. While I join Parfit in doubting the existence of a metaphysically deep self, I argue that we can appeal to a particular kind of unity exhibited by a person’s activity over time in order to explain how a person can justifiably impose burdens on her future self and commit her future self to particular courses of action. This unity allows a person to be compensated at one moment by what happens at another moment, assuaging worries that a person wrongs her future self by burdening it. I also argue that when selecting an activity at a distinct moment, an agent does so in a way that is justifiable to her future self if she selects the activity through a decision procedure that has authority over her future. The coerced future self has no cause for complaint when the coercive decision is made through a procedure whose authority she ought to recognize.
Moving to political philosophy, I argue that the moral view just outlined provides a model for understanding how a democratic body could have permission to exercise control over itself and its members. We needn’t appeal to a metaphysically deep “social entity” to suggest that a multitude could engage in group activity that exhibits a particular kind of unity, or to suggest that such activity could be selected through a procedure that has authority over each individual. Despite obvious differences between a person and a political community, I argue that they are similar in respects that are morally important. So I model my Rousseauvian political view on my account of intra-personal morality.
With respect to burdening individual members of society, I argue that when a burden is imposed as part of a worthwhile society-wide activity, participation in the activity constitutes a good for the individual. The individual is thus simultaneously compensated, justifying the imposition of burdens that might otherwise have been impermissible to impose. If carrying out such activity does constitute a good for each individual, then such activity is a common good. Thus, just as an individual may sometimes permissibly impose burdens on herself at a particular time in pursuit of her own overall good, a democratic commonwealth may sometimes permissibly impose burdens on distinct members in pursuit of the common good.
With respect to coercion and choice, I argue that democratic procedures have authority over citizens. My account highlights similarities between the authority that an individual’s will has over her, and the authority that a democratic body has over its members. As opposed to more familiar arguments that appeal to some other value, such as fairness or equality, to establish democracy’s authority, I argue that the mere fact that a procedure is democratic itself establishes its authority. Democratic procedures, according to my view, constitute the General Will, and just as an individual agent acts as her individual will decides insofar as she is rational, so too does she act as the General Will decides (though I temper this claim a bit by allowing for the possibility of civil disobedience). I conclude by linking democracy’s authority to a permission to coerce citizens in the pursuit of collective ends. |
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