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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 |
| If mathematics is about abstract objects like numbers or sets, how could material creatures like us have managed to learn so much about it? Given the impossibility of causal contact with mathematical objects, it can seem quite miraculous that there should be any relationship at all between our beliefs about mathematics and mathematical truth. Existing modal structuralist approaches, such as Hellman's account, attempt to solve this problem by reducing mathematics to some notion of logico-mathematical possibility but su er from an access problem of their own as well as a problematic dependence on second order logic, metaphysical possibility or other strong philosophical notions. I address these concerns by introducing a special kind of logico-mathematical possibility strong enough to capture the (non-first order) truth conditions for mathematical claims which I call combinatorial possibility. As a modal notion combinatorial possibility has the important feature that one can infer possibility from actuality. As a type of possibility, any fact about combinatorial possibility will constrain how any concrete objects can behave with regard to any relations, e.g., the claim that there are at most 8 objects which differ in how they satisfy 3 properties constrains the number of sundaes that can be made with 3 toppings as well as the number of people who can wear distinct combinations of 3 pieces of clothing. I argue that these properties allow experiences with concrete objects to explain our access to good (but incomplete) methods of reasoning about combinatorial possibility. The inference from actuality to possibility discourages the adoption of overly restrictive conclusions about combinatorial possibility while the need to elegantly explain regularities about many di erent kinds of objects and relations, like the example above, discourages the adoption of overly permissive conclusions about combinatorial possibility. Taken together, I argue, these considerations favor the adoption of correct methods of reasoning about combinatorial possibility and thereby explain our (partial) access to mathematical truth. |
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 |
I defend the thesis that that our ex ante normative relations—e.g., rights and directed duties—do not map straightforwardly onto our ex post moral relations—e.g., having a complaint and being wronged. Being wronged does not necessarily involve a having a right violated, and, conversely, having a right does not necessarily involve potentially being wronged by its violation. This thesis responds to a recent trend in moral philosophy to view directed duties as necessarily connected with accountability. It also engages the classic debate between interest theories and will theories of rights, attempting to capture the virtues of both approaches. |
Patricio Fernandez |
| The Power of a Practical Conclusion |
I defend the thesis, first advanced by Aristotle, that the conclusion of practical reasoning is an action, and argue for its philosophical significance. Opposition to the thesis rests on a contestable way of distinguishing between acts and contents of reasoning and on a picture of normative principles as external to the actions that fall under them. The resulting view forces us to choose between the efficacious, world-changing character of practical thought and its subjection to objective rational standards. This is a false choice.
From a reading of Aristotle’s own understanding of the thesis, I develop an alternative conception of practical reason on which it is at once a power to effect changes in the world and to get things right. Properly understood, the thesis is defensible and philosophically attractive. Indeed, I show that it allows us to do justice to the continuity and discontinuity that exists between the actions of human beings and those of other animals. |
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 |
| Conceptualism and Objectivity in Locke's Account of Natural Kinds |
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is considered by many to be the locus classicus of a number of influential arguments for conventionalism, according to which there are no objective, privileged ways of classifying things in the natural world. I argue that Locke never meant to reject natural kinds. Still, the challenge is to explain how, within a metaphysics that explicitly denies the reality of mind-independent essences, we can make sense of a privileged, objective sorting of substances. I argue that we do so by looking to Locke’s conception of God as divine architect of created substances. |
Dave Langlois |
| The Normativity of Structural Rationality |
Many of us take for granted that rationality requires that we have our attitudes structured in certain ways. For example, we ought not to hold inconsistent beliefs or intentions, and we ought to intend the means we see as crucial to our ends. But attempts to justify claims like these face two problems. First, it is unclear what unifies the rational domain and determines what is (and is not) rationally required of us. This is the content problem. Second, as philosophers have been unable to find any reason for us to have the relevant combinations of attitudes, it is unclear why we ought to comply with these putative requirements in the first place. This is the normativity problem.
I offer a theory of structural rationality which solves these problems. I argue that the entire domain of rational requirements can be derived from a single ultimate requirement demanding that we not have sets of intentions and beliefs which cause their own failure in a specific way. This General Requirement of Structural Rationality explains the unity of the rational domain and directly solves the content problem. But it also solves the normativity problem. When we violate the General Requirement we are engaged in a form of criticizable self-undermining. This is enough to ground the claim that we ought to comply with the General Requirement’s demands. This conclusion is secured as long as we accept the thesis of normative pluralism, according to which there is more than one fundamentally distinct kind of normative ‘ought.’ |
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. |
Eylem Özaltun |
| Knowledge in Action |
| It is widely acknowledged that an agent is doing A intentionally only if she knows she is doing A. It has proved difficult, however, to reconcile two natural thoughts about this knowledge. On the one hand, the agent seems to know what she is doing immediately, simply by doing it. Her knowledge seems to rely upon no evidence, and indeed to rest upon no specifiable epistemic basis at all. On the other hand, the agent can be wrong about what she is doing; her knowledge is fallible. The difficulty is to see how an agent can be wrong about her action if her knowledge of it is immediate. My dissertation provides an account of the agent’s knowledge of her own actions that reconciles these natural, but apparently conflicting thoughts. |
Paul Schofield |
| The Commonwealth as Agent: Group Action, the Common Good, and the General Will |
From Plato, to Hobbes, to Rousseau, to Hegel, philosophers have often likened a political community to an individual agent. Contemporary liberals, republicans, and libertarians have, however, tended to be suspicious if not outright contemptuous of this comparison, arguing that a commonwealth consists merely of individual agents, each with her own individual good, pursuing her own rational plan of life. In my dissertation, I attempt to rehabilitate the tradition that treats a political community as a collective agent. The tradition, I argue, supplies us with rich and plausible conceptions of the common good and collective authority that are absent from much contemporary discussion of political morality. I go on to show that, by drawing upon these conceptual resources, we can offer attractive answers to perennial questions about why citizens should obey the law, how policies that impose burdens upon some for the sake of others can be justified, and what purposes state institutions ought to serve.
I make my case by arguing that commonwealths share three essential features with individual rational agents. First, a group of people occupying a geographical region is a natural agent, as opposed to an artificial one. So unlike Hobbes, who famously declares that a commonwealth is an “artificial man” created through an agreement between the constituents, my view is that a commonwealth is an agent irrespective of any decision made by the members. To argue for this, I draw upon a notion of agency inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Individual humans bear a particular form—they are entities that live and function by reasoning. If they fail to act for reasons, then they fail to act as they ought. I argue that collections of humans are similar in this regard. They bear a particular form, and function as they ought when they collectively arrange their social world in ways that accord with reason. And like an individual agent, a multitude is subject to this normative requirement irrespective of whether its members ever decided to be an agent. The upshot is that commonwealths, like the individual humans who constitute them, are rationally required to identify and engage in worthwhile pursuits. Moreover, while the dominant contemporary view is that the proper aims of state institutions are rather limited—that the state ought merely to provide security, protect rights, or realize freedom. I argue that as an entity bearing the form of a rational agent, more is required of a commonwealth, and that it is part of the role of state institutions to help a society carry on with worthwhile collective activity. Rather than merely protecting the members’ right to pursue their own ends, the commonwealth ought to pursue collective ends of its own and enlist members to do so.
The second essential feature that a commonwealth shares with individual humans is that it has a good. And, more controversially, I argue that a contribution to the commonwealth’s good constitutes a contribution to the good of each individual constituent. Here I take issue with many contemporary treatments of the common good, which tend to dismiss the suggestion that a group can share in a single collective good in any deep sense. Robert Nozick, for instance, insists that there exists no such thing as a social entity and thus that there exists no “good of the whole.” Rawls famously argues that even if there is a good of the whole, an individual cannot benefit through contributions to it per se. I argue that both Nozick and Rawls are mistaken. To do so, I first consider a view about individual persons that parallels Nozick’s and Rawls’ view about society—Derek Parfit’s view that there is no such thing as a “self” that persists through time, and that a person cannot be compensated for burdens suffered now through benefits bestowed in the future. Against Parfit, I argue there is a good of the enduring person, and that an individual can be compensated now through benefits bestowed in the future. I then use the argument as a model for my account of how a benefit bestowed upon one or many members of the commonwealth—a benefit that makes the commonwealth better overall—can constitute a benefit to all members. I thus show that a burdened individual can be compensated through a contribution to the common good.
Third, I argue that a commonwealth that makes its decisions democratically possesses the authority to decide what to do, just as an individual often possesses the authority to decide for herself what to do. I begin by offering my own account of authority. Contrary to Joseph Raz’s influential view, I argue that a genuine authority issues commands that can rationally require a person to act contrary to the overall balance of her reasons—for instance, contrary to the balance of all her moral and prudential reasons. An authority does so, I argue, by generating a unique kind of normative force. The normative force is generated through the use of a particular sort of procedure. Thus, an individual’s will has authority over her when it makes its decisions using a particular decision procedure, and a political community’s General Will has authority when it makes its decisions using particular procedures—democratic ones. This provides a new solution to the longstanding puzzle of democratic authority, showing how it can be rational to obey democratically enacted law, even when one believes the law to be unwise. |
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