Deflationary Account Research Articles

Hypernatural Monitoring: A Social Rehearsal Account of Smartphone Addiction.

We present a deflationary account of smartphone addiction by situating this purportedly antisocial phenomenon within the fundamentally social dispositions of our species. While we agree with contemporary critics that the hyper-connectedness and unpredictable rewards of mobile technology can modulate negative affect, we propose to place the locus of addiction on an evolutionarily older mechanism: the human need to monitor and be monitored by others. Drawing from key findings in evolutionary anthropology and the cognitive science of religion, we articulate a hypernatural monitoring model of smartphone addiction grounded in a general social rehearsal theory of human cognition. Building on recent predictive-processing views of perception and addiction in cognitive neuroscience, we describe the role of social reward anticipation and prediction errors in mediating dysfunctional smartphone use. We conclude with insights from contemplative philosophies and harm-reduction models on finding the right rituals for honoring social connections and setting intentional protocols for the consumption of social information.

On Deflationary Accounts of Human Action Understanding

A common deflationary tendency has emerged recently in both philosophical accounts and comparative animal studies concerned with how subjects understand the actions of others. The suggestion emerging from both arenas is that the default mechanism for understanding action involves only a sensitivity to the observable, behavioural (non-mental) features of a situation. This kind of ‘smart behaviour reading’ thus suggests that, typically, predicting or explaining the behaviour of conspecifics does not require seeing the other through the lens of mental state attribution. This paper aims to explore and assess this deflationary move. In §1 I clarify what might be involved in a smart behaviour reading account via looking at some concrete examples. Then in §2 I critically assess the deflationary move, arguing that, at least in the human case, it would in fact be a mistake to assume that our default method of action understanding proceeds without appeal to mental state attribution. Finally in §3 I consider briefly how the positive view proposed here relates to discussions about standard two-system models of cognition.

Getting It Together: Psychological Unity and Deflationary Accounts of Animal Metacognition

Experimenters claim some nonhuman mammals have metacognition. If correct, the results indicate some animal minds are more complex than ordinarily presumed. However, some philosophers argue for a deflationary reading of metacognition experiments, suggesting that the results can be explained in first-order terms. We agree with the deflationary interpretation of the data but we argue that the metacognition research forces the need to recognize a heretofore underappreciated feature in the theory of animal minds, which we call Unity. The disparate mental states of an animal must be unified if deflationary accounts of metacognition are to hold and untoward implications avoided. Furthermore, once Unity is acknowledged, the deflationary interpretation of the experiments reveals an elevated moral standing for the nonhumans in question.

Expressivism, meaning, and all that

AbstractIt has recently been suggested that meta-normative expressivism is best seen as a meta-semantic, rather than a semantic view. One strong motivation for this is that expressivism becomes, thereby, compatible with truth-conditional semantics. While this approach is promising, however, many of its details are still unexplored. One issue that still needs to be explored in particular, is what accounts of propositional contents are open to meta-semantic expressivists. This paper makes progress on this issue by developing an expressivist-friendly deflationary account of such contents.

Candrakīrti on Deflated Episodic Memory: Response to Endel Tulving's Challenge

ABSTRACTIn my response to Ganeri's [2018] paper, I take Buddhagosha's deflationary account of episodic memory one step further through the analysis of the Madhyamaka philosopher Candrakīrti (ca. 570-640) who, like Buddhagosha, explicitly defends episodic memory as a recollection of the objects experienced in the past, rather than subjective experience. However, unlike Buddhagosha, Candrakīrti deflates episodic memory by showing the incoherence of the Sautrāntika-Yogācāra's thesis that episodic memory requires the admission of reflexive awareness. Also unlike Buddhagosha, Candrakīrti shows the incoherence of the Mimāṁsāka-Naiyāyika's self-implication requirement thesis, therefore directly countering Tulving's challenge to the Buddhist philosophers, by arguing that episodic memory is capable of mental time travel without any reference to the operation of enduring self. I will thus suggest that Candrakīrti may have even greater success in deflating the self-implication requirement of episodic memory.

Theoretical Foundations for Human Rights

This article explores an alternative to the established dichotomy between philosophical (natural law) accounts of human rights, characterized by a foundationalist tendency, and political (practice-based) accounts of human rights, which aspire to be non-foundationalist. I argue that in order to justify human rights practice, political accounts of human rights cannot do without the support of theoretical foundations, although not necessarily of the natural-law variety. As an alternative to natural-law metaphysics, a deflationary theory of human rights, based on a deflationary account of truth, is put forward. Starting from a distinction between ‘extreme’ and ‘moderate’ forms of deflationism, this article defends a constructivist theory of human rights grounded on the Humean notion of conventionalism. This innovative approach to human rights provides political conceptions of human rights with the foundations (or quasi-foundations) they need, but are currently lacking.

Self-defense: Deflecting Deflationary and Eliminativist Critiques of the Sense of Ownership.

I defend a phenomenological account of the sense of ownership as part of a minimal sense of self from those critics who propose either a deflationary or eliminativist critique. Specifically, I block the deflationary critique by showing that in fact the phenomenological account is itself a deflationary account insofar as it takes the sense of ownership to be implicit or intrinsic to experience and bodily action. I address the eliminativist view by considering empirical evidence that supports the concept of pre-reflective self-awareness, which underpins the sense of ownership. Finally, I respond to claims that phenomenology does not offer a positive account of the sense of ownership by showing the role it plays in an enactivist (action-oriented) view of embodied cognition.

Do corporations have minds of their own?

Corporations have often been taken to be the paradigm of an organization whose agency is autonomous from that of the successive waves of people who occupy the pattern of roles that define its structure, which licenses saying that the corporation has attitudes, interests, goals, and beliefs which are not those of the role occupants. In this essay, I sketch a deflationary account of agency-discourse about corporations. I identify institutional roles with a special type of status function, a status role, in which the collectively accepted function is expressed in part through its occupier’s intentional expression of her agency in that role (where the occupier is part of the group whose collective acceptance underwrites her having the relevant function in social transactions). I identify institutions as systems of status roles and show how this is compatible with seeing the agency of institutions generally, even over time periods in which there is complete change in role occupiers, as a matter of the contributions only of individual agents. I explain how the reduction of the institution to its members is compatible with its potentially having had a completely different membership. I show in the case of the corporation in particular that, once we see its origins and function, the surface features of legal discourse about corporate agency are misleading and are compatible with a deflationary account of corporate agency. I show in connection with this that the corporation is to be identified with its shareholders, and that where a corporation separates ownership and control, its managers and employees are proxy agents of the shareholders doing business under the corporate form. Finally, I canvass the legitimate ways of construing ordinary talk about corporate intention, belief, and so on, in light of this, none of which support the attribution of genuine agency or intentionality to any group per se associated with the corporation.

Conceptual competence injustice

This paper identifies the phenomenon of conceptual competence injustice, a form of epistemic injustice that occurs when a marginalized epistemic agent makes a conceptual claim and is illegitimately regarded as having failed to grasp one or more of the concepts expressed in her testimony. The notion of a conceptual claim is given a deflationary account that is coextensive with the class of a priori knowable claims. This study reveals a form of oppression that severely hinders marginalized epistemic agents who seek to create or communicate conceptual knowledge. Conceptual competence injustice is compared and contrasted with three other forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, and contributory injustice. The final section investigates a number of damaging effects that conceptual competence injustice has on marginalized persons pursuing a career in academic philosophy.

The Ethical Value of Narrative Representation

The purpose of this paper is to defend a deflationary account of the ethical value of narrative representation. In sections 1 and 2 I demonstrate that there is a necessary relation between narrative representation and ethical value, but not between narrative representation and moral value. Ethical is conceived in terms of moral as opposed to amoral and moral in terms of moral as opposed to immoral and the essential value of narrative representation is restricted to the former. Recently, both theorists involved in the ethical turn in criticism and analytic philosophers have erred in conflating these two distinct kinds of value. In sections 3 to 5 I defend my deflationary view against three attempts to elevate the ethical value of narrative representation to moral value: Martha Nussbaum’s theory of realist novels, Noël Carroll’s virtue wheels, and Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s closural moral order.

Knowledge attribution revisited: a deflationary account

According to the usual way of understanding how true knowledge attribution works, it is not right to attribute knowledge of p to S unless p is true and S is justified in believing p. This assumption seems to hold even if we shun away from the idea that we can give an analysis of knowledge in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. I want to raise some suspicions on the correctness of this traditional picture. I suggest that justification is not always perceived as a necessary condition for true knowledge attribution, according to our pre-theoretical usage of standard epistemic terms. This is not to say that justification is never seen as an important requirement; sometimes it certainly is. Still, the full-fledged, traditional position on epistemic justification needs to be seriously qualified. Ultimately, I will contend that this result lends support to a rival epistemological standpoint — what we might dub a Moderate Peircean stance on epistemic matters.

The optimist within? Selective sampling and self-deception

The nature and existence of self-deception is controversial. On a classic conception, self-deceived individuals carry two conflicting representations of reality. Proponents of an alternative, deflationary account dispute this, arguing that putative cases of self-deception simply reflect distorted information processing. To investigate these alternatives, we adapted a paradigm from the "crowd-within" literature. Participants provided two different estimates for each of a series of incentivized questions. Half of the questions were neutral in content, while half referred to undesirable future events. Whereas the first and second estimates for neutral questions did not differ systematically, second estimates for undesirable questions were more optimistic than first estimates. This result suggests that participants were sampling selectively from an internal probability distribution when providing estimates for undesirable events, implying they had access to a less rosy representation of their future prospects than their individual estimates conveyed. In short, self-deception is real.

Anti-exceptionalism about logic

Logic isn’t special. Its theories are continuous with science; its method continuous with scientific method. Logic isn’t a priori, nor are its truths analytic truths. Logical theories are revisable, and if they are revised, they are revised on the same grounds as scientific theories. These are the tenets of anti-exceptionalism about logic. The position is most famously defended by Quine, but has more recent advocates in Maddy (Proc Address Am Philos Assoc 76:61–90, 2002), Priest (Doubt truth to be a liar, OUP, Oxford, 2006a, The metaphysics of logic, CUP, Cambridge, 2014, Log et Anal, 2016), Russell (Philos Stud 171:161–175, 2014, J Philos Log 0:1–11, 2015), and Williamson (Modal logic as metaphysics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013b, The relevance of the liar, OUP, Oxford, 2015). Although these authors agree on many methodological issues about logic, they disagree about which logic anti-exceptionalism supports. Williamson uses an anti-exceptionalist argument to defend classical logic, while Priest claims that his anti-exceptionalism supports nonclassical logic. This paper argues that the disagreement is due to a difference in how the parties understand logical theories. Once we reject Williamson’s deflationary account of logical theories, the argument for classical logic is undercut. Instead an alternative account of logical theories is offered, on which logical pluralism is a plausible supplement to anti-exceptionalism.

Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism by Robert C. Holub.

NIETZSCHE'S JEWISH PROBLEM: BETWEEN ANTI-SEMITISM AN D ANTI-JUDAISM Robert C. Holub. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. 271 pp.In Nietzsche's Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism, Robert Holub re-opens case that Nietzsche may have been Judeo-phobic, a case largely considered closed within contemporary Nietzsche scholarship. Holub's work is historical, avoiding a systematic engagement with Nietzsche's philosophy in favor of reliance on Nietzsche's unpublished correspondences and notebooks. Nonetheless, this rigorously researched book deserves attention from Nietzsche prosecutors and defenders alike.Holub's first chapter details appropriation of Nietzsche by anti- and pro-Semitic thinkers, as well as by leftist and rightist political ideologies, without commenting on validity of these varied interpretations. Rather, Holub documents how Nietzsche was (mis)used up to, during, and after Second World War. The chapter also persuasively argues-contra defenses of Nietzsche made by Lukacs, Schelecta, Roos, and Kaufmann-that Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche is not as guilty for Nietzsche's appropriation by National Socialists as previously thought. Her selective editing and falsification of her brother's writings was primarily personal, not ideological in motivation. Figures such as Alfred Baeulmer, a Nazi interpreter who incorporated Nietzsche into National Socialism by claiming that his critical remarks against Germans and nationalism applied only to Bismark's second empire, damaged Nietzsche's reputation far more than Elisabeth.Chapter 2 discusses and political climate toward Jews where Nietzsche grew up, without taking a stand about how this informs Nietzsche's culpability vis-a-vis accusations of antisemitism. Despite Nietzsche's strong desire to study with Jewish scholar Bernays and his appreciation for Lessing, who advocated tolerance toward Jews, Holub shows that Nietzsche blended in rather inconspicuously with a climate of anti-Jewish biases that flourished almost everywhere around him. In particular, Holub highlights offhanded comments Nietzsche makes about pervasiveness of Jews in Leipzig when recalling his time with Gersdorff, an outspoken antisemite.Chapter 3 analyzes Nietzsche's relationship with Wagners. Parts of Holub's argument are speculative, such as claim that Nietzsche refused a trip with Mendelssohn's son because of his Jewish heritage, though we have no documentation of Nietzsche's reason for declining offer. More central to Holub's position is an unpublished-and perhaps undelivered-draft of a lecture written before Birth of Tragedy, which associates Socratism with the Jewish press. After receiving a copy, Wagners encouraged Nietzsche to omit this reference. From this, Holub concludes that absence of any reference to Jews in Nietzsche's writing during his Wagner period demonstrates that he now resorts to a cultural code to voice his antisemitism and that Nietzsche's criticism of Socratic optimism always obliquely expresses an anti-Jewish stance. The first conclusion begs question, requiring that we consider Nietzsche an antisemite before decoding his writings. The second conclusion is philosophically contentious. Nietzsche criticizes Socratic optimism for valuing truth over and against life, while he typically characterizes Jewish optimism as construction of a fiction to invert values and thereby preserve a mode of life. Nevertheless, Holub again demonstrates that Nietzsche made offhand comments about Jews in personal correspondences, suggesting that he may have been more at home in an antisemitic environment than Nietzsche sympathizers care to admit.Chapter 4 provides a deflationary account of Nietzsche's break with Wagners and of his friendships with Paul Ree, Siegfried Lipiner, and Josef Paneth. Holub rightfully notes that Nietzsche's break with Wagners was likely motivated by personal reasons more than by a rejection of their antisemitism, at least initially. …

Precisión, sinceridad y autoengaño

The present text follows three general objectives, which, at the same time, build its structure. Firstly, I would like to present and question Bernard Williams’ description of the virtue of accuracy. Secondly, I´ll try to complement Williams’ description by analyzing two dimensions of accuracy: care, on one side, and what I call “proximity to the problem”, on the other side. Related to that last issue, I add an excursus about writing. The third and last part of this article is an attempt to relate the discussion about the so called virtues of truth —sincerity as well as accuracy— with the issue of self-deception. Specifically, I try to a) support Mele´s deflationary account of self-deception as motivationally biased belief, b) make an adjustment to this conception, and c) complement it with another aspect which has not received enough consideration in the discussion about self-deception, namely some beliefs we don´t generate or that manifest a high lack of accuracy.

Precisión, sinceridad y autoengaño

El texto persigue tres objetivos generales que, a la vez, lo estructuran. En primer lugar, quiero presentar, pero también cuestionar, la descripción que de la virtud de la precisión (accuracy) ofrece Bernard Williams. En segundo lugar, me propongo complementar dicha descripción deteniéndome en dos dimensiones de la precisión: el cuidado y lo que llamaré “cercanía al problema”. En ese contexto, intercalo un excurso acerca de la escritura. La tercera y última parte del artículo es un intento de vincular la reflexión sobre las llamadas virtudes de la verdad —junto con la precisión, la sinceridad (sincerity)— con la cuestión del autoengaño. En concreto, busco a) brindar apoyo al enfoque de acionario de Mele, i.e., a la concepción del autoengaño como creencia sesgada motivacionalmente, b) realizar un ajuste a dicha concepción y c) complementarla con un aspecto no suficientemente considerado en las discusiones sobre autoengaño, a saber, con ciertas creencias que dejamos de generar o que presentan un alto grado de imprecisión.

EPISTEMIC INVARIANTISM AND CONTEXTUALIST INTUITIONS

ABSTRACTEpistemic invariantism, or invariantism for short, is the position that the proposition expressed by knowledge sentences does not vary with the epistemic standard of the context in which these sentences can be used. At least one of the major challenges for invariantism is to explain our intuitions about scenarios such as the so-called bank cases. These cases elicit intuitions to the effect that the truth-value of knowledge sentences varies with the epistemic standard of the context in which these sentences can be used. In this paper, I will defend invariantism against this challenge by advocating the following, somewhat deflationary account of the bank case intuitions: Readers of the bank cases assign different truth-values to the knowledge claims in the bank cases because they interpret these scenarios such that the epistemic position of the subject in question differs between the high and the low standards case. To substantiate this account, I will argue, first, that the bank cases are underspecified even with respect to features that should uncontroversially be relevant for the epistemic position of the subject in question. Second, I will argue that readers of the bank cases will fill in these features differently in the low and the high standards case. In particular, I will argue that there is a variety of reasons to think that the fact that an error-possibility is mentioned in the high standards case will lead readers to assume that this error-possibility is supposed to be likely in the high standards case.

De se thoughts and immunity to error through misidentification

I discuss an aspect of the relation between accounts of de se thought and the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. I will argue that a deflationary account of the latter—the Simple Account, due to Evans (The varieties of reference, 1982)—will not do; a more robust one based on an account of de se thoughts is required. I will then sketch such an alternative account, based on a more general view on singular thoughts, and show how it can deal with the problems I raise for the Simple Account.

Slave Revolt, Deflated Self-deception

The problem of self-deception lies at the heart of Nietzsche's account of the slave revolt in morality in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. The viability of Nietzsche's genealogy of morality is thus crucially dependent on a successful explanation of the self-deception the slaves of the first essay are caught in. But the phenomenon of self-deception is notoriously puzzling. In this paper, after critically examining existing interpretations of the slaves’ self-deception, I provide, by drawing on Alfred Mele's work on self-deception, a deflationary account of the slaves’ self-deception; an account which explains the slaves’ self-deceived predicament but without either the attribution of contradictory mental states or an intention to produce or to facilitate the production of the belief the self-deceived subjects end up holding. In light of my account of self-deception, I interpret Nietzsche's intriguing claim that the slaves’ revaluation of ressentiment amounts to their ‘most mendacious artistic stroke’.

Deflationary representation, inference, and practice

This paper defends the deflationary character of two recent views regarding scientific representation, namely RIG Hughes' DDI model and the inferential conception. It is first argued that these views' deflationism is akin to the homonymous position in discussions regarding the nature of truth. There, we are invited to consider the platitudes that the predicate “true” obeys at the level of practice, disregarding any deeper, or more substantive, account of its nature. More generally, for any concept X, a deflationary approach is then defined in opposition to a substantive approach, where a substantive approach to X is an analysis of X in terms of some property P, or relation R, accounting for and explaining the standard use of X. It then becomes possible to characterize a deflationary view of scientific representation in three distinct senses, namely: a “no-theory” view, a “minimalist” view, and a “use-based” view—in line with three standard deflationary responses in the philosophical literature on truth. It is then argued that both the DDI model and the inferential conception may be suitably understood in any of these three different senses. The application of these deflationary ‘hermeneutics’ moreover yields significant improvements on the DDI model, which bring it closer to the inferential conception. It is finally argued that what these approaches have in common—the key to any deflationary account of scientific representation—is the denial that scientific representation may be ultimately reduced to any substantive explanatory property of sources, or targets, or their relations.