Epistemic Sense Research Articles

SELF‐DECEPTION AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

Criticism against religions and religious beliefs has taken many forms [1]. Some of the criticism is in a broad sense pragmatic, while other objections are epistemic or metaphysical. Famous critics such as Richard Dawkins and D.C. Dennett have presented a whole range of arguments against religious convictions. A special form of criticism is the idea that religious beliefs or “avowals” are actually results of self-deception [2]. Since self-deception is a form of irrationality, having religious beliefs is irrational, at least in the epistemic sense. This claim has been defended, among others, by Georges Rey and Adele Mercier.

Mental Disorder and Values

Abstract: It is now generally agreed that we have to rely on value judgments to distinguish mental disorders from other conditions, but it is not quite clear how. To clarify this, we need to know more than to what extent attributions of disorder are dependent on values. We also have to know (1) what kind of evaluations we have to rely on to identify the class of mental disorder; (2) whether attributions of disorder contain any implicit reference to some specific evaluative standard; and (3) whether the concept of mental disorder is value laden in the definitional or in the epistemic sense. I will argue that the evaluations we have to rely on are mainly considerations of harm, but that we also need to rely on other evaluations; that there should be no references to specific evaluative standards; and that even though mental disorders are necessarily undesirable, "mental disorder" may well be a descriptive phrase.

Berkeley on Immediate Perception: Once More unto the Breach

I have previously argued that within an argument to show that we cannot perceive the causes of our sensations, Berkeley's Philonous conflates a psychological and an epistemic sense of ‘immediately perceive’, and uses the principle of perceptual immediacy (PPI), that whatever is perceived by the senses is immediately perceived. George Pappas has objected that Berkeley does not operate with either of these concepts of immediate perception, and does not subscribe to (PPI). But I show that Berkeley's argumentative strategy requires him to use these two concepts, and that the concept of immediate perception Pappas attributes to Berkeley would weaken this strategy. I also defend attributing to Berkeley a slightly modified version of (PPI), on which it both serves his strategy and allows sense perception to incorporate what he calls ‘suggestion’.

The meaning and the scope of the separability thesis between morals and law

This paper analyzes possible meanings and implications of the separability thesis (between morals and law) mainly within the context of the Hart Dworkin debate. The separability thesis was first brought into connection with the 'soft-positivism', that was expounded on the presumption of compatibility between basic positivistic statements and moral principles i.e. values. The analysis shows that Dworkin was not in fact disputing with the separability thesis, but with the more radical version of the hard fact positivism. It is found that Hart supported one additional version of the separabiity thesis called Explicit Moral Content Thesis. According to that thesis law has no moral content or condition but the one explicitly displayed in it. That thesis is plausible if the ambiguity of epistemic and semantic sense of the rule of recognition is acceptable.

From theory to data: Representing neurons in the 1940s

Recent literature on the role of pictorial representation in the life sciences has focused on the relationship between detailed representations of empirical data and more abstract, formal representations of theory. The standard argument is that in both a historical and epistemic sense, this relationship is a directional one: beginning with raw, unmediated images and moving towards diagrams that are more interpreted and more theoretically rich. Using the neural network diagrams of Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts as a case study, I argue that while in the empirical sciences, pictorial representation tends to move from data to theory, in areas of the life sciences that are predominantly theoretical, when abstraction occurs at the outset, the relationship between detail and abstraction in pictorial representations can be of a different character.

V-The Sources of Self-Consciousness

This paper explores the relation between two ways of thinking about the sources of self-consciousness. We can think about the sources of self-consciousness either in genetic terms (as the origins or precursors of self-conscious thoughts) or in epistemic terms (as the grounds of self-conscious judgements). Using Christopher Peacocke's account of self-conscious judgements in Being Known as a foil, this paper brings out some important ways in which we need to draw upon the sources of self-consciousness in the genetic sense for a proper understanding of the sources of self-consciousness in the epistemic sense.

Motan in The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records

Abstract. In this paper we have tried to establish which paths the Old English modal *motan followed from Old English central meaning of permission to Modern English central meaning of obligation, by looking at peripheral meanings of *motan. The data presented here were drawn from The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. They tell us that *motan was never used in an epistemic sense; so, diachronically, deontic *motan came first. Moreover, it becomes quite clear that the core meaning was permission, that this could be slightly amended to include ability or wish, and that obligation was only a peripheral meaning in (late?) Old English.

The Epistemic Sense of the Pedigree Thesis

Jules Coleman has shown that positivism’s pedigree thesis has a semantic sense and an epistemic sense. The semantic sense states the conditions a proposition must satisfy in order to be law. The epistemic sense constitutes a standard that can be used to identify the community’s law. In this article, I argue the epistemic sense is considerably more modest than has often been supposed. At most, it provides a means for conclusively identifying those legislative utterances that give rise to statutory law. Accordingly, it is false that the pedigree thesis provides a test for deciding even questions of settled law.

Truthlikeness, Translation, and Approximate Causal Explanation

D. Miller's demonstrations of the language dependence of truthlikeness raise a profound problem for the claim that scientific progress is objective. In two recent papers (Barnes 1990, 1991) I argue that the objectivity of progress may be grounded on the claim that the aim of science is not merely truth but knowledge; progress thus construed is objective in an epistemic sense. In this paper I construct a new solution to Miller's problem grounded on the notion of “approximate causal explanation” which allows for linguistically invariant progress outside an epistemic context. I suggest that the notion of “approximate causal explanation” provides the resources for a more robust theory of progress than that provided by the notion of “approximate truth.”

Who wrote the book of life? Information and the transformation of molecular biology, 1945-55.

This paper focuses on the opening of a discursive space: the emergence of informational and scriptural representations of life and hereditiy and their self-negating consequences for the construction of biological meaning. It probes the notion of writing and the book of life and shows how molecular biology's claims to a status of language and texuality undermines its own objective of control. These textual significations were historically contingent. The informational representations of heredity and life were not an outcome of the internal cognitive momentum of molecular biology; they were not a logical necessity of the unravelling of the base-pairing of the DNA double-helix. They were transported into molecular biology still within the protein paradigm of the gene in the 1940s and permeated nearly every discipline in the life and social sciences. These information-based models, metaphors, linguistic, and semiotic tools which were central to the formulation of the genetic code were transported into molecular biology from cybernetics, information theory, electronic computing, and control and communication systems--technosciences that were deeply embedded with the military experiences of World War II and the Cold War. The information discourse thus became fixed in molecular biology not because it worked in the narrow epistemic sense (it did not), but because it positioned molecular biology within postwar discourse and culture, perhaps within the transition to a post-modern information-based society.

Devoir épistémique, marqueur modal ou évidentiel ?

Patrick Dendale : « Epistemic devoir, modal or evidential marker ? » It is generally recognized that the French verb devoir has deontic and epistemic senses. We focus on the epistemic sense and claim that the basic value of epistemic devoir is an evidential one whereas the modal values (probability, quasi-certainty) actually derive from it. We consider the nature of evidential devoir to be inferential and show how inference is to be understood as a complex operation including the search for premisses and the evaluation of competing conclusions.

Necessity, obligation and modern greek verbal aspect

The Modern Greek modal prépi, in addition to its epistemic sense, may refer to obligation or to physical necessity. When it occurs with a temporal adverbial referring to rate of occurrence such as ‘rarely’, ‘ten times a day’, it may have wide or narrow scope in respect of such expressions. In its deontic uses it always has wide scope; in its nondeontic uses narrow scope. Because scope differences may have implications for the aspect of complement verbs, aspect may provide information respecting modal force. In the case of physical modality aspectual choice is influenced by the relative event frequency indicated by the adverbial. As frequency increases and the points corresponding to occurrences of the causes approach linearity, so does the chance of an imperfect aspect in the complement. This is no accident as deontic modality always corresponds to an unbroken line and with rate expressions always requires an imperfective complement.

Compatibilism and Conditioning

Contemporary defenders of the claim that an action or an omission's being determined is compatible with its being free have offered by way of a first approximation the following analysis of freedom. A person performs some action freely if he (or she) possesses the capacity (or capacities) relevant to its performance and exercises this capacity when he wants to, provided that the wanting is not the product of defeating conditions (such as brainwashing, pathological urges and the like).' A person freely omits to do some action if he has the capacity to do it but does not want to exercise the capacity, provided that the wanting is not the product of defeating conditions. The present paper will mainly be concerned with this proviso which is intended to mark off those wants that are truly the person's from those that are alien to him. But first the compatibilist analysis of freedom given above needs to be refined to take account of several complicating factors. A first complication is that where a person does not know or believe that he has the capacity to perform some action which he indeed wants to perform, and where his wants are not the product of defeating conditions, he may still not in fact perform the action. In order to avoid this complication we must distinguish between an epistemic sense of power or capacity and a non-epistemic sense. Sometimes one is entitled to say of a particular person that some action is (or was) within his power but that he doesn't realize that it is. Whether or not we are led to judge the failure to act as free and responsible depends on whether or not the person is culpable for failing to acquire the requisite knowledge at or by the specified time. The modification needed in the suggested analysis of freedom is pretty obvious what is needed is the incorporation of a