Explanatory Challenge Research Articles

Don’t mind the gap: how non-naturalists should explain normative facts

Abstract In this paper, I present and defend a novel way for non-naturalists to account for the sui generis status of normative facts, which is consistent with the claim that contingent normative facts obtain in virtue of non-normative facts. According to what I call unsupplemented partial ground approach, non-derivative normative facts have non-normative partial grounds, but are not fully grounded in any collection of facts. This view entails that an explanatory gap separates the normative from the non-normative domain. I argue that this account provides non-naturalists with a metaphysically coherent response to the challenge of accounting for explanatory dependence relations between two domains while positing metaphysical discontinuity (explanatory challenge), and avoids serious objections that alternative non-naturalist accounts face. Moreover, I show that the unsupplemented partial ground approach is an attractive option for the popular Reasons-First approach, which is often, but I argue prematurely, considered a particularly promising account for non-naturalists.

Austere relationalism and seeing aspects

ABSTRACTAustere relationalism combines two claims. First, the phenomenal character of perception is at least partially constituted by the perceived items. Second, perception doesn't consist in representing the perceived items as being a certain way. Recently, Daniel Kalpokas, Avner Baz, and Søren Overgaard have cast doubt on the ability of austere relationalism to account for the peculiar phenomenology of aspect‐seeing. I show that this explanatory challenge can be met. Some of the claims made by the critics can be resisted, whereas other can be accommodated into austere relationalism. Most notably, I argue that austere relationalists should acknowledge that aspect‐seeing is enabled by unconscious perceptual judgment. This not only allows them to meet the challenge, but also provides the means to reconcile the apparently belief‐independent phenomenology of aspect‐seeing with the arguably indispensable role that concepts and recognition play in it.

When am I Accountable for What Others do? The Causal Accounts and the Explanatory Challenge

When am I Accountable for What Others do? The Causal Accounts and the Explanatory Challenge

Generalized Identity, Zero-Ground, and Necessity

AbstractThis paper offers a modification of Fabrice Correia’s and Alexander Skiles’ (Grounding, Essence, and Identity) definition of grounding in terms of generalized identity that extends it to zero-grounding. The definition promises (1) to improve our understanding of zero-grounding by capturing it within the framework of generalized identity, and (2) to unlock the theoretical potential of zero-grounding for Correia’s and Skiles’ account. The latter is demonstrated by arguing that the definition allows an essentialist theory of modality based on Correia’s and Skiles’ account to answer a recent explanatory challenge by Jessica Leech (From Essence to Necessity via Identity) by combining the following two ideas: (1) Some necessities are grounded in truths about zero-grounding, and (2) at least some identity-propositions are zero-grounded. Finally, some advantages of the zero-grounding approach over Correia’s and Skiles’ recent definition of necessity in terms of generalized identity and logical consequence are argued for.

Vagueness and relative truth

Abstract According to a view called ‘nihilism’, sentences containing vague expressions cannot strictly speaking be true or false, because they lack definite truth conditions. While most theorists of vagueness tend to regard nihilism as a hopeless view, a few isolated attempts have been made to defend it. This paper aims to develop such attempts in a new direction by showing how nihilism, once properly spelled out, can meet three crucial explanatory challenges that, respectively, concern truth, assertibility, and communication.

Temporal dynamism and the persisting stable self

Abstract Empirical evidence suggests that a majority of people believe that time robustly passes and that many also report that it seems to them, in experience, as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists deny that time robustly passes, and many contemporary non-dynamists—deflationists—even deny that it seems to us as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists, then, face the dual challenge of explaining why people have such beliefs and make such reports about their experiences. Several philosophers have suggested the stable-self explanation, according to which what partly explains one or both of the explananda is that people believe themselves to have a stable persisting self that is imagined either as moving through time or as being stationary with time moving around it. This paper empirically investigates this explanation. We found, however, no evidential support for the stable-self explanation, leaving the non-dynamist but also, we will argue, the dynamist with an extant explanatory challenge.

Anti-luminosity and anti-realism in metaethics

This paper begins by applying a version of Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument to normative properties. This argument suggests that there must be at least some unknowable normative facts in normative Sorites sequences, or otherwise we get a contradiction given certain plausible assumptions concerning safety requirements on knowledge and our doxastic dispositions. This paper then focuses on the question of how the defenders of different forms of metaethical anti-realism (namely, error theorists, subjectivists, relativists, contextualists, expressivists, response dependence theorists, and constructivists) could respond to the explanatory challenge created by the previous argument. It argues that, with two exceptions, the metaethical anti-realists need not challenge the argument itself, but rather they can find ways to explain how the unknowable normative facts can obtain. These explanations are based on the idea that our own attitudes on which the normative facts are grounded need not be transparent to us either. Reaching this conclusion also illuminates how metaethical anti-realists can make sense of instances of normative vagueness more generally.

The ambiguity in IPCC’s risk diagram raises explanatory challenges

The ambiguity in IPCC’s risk diagram raises explanatory challenges

Norm-induced forgetting: when social norms induce us to forget

ABSTRACT Sometimes subjects have sufficient internal and external resources to retrieve information stored in memory, in particular information that carries socially charged content. Yet, they fail to do so: they forget it. These cases pose an explanatory challenge to common explanations of forgetting in cognitive science. In this paper, I take this challenge and develop a new explanation of these cases. According to this explanation, these cases are best explained as cases of norm-induced forgetting: cases in which forgetting is caused by social norms in a relevant sense. These cases draw attention to the normative aspects of the mechanisms of forgetting. This is an important but neglected aspect of cases of everyday forgetting, in particular of those characterized by a social dimension. By investigating some ways in which the psychology of social norms is causally relevant in the mechanisms of retrieval failure, I begin to fill this gap.

The Christian Elephant in the Meccan Room: Dye, Tesei, and Shoemaker on the Date of the Qurʾān

Abstract A great number of qurʾānic passages exhibit demonstrable intersections with Christian traditions, and sometimes the Qurʾān even addresses Christians directly. Guillaume Dye, Tommaso Tesei, and Stephen Shoemaker have recently argued that this is difficult to reconcile with our current lack of evidence for organized Christian communities in the pre-Islamic Ḥijāz. Accordingly, all three scholars maintain that much of the Qurʾān ought to be decoupled from the preaching of Muḥammad (whose historical existence they do not deny). While recognizing the pertinence of the explanatory challenge identified by Dye, Tesei, and Shoemaker, this article suggests that the problem may be somewhat less acute than it is made out to be. The article then proceeds to a critical examination of the alternative scenario for the genesis of the Qurʾān that is offered, in different variations, by Dye, Tesei, and Shoemaker. This scenario is found to give rise to a number of explanatory difficulties of its own that have not so far been satisfactorily addressed. By way of an appendix, the article includes an extended critique of Shoemaker and Dye’s claim that the Jesus-and-Mary pericope in Sūrah 19 most likely reflects a post-conquest Palestinian milieu.

On 'Ontology'

This paper uses the concept of metalinguistic negotiation, drawn from contemporary philosophy of language, to develop a novel interpretation of Carnap and Quine’s debate about ontology. Like recent revisionary accounts of the debate, it argues that the widespread perception of first-order disagreement between the two is misleading, ascribing this misperception to Carnap and Quine’s divergent usage of “ontology” and its cognates. Once this difference is accounted for, their seemingly contradictory claims about the subject can be reconciled, as the two “talk past” each other on the semantic level. Crucially, however, this does not render their dispute merely verbal. Rather, it emerges as a remarkably consequential metalinguistic negotiation over whether the term “ontology” ought to be reinterpreted or replaced for the purposes of positive philosophical theorizing. This reading provides an account of the genuine disagreement that drove Carnap and Quine to engage in their debate and illuminates the broader metaphilosophical convictions that support each of their positions. As such, it addresses an important explanatory challenge facing members of the revisionary camp.

Non-dynamism and temporal disturbances

Philosophical accounts denying that temporal passage is an objective feature of reality face an explanatory challenge with respect to why it appears to us as though time passes. Recently, two solutions have surfaced. Cognitive illusionism claims that people experience the passage of time due to their belief that time passes. Cognitive error theory claims that we do not experience the passage of time, but hold the belief that we do, which we have acquired through making an inference from the prior belief that time passes. These approaches suppose that belief and passage experience are explanatorily connected, and they depend on the claims that people who experience the passage of time or at least believe that they do also believe that time passes. To test these claims, we probed the beliefs of populations of individuals with depression and schizotypy, thus conditions that are strongly associated with alterations in temporal phenomenology. Depression was assessed with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and schizotypy with the short Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE). While cognitive illusionism and inferentialist cognitive error theory would predict a strong association between BDI and O-LIFE scores and beliefs about time passage, our study found no such association. The experience of passage does not seem to be explanatorily connected to beliefs about the passage of time.

Experience, time, objects, and processes

AbstractWe regularly talk of the experience of time passing. Some theorists have taken the supposed phenomenology of time passing to provide support for metaphysical accounts of the nature of time; opposing theorists typically granted that there is a phenomenology of time passing while seeking to dispute that any metaphysical conclusions about time can be drawn from this. In recent debates theorists have also begun to dispute that there is a phenomenology of time passing – plausibly, if there is not, then there is no relevant experience to be explained away, or for metaphysical conclusions to be drawn from. In the present paper I offer one explanation of why such disputes about the experience of time passing may seem intractable. However, I suggest that there is a distinct and more tractable issue lurking in this area, concerning our experience of how certain phenomena persist over time. Interestingly, articulating how we experience different phenomena as persisting over time doesn't simply provide a challenge to one metaphysical view of persistence rather than another; instead, it generates an explanatory challenge for a variety of competing views of persistence and, by extension, a challenge for popular combinations of views of the metaphysics of persistence and of time.

A Challenge for Indexical Reliabilism

The new evil demon problem amounts to a difficult challenge for the externalist about epistemic justification. Many solutions to the problem have been proffered in the almost 40 years since its first appearance in the literature. Among the more promising responses is indexical reliabilism, a combination of two versions of actual world reliabilism where “actual” denotes either the world of utterance or a rigidly determined actual world. This paper does three things. First, it attempts to clarify indexical reliabilism and how it purports to solve the new evil demon problem. Second, it attempts to mitigate some of the prominent criticism that has been leveled against the theory. Third, it poses an explanatory challenge for the theory which remains even after all of the premises supporting indexical reliabilism are accepted. The conclusion is that indexical reliabilism is not tenable until a linguistic mechanism for the use of “actually reliable” has been offered that explains how the theory avoids collapsing into a two-concepts response to the new evil demon problem.

Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness

<i>Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness</i>

Societal knowledge quality as catalyst for the competitive productivity of technology: One in a set of several universal processes in trajectories of societal progress.

Societal knowledge quality as catalyst for the competitive productivity of technology: One in a set of several universal processes in trajectories of societal progress.

The phenomenology of auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia and the challenge from pseudohallucinations.

In trying to make sense of the extensive phenomenological variation of first-personal reports on auditory verbal hallucinations, the concept of pseudohallucination is originally introduced to designate any hallucinatory-like phenomena not exhibiting some of the paradigmatic features of “genuine” hallucinations. After its introduction, Karl Jaspers locates the notion of pseudohallucinations into the auditory domain, appealing to a distinction between hallucinatory voices heard within the subjective inner space (pseudohallucination) and voices heard in the outer external space (real hallucinations) with differences in their sensory richness. Jaspers' characterization of the term has been the target of a number of phenomenological, conceptual and empirically-based criticisms. From this latter point of view, it has been claimed that the concept cannot capture distinct phenomena at the neurobiological level. Over the last years, the notion of pseudohallucination seems to be falling into disuse as no major diagnostic system seems to refer to it. In this paper, we propose that even if the concept of pseudohallucination is not helpful to differentiate distinct phenomena at the neurobiological level, the inner/outer distinction highlighted by Jaspers' characterization of the term still remains an open explanatory challenge for dominant theories about the neurocognitive origin of auditory verbal hallucinations. We call this, “the challenge from pseudohallucinations”. After exploring this issue in detail, we propose some phenomenological, conceptual, and empirical paths for future research that might help to build up a more contextualized and dynamic view of auditory verbal hallucinatory phenomena.

Inspiring imagination – embarrassing analogies: coping with the causes of cytoplasmic streaming

ABSTRACT In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the observation of a phenomenon that we call today cyclosis or cytoplasmic streaming provoked great astonishment, and also raised great expectations of being able to penetrate into the secrets of living matter. From the outset, the steady circling flow of liquids and granules inside the cells of algae posed an explanatory challenge, because it seemed to contradict the laws of physics. With scarce epistemic support at hand, researchers adopted a series of analogies to give plausibility to their conclusions. None of these enjoyed lasting success. On the contrary, over the years, we can observe an ongoing proliferation of explanations, and a diversification of alleged mechanisms and agents. Moreover, all the adduced analogies were severely criticized by scientific contemporaries; several were even subjected to derision. Nevertheless, it seemed that nobody could do without them. This paper will focus on the period 1774–1840, and will analyze the contributions and analogical arguments of some prominent microscopists of the time, among them Bonaventura Corti, Charles Bonnet, Ludolph Christian Treviranus, Carl Heinrich Schultz-Schultzenstein, Giovanni Battista Amici, Henri Dutrochet, and Franz Meyen.

Three legs of the missing heritability problem

Three legs of the missing heritability problem

An Intellectualist Dilemma

AbstractLewis Carroll's famous puzzle leads to an explanatory challenge: what must we know to grasp the logical necessity of deductive arguments? This paper argues that intellectualism lacks a philosophically satisfying explanation to that puzzle.