Vicious Infinite Regress Research Articles

Reflexive awareness and reflexivity: an identity model of reflexive awareness with Korta and Perry’s reflexive-referential theory of content (RRT)

In recent years, much debate has centered on the same-order representational theory of consciousness. According to this theory, (1) conscious mental episodes are episodes of which we are aware; and (2) the awareness of an external object and the immediate, reflexive awareness of the mental episode together constitute a single episode. In this paper, I propose that the reflexive-referential theory of content developed by Korta and Perry can be used to establish the claim that reflexive awareness is numerically identical to the mental episode it represents. The advantage of this model is threefold. First, it avoids misrepresentation and vicious infinite regress. Second, it illustrates the intimate connection between a mental episode and the reflexive awareness of it. Third, it explains why consciousness is an intrinsic property.

Kant and the Duty to Act from Duty

Abstract Several interpreters argue that Kant believes we have a duty to act “from duty.” If there is such a duty, however, then Kant's moral theory faces a serious problem, namely that of an allegedly vicious infinite regress of duties. No serious attempt has been made to determine how Kant might respond to this problem and insufficient work has been done to determine whether he even believes we have a duty to act from duty. In this paper I argue that not only does Kant not hold that there is a duty to act from duty, but he also explicitly rejects the idea.

The Parmenidean Ascent

<i>The Parmenidean Ascent</i>

The Necessary Existence of Inference-Claims

In (2018) Gilbert Plumer argues against the existence of inference-claims on the grounds that they lead to the kind of vicious infinite regress illustrated in Carroll’s famous Achilles and the Tortoise paper (Carroll 1895). In Plumer’s view, it is not simply that neither arguments nor arguers do make inference-claims, but that they can’t do so, on pain of this regress. In further unpublished work Plumer has generalized from this result: it is a mistake to include reference to standards of argument assessment within the content of the argument. Inference-claims (i.e., sufficiency-claims) do not exist, and neither do relevance-claims or acceptability-claims, and all for much the same reason. I will argue that his arguments fail to show that inference-claims do not exist, because the regresses they lead to either are not vicious, not infinite, or can be avoided. Then I hope to show, on the grounds of what I call the ‘completeness’ of the argument, that inference-claims not only do exist but that they must exist. This is not to say that inference-claims are necessarily asserted in an act of arguing, but asserting them would not lead to the kind of harmful consequences Plumer supposes, any more than their mere existence would.

Frege's Choice

I develop a new reading of Frege’s argument for the indefinability of truth. I concentrate on what Frege literally says in the passage that contains the argument. This literal reading of the passage establishes that the indefinability argument is an arguably sound argument to the following conclusion: provided that the Fregean conception of judgment—which has recently been countered by Hanks—is correct and that truth is a property of truth-bearers, a vicious infinite regress is produced. Given this vicious regress, Frege chooses to reject that truth is a property of truth-bearers. Frege’s choice leads to a unique version of the Fregean conception of judgment. His unique conception of judgment can cope with Hanks’s recent criticisms against the Fregean conception.

Blind rule-following and the regress of motivations

ABSTRACT Normativists about belief hold that belief formation is essentially rule- or norm-guided. On this view, certain norms are constitutive of or essential to belief in such a way that no mental state not guided by those norms counts as a belief, properly construed. In recent influential work, Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss develop novel arguments against normativism. According to their regress of motivations argument, not all belief formation can be rule- or norm-guided, on pain of a vicious infinite regress. I argue that the regress of motivations argument is unsuccessful: an appeal to the notion of blind rule-following, drawn from a plausible interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following, stops the regress of motivations in its tracks.

Why Strawson’s Basic Argument Is Not Impressive: an Answer from Frankfurt, Christman and Ekstrom

Galen Strawson defends his pessimist position with his famous “Basic Argument”. He attempts to prove that no agent can meet the demands for the ultimate moral responsibility. I argue that the Basic Argument is not impressive because it commits to a linear justification framework under which not only the notion of free will and moral responsibility but every notion would inevitably involve a vicious infinite regress. Surprisingly, this point has not been significantly addressed in the literature of Strawson’s Basic Argument. I scaffold my argument against “Basic Argument” by critically reviewing and comparing Frankfurt, Christman and Ekstrom’s approach to autonomy. I show that any approach, which commits to a linear justification framework, would inevitably involve an infinite regress problem. To make his argument more impressive, Strawson will have to show why he commits to a hierarchical justification framework in the Basic Argument in the first place.

Defending Nonreductionism About Understanding

In this note I defend nonreductionism about understanding by arguing that knowledge is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding. To this end, I examine Paulina Sliwa’s (2015, 2017) novel defence of knowledge-based Reductionism (Reductionism for short). Sliwa claims that one understands why p if and only if one has a sufficient amount of knowledge why p. Sliwa contends that Reductionism is supported by intuitive verdicts about our uses of ‘understanding why’ and ‘knowing why’. In reply, I first argue that Sliwa’s Reductionism leads to a vicious infinite regress. Secondly, I defuse the motivation in favour of Reductionism by showing how the linguistic data can be accommodated within a Nonreductionist framework.

Drop it like it’s HOT: a vicious regress for higher-order thought theories

Higher-order thought (HOT) theories of consciousness attempt to explain what it takes for a mental state to be conscious, rather than unconscious, by means of a HOT that represents oneself as being in the state in question. Rosenthal (in: Liu, Perry (eds) Consciousness and the self: new essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011) stresses that the way we are aware of our own conscious states requires essentially indexical self-reference. The challenge for defenders of HOT theories is to show that there is a way to explain the required reference-fixing mechanisms that is compatible with the theory. According to Rosenthal, the reference to oneself as such is grounded in the disposition to identify the individual the HOT refers to as the individual who has that HOT. I argue that this leads to a vicious infinite regress on the more than plausible assumption that our cognitive capacities are limited. This leaves such theories without a foundation, since self-reference is thought essential to consciousness.

WHAT THE INTERNALIST SHOULD SAY TO THE TORTOISE

Carroll's (1895) short piece “What the Tortoise said to Achilles” in many ways anticipates issues that arise in a number of contemporary controversies. One might argue, for example, that initially plausible attempts to deal with the problem of easy knowledge will land one in the unfortunate position of Achilles who followed the Tortoise down a road that leads to vicious infinite regress. Or consider the conditions required for inferential justification. For idealized inferential justification, I have defended (1995, 2004, 2006) the view that to be justified in believing P on the basis of E one needs to be not only justified in believing E, but justified in believing that E makes probable P (where entailment is the upper limit of making probable). And again, critics have argued that such a strong requirement fails to learn the lesson that Achilles should have been taught by the Tortoise. Even more generally, one might well argue that strong access internalists will need to deal with a variation of Carroll's puzzle even for their accounts of non-inferential justification. In this paper I'll examine these controversies with a mind to reaching a conclusion about just exactly how one can accept intellectually demanding conditions on justified belief without encountering vicious regress.

Viciousness and the structure of reality

Given the centrality of arguments from vicious infinite regress to our philosophical reasoning, it is little wonder that they should also appear on the catalogue of arguments offered in defense of theses that pertain to the fundamental structure of reality. In particular, the metaphysical foundationalist will argue that, on pain of vicious infinite regress, there must be something fundamental. But why think that infinite regresses of grounds are vicious? I explore existing proposed accounts of viciousness cast in terms of contradictions, dependence, failed reductive theories and parsimony. I argue that no one of these accounts adequately captures the conditions under which an infinite regress—any infinite regress—is vicious as opposed to benign. In their place, I suggest an account of viciousness in terms of explanatory failure. If this account is correct, infinite grounding regresses are not necessarily vicious; and we must be much more careful employing such arguments to the conclusion that there has to be something fundamental.

The Regress of Pure Powers Revisited

The paper aims to elucidate in better detail than before the dispute about whether or not dispositional monism—the view that all basic properties are pure powers—entails a vicious infinite regress. Particular focus is on Alexander Bird's and George Molnar's attempts to show that the arguments professing to demonstrate a vicious regress are inconclusive because they presuppose what they aim to prove, notably that powers are for their nature dependent on something else. I argue that Bird and Molnar are mistaken. It is true that dispositional monism is popularly assumed to characterize powers as dependent entities, but this is not what the arguments aim to prove. They merely aim to demonstrate that it would be absurd to assume that all properties are dependent in this way. Finally, it is argued that there is an unresolved tension in Bird's and Molnar's accounts of powers. They characterize them as being for their nature dependent on the manifestations that they are for, and yet ontologically independent of those same manifestations. Until that tension is resolved, their accounts are not equipped to remove the threat of vicious regress.

The world is not an asymmetric graph

1. Might the world be a mathematical structure? My question is not: might the world have a mathematical structure, but might it be identical with one? There are two general ways of interpreting this question. If it is whether, given that mathematical structures are abstract objects, the world is an abstract object, the answer has to be negative. Think of the world as wholly concrete (space, time and the spatio-temporal denizens of the world) or as a mix of the concrete and the abstract (if we include universals, laws, propositions and the like), but whichever of these is the case, the world is not purely abstract, as a formal structure is. One might claim, however, that the world is a structure in the sense that it instantiates a structure and is nothing else. In other words, all there is to the existence of the world is its being a case of a structure. Another case of the same structure might be a visual representation of it. If the structure that is the world were simple enough to draw, one might draw it and say, ‘This is what the world is’. That is how I understand Randall Dipert’s thesis that the world is an asymmetric graph (Dipert 1997). He claims to have proved ‘for the first time in the history of philosophy’ (1997: 349) that, employing the branch of mathematics known as graph theory, the distinctness of relata can be established ‘through relations alone’, i.e. that, in a nutshell, it is coherent – and indeed true – to suppose that everything that exists is relational in nature. This means, he contends, that Aristotle was wrong to have denied the possibility of pure relationalism in the description of what there is. Alexander Bird (2007: Ch. 6) picks up Dipert’s theory and uses it to argue, not that the entire world is purely relational in nature, but that at the ‘fundamental level’, whatever that may be, there is nothing but a world of pure powers, all defined relationally in terms of their stimulus and manifestation properties which are themselves pure powers defined similarly. Bird believes that graph theory provides a convincing response to the objection that a purely relational world generates either a vicious circle or a vicious infinite regress. [Elsewhere (Oderberg, 2011) I argue for the defensibility of the

Trope theory and the Bradley regress

Trope theory is the view that the world is a world of abstract particular qualities. But if all there is are tropes, how do we account for the truth of propositions ostensibly made true by some concrete particular? A common answer is that concrete particulars are nothing but tropes in compresence. This answer seems vulnerable to an argument (first presented by F. H. Bradley) according to which any attempt to account for the nature of relations will end up either in contradiction, nonsense, or will lead to a vicious infinite regress. I investigate Bradley’s argument and claim that it fails to prove what it sets out to. It fails, I argue, because it does not take all the different ways in which relation and relata may depend on one another into account. If relations are entities that are distinct from yet essentially dependent upon their relata, the Bradleyan problem is solved. We are then free to say that tropes in compresence are what make true propositions ostensibly made true by concrete particulars.

Elusive epistemological justification

What does it take for some epistemological thinking to be epistemically justified? Indeed, is that outcome even possible? This paper argues that it is not possible: no epistemological thinking can ever be epistemically justified. A vicious infinite regress of epistemological reflection is the price that would have to be paid for having some such justification. Clearly, that price would be too high.

Paradigms and Russell's Resemblance Regress

Resemblance Nominalism is the view that denies universals and tropes and claims that what makes F-things F is their resemblances. A famous argument against Resemblance Nominalism is Russell's regress of resemblances, according to which the resemblance nominalist falls into a vicious infinite regress. Aristocratic Resemblance Nominalism, as opposed to Egalitarian Resemblance Nominalism, is the version of Resemblance Nominalism that claims that what makes F-things F is that they resemble the F-paradigms. In this paper I attempt to show that a recently advocated strategy to stop Russell's regress by using paradigms does not succeed.

On Russell's Argument Against Resemblance Nominalism

Russell famously argued that Resemblance Nominalism leads to a vicious infinite regress in attempting to avoid admitting universals. Saying that a number of things are white only in that they resemble a particular white thing leaves a number of resemblances to that white thing, each of them constituting the holding of the same relation to the paradigm, qualifying that resemblance relation as a universal. Trying to dismiss that new universal by appeal to resemblances between those first resemblances only leads to a new universal of resemblance, and so on. It is argued here that this does not arise for a properly formulated resemblance theory, which only requires one complex relation among the many particulars we deal with, a complex relation which is not multiply instantiated and thus not a universal.

MCTAGGART'S PARADOX AND THE INFINITE REGRESS OF TEMPORAL ATTRIBUTIONS: A REPLY TO SMITH

In arecent article in this journal, Quentin Smith attempts to demonstrate the idea that presentness, pastness and futurity are properties does indeed entail an infinite regress, but that this regress is neither vicious nor constituted of tenseless predications. 1 Although I have no quarrel with his thesis that the regress is not constituted by tenseless predications, it is the main purpose of this paper to show that the regress is in fact vicious. I shall do this by arguing that Smith's way out of Paradox involves precisely that vicious infinite regress of temporal attributions his analysis sought to avoid. According to Smith, the paradox involved in McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time does not involve any contradiction in temporal attribution. Rather, it is McTaggart's own remarks about the infinite regress that are paradoxical, not the infinite regress! Why does he say that? McTaggart claims, correctly according to Smith, that the attribution of presentness, pastness and futurity leads to a contradiction unless they are attributed successively. Smith continues,

Scepticism About Morals and Scepticism about Knowledge

Can we ever know that something—some state of affairs, or some action taken or contemplated—is evil or wrong, or is it always at best a matter of opinion? It is curious that analytic philosophers, despite their preoccupation with the issue of scepticism and their many discussions of sceptical doubts, have given so little attention to this question. If we look, for example, at Professor Ayer's recent volume The Problem of Knowledge, which consists in effect of a prolonged consideration of various sceptical arguments, we find no reference to the problem of scepticism in moral matters; and this is the more surprising when we reflect that an explicit comparison between this sort of scepticism and scepticism about knowledge generally had been made in a celebrated essay by an earlier philosopher which is now widely thought to have broken fresh ground both in ethics and in theory of knowledge. I refer, of course, to H. A. Prichard's “Does Moral Philosophy rest on a Mistake?” contributed to Mind in 1912. There Prichard claimed to know that something was his duty, in a particular instance, as surely as he knew that seven times four are twenty-eight; in each case, he said, the knowledge is immediate and underivative. To think the contrary was, he argued, to embark on a hopeless quest; for if you cannot claim to know something until you produce criteria for knowing, you can be asked in turn what makes you think the criteria valid, and this will generate a vicious infinite regress. This is not in principle unlike the argument put forward by linguistic philosophers that, unless we allow that the word “know” is properly used in certain paradigm cases, which we take as in order without further questioning, it will lose all application. The interesting thing about Prichard is that he thought the argument applied to morals as readily as to the topics covered by traditional theory of knowledge. But here, as I say, he has not been explicitly followed by his successors.