Showing papers in "Philosophical Books in 2003"

The architecture of reason : the structure and substance of rationality

Abstract: The literature on theoretical reason has been dominated by epistemological concerns, treatments of practical reason by ethical concerns. This book overcomes the limitations of dealing with each separately. It sets out a comprehensive theory of rationality applicable to both practical and theoretical reason. In both domains, Audi explains how experience grounds rationality, delineates the structure of central elements, and attacks the egocentric conception of rationality. He establishes the rationality of altruism and thereby supports major moral principles. The concluding part describes the pluralism and relativity his conception of rationality accommodates and, taking the unified account of theoretical and practical rationality in that light, constructs a theory of global rationality-the overall rationality of persons. Rich in narrative examples, intriguing analogies, and intuitively appealing arguments, this beautifully crafted book will spur advances in ethics and epistemology as well in philosophy of mind and action and the theory of rationality itself.

Responses to commentators

Abstract: The 'inflationary' argument of chapter 1 of Truth and Objectivity-the argument that the classical deflationary conception of truth must, on its own assumptions, inflate into something more substantial-is puzzled over by James Van Cleve and, unsurprisingly, roundly rejected by Paul Horwich. Van Cleve wonders about the precise role in the argument of the normativity of the truth-predicate, and wonders what exactly it is about deflationism, in contrast with minimalism, which puts it in tension with the existence of distinct norms of truth and warranted assertibility. Horwich too complains that the argument is structurally unclear and unconvincing, charging that it turns on a non sequitur and that even if it could engage the traditional form of deflationism which holds that truth is not a property, it would pass by the version of the position which he himself has defended at length. And he too is puzzled about the role of normativity in the inflationary argument, since he thinks that those aspects of the truth-predicate which reflect its normativity may straightforwardly be accounted for by appeal to the Equivalence Schema (or, presumably, the Disquotational Scheme). I shall first offer some remarks by way of clarification, hoping thereby to speak to Van Cleve's queries, and then respond to Horwich's objections. Classical deflationism is the view that there is no legitimate subject matter for the debates between correspondence theorists, coherence theorists, pragmatists (at least, the ones who intend to say something about what truth should be held to consist in) and those philosophers who, like Frege, hold that truth is a substantial, though indefinable characteristic of the items-be they sentences, propositions, or attitudes-which have it. For the classical deflationist, these misbegotten debates arise because of a misunderstanding of the role of the truth-predicate: it functions as an adjective, so one naturally expects its function to be to ascribe a property. But that is not its function, and there is no such property. Its real function is as a device of endorsement. In general, such endorsement can be achieved, without using any special device, just by asserting, or assenting to a particular proposition (say). The need for the truth-predicate arises only because endorsement can sometimes be

On the Philosophical Interest of Frege Arithmetic

Abstract: Traditional “Fregean” logicism held that arithmetic could be shown free of any dependence on Kantian intuition if its basic laws were shown to follow from logic together with explicit definitions. It would then follow that our knowledge of arithmetic is knowledge of the same character as our knowledge of logic, since an extension of a theory (in this case the “theory” of secondorder logic) by mere definitions cannot have a different epistemic status from the theory of which it is an extension. If the original theory consists of analytic truths, so also must the extension; if our knowledge of the truths of the original theory is for this reason a priori, so also must be our knowledge of the truths of its definitional extension. The uncontroversial point for traditional formulations of the doctrine is that a reduction of this kind secures the sameness of the epistemic character of arithmetic and logic, while allowing for some flexibility as to the nature of that epistemic character. Thus, it is worth remembering that in Principles (p. 457), Russell concluded that a reduction of mathematics to logic would show, contrary to Kant, that logic is just as synthetic as mathematics. Nevertheless, the methodology underlying this approach to securing the aprioricity of arithmetic by a traditional logicist reduction has been challenged. For example, Paul Benacerraf,2 who focuses on Hempel’s3 classic exposition, tells us that