Philosophical Issues 

About: Philosophical Issues is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Skepticism & Externalism. It has an ISSN identifier of 1533-6077. Over the lifetime, 612 publications have been published receiving 11775 citations.

What's Wrong with Moore's Argument?

Abstract: 1 Some Diagnoses Moore looked at his hands and argued: (1) Here are two hands. (2) If hands exist, then there is an external world. (3) So there is an external world. 1 Something about this argument sounds funny. As we'll see, though, it takes some care to identify exactly what Moore has done wrong. I will assume that Moore knows premise (2) to be true. One could inquire into how he knows it, and whether that knowledge can be defeated; but I won't. I'll focus instead on what epistemic relations Moore has to premise (1) and to his conclusion (3). It may matter which epistemic relations we choose to consider. Some philosophers will diagnose Moore's argument using Contextualist machinery. They'll say: In some contexts, it'd be true to count Moore as knowing he has hands and that there is an external world. In more restrictive contexts, it would not. Moore's argument sounds funny because Moore plays fast and loose with the context. His straightforward assertion ''Here are two hands'' invites us to occupy a lax context; but one would only be concerned to argue that there's an external world in a more restrictive context, where the existence of the external world is an open question. If these philosophers are right to count 'knows' as context-sensitive, 2 then they're probably right in their complaint that Moore's performance plays

Deliberative Democracy and the Discursive Dilemma

Abstract: Taken as a model for how groups should make collective judgments and decisions, the ideal of deliberative democracy is inherently ambiguous. Consider the idealised case where it is agreed on all sides that a certain conclusion should be endorsed if and only if certain premises are admitted. Does deliberative democracy recommend that members of the group debate the premises and then individually vote, in the light of that debate, on whether or not to support the conclusion? Or does it recommend that members individually vote on the premises, and then let their commitment to the conclusion be settled by whether or not the group endorses the required premises? Is deliberative democracy to enforce the discipline of reason at the individual level, as in the first possibility, or at the collective level, as in the second?

Mental Paint and Mental Latex

Abstract: The greatest chasm in the philosophy of mind -maybe even all of philosophydivides two perspectives on consciousness. The two perspectives differ on whether there is anything in the phenomenal character of conscious experience that goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive and the functional. A convenient terminological handle on the dispute is whether there are "qualia". Those who think that the phenomenal character of conscious experience goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive and the functional are said to believe in qualitative properties of conscious experience, or qualia for short. The debates about qualia have recently focused on the notion of representation, with issues about functionalism always in the background. All can agree that there are representational contents of thoughts, for example the representational content that virtue is its own reward. And friends of qualia can agree that experiences at least sometimes have representational content too, e.g. that something red and round occludes something blue and square. The recent focus of disagreement is on whether the phenomenal character of experience