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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Confronting Language, Representation, And Belief: A Limited Defense Of Mental Continuity, Kristin Andrews, Ljiljana Radenovic
Confronting Language, Representation, And Belief: A Limited Defense Of Mental Continuity, Kristin Andrews, Ljiljana Radenovic
Kristin Andrews, PhD
According to the mental continuity claim (MCC), human mental faculties are physical and beneficial to human survival, so they must have evolved gradually from ancestral forms and we should expect to see their precursors across species. Materialism of mind coupled with Darwin’s evolutionary theory leads directly to such claims and even today arguments for animal mental properties are often presented with the MCC as a premise. However, the MCC has been often challenged among contemporary scholars. It is usually argued that only humans use language and that language as such has no precursors in the animal kingdom. Moreover, language is …
Moore’S Paradox In Belief And Desire, John N. Williams
Moore’S Paradox In Belief And Desire, John N. Williams
John N. WILLIAMS
Is there a Moore’s paradox in desire? I give a normative explanation of the epistemic irrationality, and hence absurdity, of Moorean belief that builds on Green and Williams’ normative account of absurdity. This explains why Moorean beliefs are normally irrational and thus absurd, while some Moorean beliefs are absurd without being irrational. Then I defend constructing a Moorean desire as the syntactic counterpart of a Moorean belief and distinguish it from a ‘Frankfurt’ conjunction of desires. Next I discuss putative examples of rational and irrational desires, suggesting that there are norms of rational desire. Then I examine David Wall’s groundbreaking …
The Surprise Exam Paradox: Disentangling Two Reductios, John N. Williams
The Surprise Exam Paradox: Disentangling Two Reductios, John N. Williams
John N. WILLIAMS
One tradition of solving the surprise exam paradox, started by Robert Binkley and continued by Doris Olin, Roy Sorensen and Jelle Gerbrandy, construes surprise epistemically and relies upon the oddity of propositions akin to G. E. Moore's paradoxical 'p and I don't believe that p.' Here I argue for an analysis that evolves from Olin's. My analysis is different from hers or indeed any of those in the tradition because it explicitly recognizes that there are two distinct reductios at work in the student's paradoxical argument against the teacher. The weak reductio is easy to fault. Its invalidity determines the …
Justifying Circumstances And Moore-Paradoxical Beliefs: A Response To Brueckner, John N. Williams
Justifying Circumstances And Moore-Paradoxical Beliefs: A Response To Brueckner, John N. Williams
John N. WILLIAMS
In 2004, I explained the absurdity of Moore-paradoxical belief via the syllogism (Williams 2004): (1) All circumstances that justify me in believing that p are circumstances that tend to make me believe that p. (2) All circumstances that tend to make me believe that p are circumstances that justify me in believing that I believe that p. (3) All circumstances that justify me in believing that p are circumstances that justify me in believing that I believe that p.
Moore's Paradoxes And Iterated Belief, John N. Williams
Moore's Paradoxes And Iterated Belief, John N. Williams
John N. WILLIAMS
I give an account of the absurdity of Moorean beliefs of the omissive form (om) p and I don’t believe that p, and the commissive form (com) p and I believe that not-p, from which I extract a definition of Moorean absurdity. I then argue for an account of the absurdity of Moorean assertion. After neutralizing two objections to my whole account, I show that Roy Sorensen’s own account of the absurdity of his ‘iterated cases’ (om1) p and I don’t believe that I believe that p, and (com1) p and I believe that I believe that not-p, is unsatisfactory. …
Wittgenstein, Moorean Absurdity And Its Disappearance From Speech, John N. Williams
Wittgenstein, Moorean Absurdity And Its Disappearance From Speech, John N. Williams
John N. WILLIAMS
G. E. Moore famously observed that to say, "I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe that I did" would be "absurd." Why should it be absurd of me to say something about myself that might be true of me? Moore suggested an answer to this, but as I will show, one that fails. Wittgenstein was greatly impressed by Moore's discovery of a class of absurd but possibly true assertions because he saw that it illuminates "the logic of assertion". Wittgenstein suggests a promising relation of assertion to belief in terms of the idea that one "expresses …