Paul Boghossian

According to an interesting and thought-provoking article by Natalie Ashton and Robin McKenna, Paul Boghossian in Fear of Knowledge would have presented a "classical", "objectivist" view of epistemic justification, which allegedly excludes "that social factors can determine what counts as evidence". On the basis of this interpretation, the two authors find that a feminist history of science, which shows how certain societal advancements in the position of women did, actually, lead to the acceptance of certain (previously available) data as evidence for a given theory, would run counter to that classical view. I argue that Ashton and McKenna overlook the crucial difference between the merely descriptive tenet "social factors determine what data epistemic subjects take, in fact, to be evidence for a given theory" and the normative tenet "social factors determine what data can legitimately be taken to be evidence for a given theory". Under the descriptive interpretation, the history they tell is clearly not incompatible with the "classical view". And under the normative interpretation, a second ambiguity emerges: when social factors are supposed to "determine" what data can legitimately count as evidence, is this a rational or a causal sense of "determine"? Given that the authors themselves admit, relative to the specific story they tell, that we have an independent criterion (explanatory power) which justifies that we take certain data as justification for a given belief, then the only sense of "determine" which remains is the causal one−and in this sense, once again, the story they tell is perfectly compatible with a "classical view" of justification.

This is chapter 6 of my book on Rorty, an attempt to understand and defend to an extent his account of the uses of 'truth'. I'm posting it because I'm revisiting the topic and having reread it recently thought some might find it interesting. Any comments welcome!

Contemporary accounts of the possession conditions for basic logical concepts rely on either the subject being primitively compelled by transitions that are isomorphic to the introduction and elimination rules for the logical constant or the rules are an innate property of the subject’s language of thought. Drawing from Heidegger’s work in the philosophy of logic and Boghossian’s work on inference, I argue that any attempt to explain logical inference as a form of rule following will lead to arguments for the impossibility of logic or an infinite regress. An under-explored alternative to defining all inferences as instances of following a rule is to take some inferences as basic – inferences that do not follow rules and provide a starting point for our inferential practices. I propose that neural networks can provide a useful model for understanding basic inferences as a primitive ability since they show how one can infer in accordance with a logical principle without necessarily following a rule. Determining whether a subject possesses a basic logical concept is arrived at then by interpreting their inferential behaviour.

Few would doubt that one often encounters the preposterous in philosophy.  Some would claim that preposterousness in philosophy is often a matter of literal nonsensicality, i.e. meaninglessness.  Is this plausible or is it itself an example of a preposterous philosophical claim?

In this response to Bloch et al., after thanking them for their careful work exploring what's wrong with modus morons, Haack poses a series of more philosophical questions about the grounds of logic---questions she believes are beyond the scope of the "philosophical proof theory" they adopt. She also explains how her approach to relativism differs from Paul Boghossian's apparently much less nuanced critique.

[Excerpts from the penultimate draft. Includes the front matter, the first section of the preamble, and chapter 1.] *Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind* attempts to solve a grave problem about critical self-reflection. The worry is that we critical thinkers are all in “epistemic bad faith” in light of what psychology tells us. For the research shows not merely that we are bad at detecting “ego-threatening” thoughts à la Freud. It also indicates that we are ignorant of even our ordinary thoughts—e.g., reasons for our moral judgments of others (Haidt 2001), and even mundane reasons for buying one pair of stockings over another! (Nisbett & Wilson 1977) However: Self-reflection presupposes an ability to know what one thinks in the first place. So if ignorance is the norm, why attempt self-reflection? The activity would just show naivety about psychology. Yet while respecting all the data, this book argues that, remarkably, we are infallible in a (limited) range self-discerning judgments. Even so, infallibility does not imply indubitability, and there is no Cartesian ambition to provide a “foundation” for empirical knowledge. The point is rather to explain how self-reflection as a rational activity is possible.

Paul Boghossian regards constructivism about the explanation of belief as one of the theses espoused by the constructivist picture of knowledge. The strong version of this thesis assumes the cause of belief exclusively social and gives no place to epistemic reasons and its weak version while making room for epistemic reasons, never considers them sufficient without the intervention of social influences. Boghossian explicitly considers the strong version of this thesis to be rooted in the Strong Program, but implicitly attributes its weak version to it. He tries hard to refute both versions; however, as I will indicate in this paper, his criticisms are based either on unsuccessful arguments or on a misconception of the Strong Program. Since, this program does not consider epistemic reasons ineffective or insufficient in creating belief; rather, it considers the reasons themselves socially constructed or constituted. Therefore, the Strong Program’s position does not undermine rational discourse and contrary to Boghossian’s claim, its proponents can argue in defense of themselves without committing any contradictions or falling into the trap of self-refutation.

By virtue of a contextual interpretation of our few Protagorean fragments, this paper argues that he (in opposition to the Platonic ideal of complete reproduction of absolute certainty) tries to teach virtue and the capacity of judgment through processes of consideration, insight, imitation and practice. Accordingly, his homo-mensura entails a moderate relativism that combines critical self-awareness and the ambition to improve our knowledge with a preference for proliferation of theories. Against stereotypical reservations from Plato to Boghossian, I defend Protagoras position as sustained, attractive, and virtuous epistemic attitude.

According to Wright’s Judgement-Dependent account of intention, facts about a subject’s intentions can be taken to be constituted by facts about the subject’s best opinions about them formed under certain optimal conditions. This paper aims to defend this account against three main objections which have been made to it by Boghossian, Miller and implicitly by Wright himself. It will be argued that Miller’s objection is implausible because it fails to take into account the partial-determination claim in this account. Boghossian’s objection also fails because it is based on an unjustified reductionist reading of Wright’s account. However, Wright’s own attempt to resist Boghossian’s objection seems to display a shift from his Judgement-Dependent account to an Interpretationist account of self-knowledge, in which case Wright’s new account would face the same problem which he himself has previously put forward in the case of Davidson’s Interpretationist account of self-knowledge. Nonetheless, I will argue that Wright does not need to make such a move because Boghossian’s objection is not applicable to his account.

Desde la lectura del segundo Wittgenstein podemos repensar la problemática de los desacuerdos: una perspectiva gramatical que no se centra en los posibles fallos epistémicos por parte de los agentes ni en las conclusiones negativas sobre la imposibilidad de resolución argumentativa-racional de los desacuerdos profundos (Fogelin 1984). El propósito de este escrito es destacar algunos aspectos de esta estrategia gramatical para el tratamiento de los desacuerdos a partir de la pregunta por el lugar que la ciencia cumple en ciertos debates en el que las discrepancias aparentan no tener una posible resolución.

Paul Boghossian, no seu artigo não-publicado " The normativity of meaning revisited " , reassume um debate com Allan Gibbard e argumenta em favor de duas teses, entre outras: (1) A normatividade do significado não pode ser explicada em termos da normatividade da crença. (2) A afirmação de que o significado é normativo e a afirmação de que o significado tem um papel justificatório são diferentes. Nesta nota eu apresento brevemente algumas questões sobre os argumentos de Boghossian para (1) e (2).

La critique universaliste du relativisme s'appuie d'abord sur l'argument de la "contradiction performative", en quoi elle ne fait que s'adresser à ceux qui, déjà, ont rallié le principe de non-contradiction, et donc un certain usage de la raison. Il s'agit ici d'étudier les modalités de cette contradiction performative et la seconde vie qu'elle retrouve dans le domaine politique, notamment autour de la possibilité de la subversion, laquelle, selon Boghossian, exige de l'esclave qu'il s'appuie sur le sol ferme de la vérité pour transgresser le discours du maître. Nous essayons de substituer, au "véritaire", le "possibilitaire", sous un versant tant politique que métaphysique : car le relativisme n'est pas qu'un principe régulateur pour les sciences humaines (histoire, ethnologie, etc.) ; il doit aussi être pris comme un discours sérieux sur les possibles. L'opposition du possibilitaire au véritaire est aussi celle de la réinvention permanente aux fixismes confortables.

McTaggart, in his famous paper, “The Unreality of Time” (1908), argues in favor of the sceptical claim that time is unreal. His main argument is based on detecting a paradox in our ordinary descriptions of time, or events occurring in time. Based on our common sense conception of time, time and the events happening in it can be described in two ways: either as having the properties of “being past”, “being present” and “being future”, or as having the properties of “being earlier than”, “being later than”, or “being simultaneous with”. McTaggart argues that employing the second sort of properties fails to properly explain “change” in time. However, having assumed the essentiality of the first type of properties to time, McTaggart argues that these properties themselves  will lead to a paradox, according to which all events are at the same time in the past, present, and future. In this essay, we are going to provide a clear exposition of McTaggart’s argument and briefly review some of the main responses to it. We will then show that McTaggart’s argument will amount to error-theory about the content of our utterances about time. We will then employ Boghossian’s argument against error-theory (1990) to show why McTaggart’s argument leads to paradoxical conclusions.

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مک‌تاگارت، در مقالة معروف خود به نام «غیر‌ واقعی بودن زمان» (1908)، درباب عدم وجود زمان استدلال می‌کند.
استدلال اصلی او مبتنی است بر استدلالی دیگر مبنی بر اینکه توصیف ما از زمان به تناقض منجر می‌شود. به اعتقاد او، ما زمان و رویدادهایی را که در زمان رخ می‌دهند به دو صورت مختلف صورتبندی می‌کنیم: بر اساس صورتبندی نخست، یک رویداد یا در گذشته رخ داده است، یا در زمان حال در حال رخ دادن است، و یا در آینده رخ خواهد داد؛ بر اساس صورت‌بندی دوم، می‌گوییم که رویداد الف همزمان، زودتر، و یا دیرتر از رویداد ب رخ داده است.‌ مک‌تاگارت ابتدا استدلال می‌کند که توصیف دوم از زمان برای تبیین «تغییر» در زمان ضروری نیست و اساساً نمی‌تواند تغییر را تبیین کند؛ بنابراین، تنها توصیف نخست است که برای تبیین مفهوم «تغییر» ضروری است. وی سپس استدلال می‌کند که پیشفرض گرفتن توصیف نخست، منجر به تناقض خواهد شد. به این معنا، چون پیشفرض گرفتن نحوة نخست از توصیف زمان برای واقعی بودن زمان ضروری است و از آنجاییکه این پیشفرض به تناقض می¬انجامد، نتیجه می‌گیریم که زمان غیر‌واقعی است. در این نوشتار، تلاش خواهد شد که ابتدا صورتبندی کاملی از استدلال مک‌تاگارت ارائه شود و سپس، به برخی از اصلی‌ترین واکنش‌ها به این استدلال اشاره گردد. در انتها، تلاش خواهیم کرد که انتقادی متفاوت را درباره استدلال مک‌تاگارت معرفی‌کنیم که بر اساس آن، استدلال مک‌تاگارت به تأیید نظریة غیر-واقع¬گرایی (Irrealism)، و بطور خاص نظریه خطا (Error Theory) خواهد انجامید. سپس، با استفاده از استدلال پاول بقوسیان (Boghossian, 1990) علیه این نظریه، استدلال خواهد شد که چنین دیدگاهی در مورد تبیین محتوای اظهارات ما درباب زمان به تناقض منتهی خواهد شد.

I reply here to philosopher Paul Boghossian’s purported exposure and refutation of the alleged "unpalatable relativism" of what he understands as the  constructivism of contemporary sociology of science as supposedly illustrated by my article, “Cutting-edge Equivocation:: Conceptual Moves and Rhetorical  Strategies in Contemporary Anti-Epistemology..”

Content externalism about memory says that the individuation of memory contents depends on relations the subject bears to his past environment. I defend externalism about memory by arguing that neither philosophical nor psychological considerations stand in the way of accepting the context dependency of memory that follows from externalism.

According to the so-called metaphysical conception of analyticity, analytic truths are true in virtue of meaning (or content) alone and independently of (extralinguistic) facts. Quine and Boghossian have tried to present a conclusive argument against the metaphysical conception of analyticity. In effect, they tried to show that the metaphysical conception inevitably leads into a highly implausible view about the truthmakers of analytic truths. We would like to show that their argument fails, since it relies on an ambiguity of the notion of ‘independence of (extralinguistic) facts’. If one distinguishes between variation independence and existence independence, the unwelcome view about the truthmakers of analytic truths no longer follows. Thus, there is at best a challenge, but no conclusive argument. The door to the metaphysical conception of analyticity is still open.1

According to Wright’s Judgement-Dependent account of intention, facts about a subject’s intentions are viewed as constituted by the subject’s best opinions, or judgements, about them formed under certain optimal conditions. If such conditions hold, the subject has an intention if and only if she judges that she has that intention. Boghossian, however, has objected that this account faces a problem: How can the content of such fact-constituting judgements get determined? Wright’s account, thus, has to deal with a dilemma: either it would be trapped in a vicious regress of appealing to higher-order judgements or it should treat such a content-determining process as a mysterious process. In order to respond to Boghossian, Wright invites a Davidsonian Interpretationist Proposal, according to which the content of the subject’s judgements gets fixed by the judgements of an interpreter. In this talk, I will argue that Wright’s manoeuvre is hopeless as it either fails to resist Boghossian’s objection or results in a collapse in the account as a First-Person-Based Judgement-Dependent account of intention.

I argue that the accounts of inference recently presented (in this journal) by Paul Boghossian, John Broome, and Crispin Wright are unsatisfactory. I proceed in two steps: First, in Sects. 1 and 2, I argue that we should not accept what Boghossian calls the “Taking Condition on inference” as a condition of adequacy for accounts of inference. I present a different condition of adequacy and argue that it is superior to the one offered by Boghossian. More precisely, I point out that there is an analog of Moore’s Paradox for inference; and I suggest that explaining this phenomenon is a condition of adequacy for accounts of inference. Boghossian’s Taking Condition derives its plausibility from the fact that it apparently explains the analog of Moore’s Paradox. Second, in Sect. 3, I show that neither Boghossian’s, nor Broome’s, nor Wright’s account of inference meets my condition of adequacy. I distinguish two kinds of mistake one is likely to make if one does not focus on my condition of adequacy; and I argue that all three—Boghossian, Broome, and Wright—make at least one of these mistakes.

IPM's Summer School: Meaning Skepticism

In the last session, I introduced Kripke's Wittgenstein's Sceptical Argument. After introducing the sceptical problem and the sceptic's claims, we went on and looked at KW's responses to Dispositionalism and Non-Reductionism. The session ended with remarks from Boghossian and Wright on the plausibility of KW's responses to Non-Reductionism.