David Sosa

NORMATIVITY OF EPISTEMOLOGY

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Course Description

Epistemology is plausibly a normative enterprise. When we consider the nature of justification, especially, but also when we're concerned about the value of knowledge or when we think about the demands of reason, the idea that some epistemic conditions are demanded of us, others prohibited—that some ways of being, epistemically, are better than others—is almost inescapable. The goal of this seminar will be to understand better some of the normative dimensions of epistemic phenomena. What would it be for something to be epistemically good? In what could epistemic excellence consist? One form our pursuit of that issue might take investigates the relevance of pragmatic factors to the status of a judgment. But additional possible topics include closure, contextualist and relativist semantics for knowledge attributions, the epistemic basis of disjunctivism, dogmatism, the ethics of belief, fallibilism, luck, transmission of warrant, and the "truth connection."

Grading

Enrolled students will be expected to make an in-class presentation and to write a paper.

Texts

[Preliminary and subject to revision]

Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits

Sellars, Empiricism and the Scientific Image of Man

Fantl and McGrath, Knowledge in an Uncertain World

McDowell, Mind and World

This course satisfies the M&E requirement

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Course Description

A number of philosophical problems are alike in arising from relations between epistemic states and linguistic phenomena. For one example, we appear to acquire knowledge from each other, in conversation, through hearing each others’ utterances. How best to account for that circumstance? For another example, what should we do when we discover that someone we consider an epistemic peer disagrees with us? Should we become somehow less committed to our own belief? Finally, for what might be a third case, how shall we understand slurs (and aspersions, epithets, and pejoratives)? What state of mind is expressed by sentences containing them? The course will take up these problems.

Grading

Students will be expected to write a substantial term paper.

Texts

Still to be determined. But among them, at least parts of the following will likely figure:

Coady, Testimony

Burge, “Content Preservation”

Lackey, Learning from Words

Christensen, “Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News”

Kelly, “Peer Disagreement and Higher Order Evidence”

Williamson, “Reference, Inference, and the Semantics of Pejoratives”

Richard, When Truth Gives Out

This course satisfies the M&E requirement

POLYSEMANTICISM

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or Instructor required.

Description:

 What we talk about when we talk about ‘about.’ A presupposition of much philosophy of mind and language since at least Frege has been, what we might call “monosemanticism,” that the phenomenon of aboutness is fundamentally uniform. The proposition is at once the meaning of the well-formed declarative sentence and that to which we’re related in any propositional attitude. Propositions univocally constitute the content, in some important sense, of both thoughts and sentences. And they thereby determine what those thoughts and sentences are about. In virtue of having the contents they do, thoughts and sentences alike are apt to have truth conditions and, accordingly, truth values.  

A frustratingly underdeveloped alternative is what I will call “polysemanticism”: that the phenomenon of intentionality is rather fundamentally multiplex. No kind of thing is at once the meaning of a sentence of a natural language and that to which a subject is related in thought. What it is to be the object of an attitude is different in kind from what it is to be the semantic value of a sentence. That idea, for what it’s worth, will be the focus of the seminar: there is more than one way for some thing to present another again—to represent it. And language and thought exploit two different such ways. I think such a view provides a new perspective on long-standing obscurities in philosophy of mind and language, several of which will be reconstrued. But it is not without its own difficulties.  

One central challenge is to explain the nature of communication: an attractively simple view is that (in its paradigm, at least) communication is a matter of one subject’s transmitting the content of a thought of theirs by encoding it in a bit of a common language. But if there’s a sense in which no bit of language can simply encode a thought, then a different account is wanted. One aim of the seminar will be to investigate the motivations for the simple view, and to contemplate the prospects for a radically contrary alternative, according to which linguistic communication is not dependent on any content of thought.  

Grading Policy:

 Students enrolled for credit will be expected to write a paper.  

Texts:

 Selections from Burge, Evans, Frege, Kripke, Loar, Putnam, and Russell, among others.

This course satisfies the M&E requirement.