We cannot infer by accepting testimony Abstract While we can judge and believe things by merely accepting testimony, we cannot make inferences by merely accepting testimony. A good theory of inference should explain this. The theories that are best suited to explain this fact seem to be theories that accept a so-called intuitional construal of Boghossian’s Taking Condition.

Responsibility and the limits of good and evil Abstract P.F. Strawson’s compatibilism has had considerable influence. However, as Watson has argued in “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil” (1987/2008), his view appears to have a disturbing consequence: extreme evil exempts an agent from moral responsibility. This is a reductio of the view. Moreover, in some cases our emotional reaction to an evildoer’s history clashes with our emotional expressions of blame. Anyone’s actions can be explained by his or her history, however, and thereby can conflict with our present blame. Additionally, we too might have been evil if our history had been like the unlucky evildoer’s. Thus, our emotional responses to the evildoer compromise our standing to blame them. Since Strawson’s view demarcates moral responsibility by moral emotional responses, his view appears to be self-defeating. In this paper, I defend the Strawsonian view from the reductio and self-defeat problems. I argue that two emotions, disgust and elevation, can be moral reactive attitudes in Strawson’s sense. First, moral disgust expresses neither blame nor exemption from responsibility. Instead, moral disgust presupposes blameworthiness but is instead a distinct response to the extreme wrongdoer. Secondly, moral disgust involves self-directed attitudes that explain away our apparent lack of standing to blame the evil agent. The structure of disgust as a reactive attitude is mirrored along the positive dimension by the emotion that Haidt (2003a) has called “elevation”, a feeling of moral inspiration. I conclude by defending my view from objections about the moral appropriateness of disgust.

Humean laws, explanatory circularity, and the aim of scientific explanation Abstract One of the main challenges confronting Humean accounts of natural law is that Humean laws appear to be unable to play the explanatory role of laws in scientific practice. The worry is roughly that if the laws are just regularities in the particular matters of fact (as the Humean would have it), then they cannot also explain the particular matters of fact, on pain of circularity. Loewer (Philoso Stud 160:115–137, 2012) has defended Humeanism, arguing that this worry only arises if we fail to distinguish between scientific and metaphysical explanations. However, Lange (Philoso Stud 165:255–261, 2013, Synthese 195:1337–1353, 2018) has argued that scientific and metaphysical explanations are linked by a transitivity principle, which would undercut Loewer’s defense and re-ignite the circularity worry for the Humean. I argue here that the Humean has antecedent reasons to doubt that there are any systematic connections between scientific and metaphysical explanations. The reason is that the Humean should think that scientific and metaphysical explanation have disparate aims, and therefore that neither form of explanation is beholden to the other in its pronouncements about what explains what. Consequently, the Humean has every reason to doubt that Lange’s transitivity principle obtains.

Understanding as compression Abstract What is understanding? My goal in this paper is to lay out a new approach to this question and clarify how that approach deals with certain issues. The claim is that understanding is a matter of compressing information about the understood so that it can be mentally useful. On this account, understanding amounts to having a representational kernel and the ability to use it to generate the information one needs regarding the target phenomenon. I argue that this ambitious new account can accommodate much of the data that has motivated theories of understanding in philosophy of science, and can also be generally applicable in epistemology and daily life as well.

In defence of utterly indiscernible entities Abstract Are there entities which are just distinct, with no discerning property or relation? Although the existence of such utterly indiscernible entities is ensured by mathematical and scientific practice, their legitimacy faces important philosophical challenges. I will discuss the most fundamental objections that have been levelled against utter indiscernibles, argue for the inadequacy of the extant arguments to allay perplexity about them, and put forward a novel defence of these entities against those objections.

Quantum metaphysical indeterminacy Abstract On a wide variety of presently live interpretations, quantum mechanics violates the classical supposition of ‘value definiteness’, according to which the properties (‘observables’) of a given particle or system have precise values at all times. Here we consider whether two recent approaches to metaphysical indeterminacy—a metaphysical supervaluationist account, on the one hand, and a determinable-based account, on the other—can provide an intelligible basis for quantum metaphysical indeterminacy (QMI), understood as involving quantum value indefiniteness. After identifying three sources of such QMI, we show that previous arguments (Darby in Australas J Philos 88:227–245, 2010; Skow in Philos Q 60:851–858, 2010) according to which supervaluationism cannot accommodate QMI are unsuccessful; we then provide more comprehensive arguments for this conclusion, which moreover establish that the problems for supervaluationism extend far beyond the orthodox interpretation. We go on to argue that a determinable-based approach can accommodate the full range of sources of QMI.

Being realistic about motivation Abstract T.M. Scanlon’s ‘reasons fundamentalism’ is thought to face difficulties answering the normative question—that is, explaining why it’s irrational to not do what you judge yourself to have most reason to do. I argue that this difficulty results from Scanlon’s failure to provide a theory of mind that can give substance to his account of normative judgment and its tie to motivation. A central aim of this paper is to address that deficiency. To do this, I draw on broadly cognitivist theories of emotion (those of, e.g., Martha Nussbaum and Robert Roberts). These theories are interesting because they view emotions as cognitive states from which motivation emerges. Thus, they provide a model Scanlon can use to develop a richer account of both the judgment-motivation connection and the irrationality of not doing what you judge yourself to have most reason to do. However, the success on this front is only partial—even this more developed proposal fails to give a satisfactory answer to the normative question.

How race travels: relating local and global ontologies of race Abstract This article develops a framework for addressing racial ontologies in transnational perspective. In contrast to simple contextualist accounts, it is argued that a globally engaged metaphysics of race needs to address transnational continuities of racial ontologies. In contrast to unificationist accounts that aim for one globally unified ontology, it is argued that questions about the nature and reality of race do not always have the same answers across national contexts. In order address racial ontologies in global perspective, the article develops a framework that accounts for both continuities and discontinuities by looking beyond the referents of narrowly defined core concepts. By shifting the focus from narrow concepts to richer conceptions of race, racial ontologies become comparable through globally related but nonetheless distinct mappings between conceptions and property relations. The article concludes by showing how this framework can generate novel insights in case studies from Asia, Europe, and Latin America.

It only takes two to tango: against grounding morality in interaction Abstract Most Kantian constructivists try to ground universal duties of interpersonal morality in certain interactions between individuals, such as communication, argumentation, shared action or the second-person standpoint. The goal of this paper is to present these, which I refer to as arguments from the second-person perspective, with a dilemma: either the specific kind of interaction that is taken as a starting point of these arguments is inescapable, but in that case the argument does not justify a universal principle of interpersonal morality. Or interaction does have a principle of interpersonal morality among its necessary conditions of possibility, but such forms of interactions are merely optional. I argue that proponents of arguments from the second-person perspective have failed to provide a convincing response to this dilemma and that this failure is systematic. This suggests that the success of Kantian constructivism depends on the success of arguments from the first person.

On representationalism, common-factorism, and whether consciousness is here and now Abstract A strong form of representationalism says that every conscious property of every mental state can be identified with some part of the state’s representational properties. A weaker representationalism says that some conscious property of some mental state can be identified with some part of the state’s representational properties. David Papineau has recently argued that all such theories are incorrect since (a) they construe consciousness as consisting (partly or wholly) in “relations to propositions or other abstract objects outside space and time”, whereas (b) consciousness is “concrete” and “here and now”. Papineau defends instead a kind of “qualia theory” according to which all conscious properties are intrinsic non-relational properties of subjects. He argues that this theory bypasses the difficulties he identifies for representationalism. Similar worries about representationalism, and similar ideas to the effect that some qualia theory, adverbial theory, or sense-datum theory fares better with respect to these worries are relatively wide-spread. I argue that Papineau’s theory does not bypass the difficulties he identifies for representationalism. In fact, Papineau’s theory arguably has no advantage at all over representationalism with regard to these issues. The features that concern Papineau about representationalist views do not derive—or do not derive solely—from the representationalism of these views. They (also) derive from a common-factorism of these views. And this common-factorism is embraced by Papineau as well as by most theories of consciousness and perception.