Brendan Balcerak Jackson

Verbal Disputes and Substantiveness

One way to challenge the substantiveness of a particular philosophical issue is to argue that those who debate the issue are engaged in a merely verbal dispute. For example, it has been maintained that the apparent disagreement over the mind/brain identity thesis is a merely verbal dispute, and thus that there is no substantive question of whether or not mental properties are identical to neurological properties. The goal of this paper is to help clarify the relationship between mere verbalness and substantiveness. I first argue that we should see mere verbalness as a certain kind of discourse defect that arises when the parties differ as to what each takes to be the immediate question under discussion. I then argue that mere verbalness, so understood, does not imply that the question either party is attempting to address is a non-substantive one. Even if it turns out that the parties to the mind/brain dispute are addressing subtly different questions, these might both be substantive questions to which their respective metaphysical views provide substantive answers. One reason it is tempting to reach deflationary conclusions from the charge of mere verbalness is that we fail to distinguish it from the claim that a sentence under dispute is, in a certain sense, indisputable. Another reason is that we fail to distinguish mere verbalness from a certain sort of indeterminacy. While indisputability and indeterminacy plausibly capture forms of nonsubstantiveness, I argue that mere verbalness is insufficient to establish either indisputability or indeterminacy.

Understanding and philosophical methodology

According to Conceptualism, philosophy is an independent discipline that can be pursued from the armchair because philosophy seeks truths that can be discovered purely on the basis of our understanding of expressions and the concepts they express. In his recent book, The Philosophy of Philosophy, Timothy Williamson argues that while philosophy can indeed be pursued from the armchair, we should reject any form of Conceptualism. In this paper, we show that Williamson’s arguments against Conceptualism are not successful, and we sketch a way to understand understanding that shows that there is a clear sense in which we can indeed come to know the answers to (many) philosophical questions purely on the basis of understanding.

Reasoning as a source of justification

In this essay we argue that reasoning can sometimes generate epistemic justification, rather than merely transmitting justification that the subject already possesses to new beliefs. We also suggest a way to account for it in terms of the relationship between epistemic normative requirements, justification and cognitive capacities.

Structural entailment and semantic natural kinds

Is there a principled difference between entailments in natural language that are valid solely in virtue of their form or structure and those that are not? This paper advances an affirmative answer to this question, one that takes as its starting point Gareth Evans’s suggestion that semantic theory aims to carve reality at the joints by uncovering the semantic natural kinds of the language. I sketch an Evans-inspired account of semantic kinds and show how it supports a principled account of structural entailment. I illustrate the account by application to a case study involving the entailment properties of adverbs; this involves developing a novel proposal about the semantics for adverbs like ‘quickly’ and ‘slowly’. In the course of the discussion I explore some implications of the account for the place of model-theoretic tools in natural language semantics.

Against the perceptual model of utterance comprehension

What accounts for the capacity of ordinary speakers to comprehend utterances of their language? The phenomenology of hearing speech in one’s own language makes it tempting to many epistemologists to look to perception for an answer to this question. That is, just as a visual experience as of a red square is often taken to give the perceiver immediate justification for believing that there is a red square in front of her, perhaps an auditory experience as of the speaker asserting that p gives the competent hearer immediate justification for believing that the speaker has asserted that p. My aim here is to offer reasons for resisting this temptation. I argue that the perceptual model cannot adequately account for the hearer’s justification in many cases. The arguments here also allow us to draw certain further morals about the role of phenomenology in the epistemology of perception.

Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise

This book deals with standards of rationality for collective acts. Weirich believes that individual rationality should be consistent with group rationality (in the sense that a collectively rational act cannot require an irrational act by any member). He therefore proposes that group acts (which are not ‘directly controlled’) should be evaluated by the principle of compositionality, according to which the rationality of a composite act depends upon the rationality of its constituent simple acts. Thus, a sufficient condition for the rationality of a group act is that its individual members’ acts are rational. This standard for collective rationality replaces other proposed standards such as efficiency or utility maximization; according toWeirich, efficiency is a goal of collective rationality but not a standard, because collective rationality takes account of circumstances (that is, what is rationally attainable for individuals). The standard for individual rationality is self-support (that an option is rational for the agent given that it was chosen), and joint rationality consists of a profile of self-supporting strategies. As a standard for collective rationality, Weirich argues for ‘strategic equilibrium’, a less stringent standard than ‘Nash equilibrium’, which arises from a profile of selfsupporting strategies among group members. Weirich spends several chapters discussing ‘coalitional games’ in which members can form jointly-acting coalitions; he argues for strategic equilibrium as a standard for solutions to such games. He claims that the standard of strategic equilibrium is mostly consistent with other proposed standards for collective rationality (or has better intuitive support in cases where there is a conflict). The final chapter contains some brief and very abstract remarks on potential applications of his theory to social institutions, and about the relationship between game theory and decision theory. Weirich believes that a major advantage of his proposal is that it enables the unification of decision theory and game theory. Readers should be warned that the book is exceedingly dry, and written in a highly disconcerting stop-start style. Moreover, the intended audience is unclear: those not already ‘insiders’ will find it impossible to follow without supplementary reading. Technical concepts and arguments are frequently not explained, and there is virtually no context or signposting to help the reader discern the relevance of a given discussion. Those already familiar with the issues and debates may find this book interesting; anyone wishing to learn about the field would do better to read something else.