Matthew McKeon

On the Substitutional Characterization of First-Order Logical Truth

I consider the well-known criticism of Quines characterization of first-order logical truth that it expands the class of logical truths beyond what is sanctioned by the model-theoretic account. Briefly, I argue that at best the criticism is shallow and can be answered with slight alterations in Quines account. At worse the criticism is defective because, in part, it is based on a misrepresentation of Quine. This serves not only to clarify Quines position, but also to crystallize what is and what is not at issue in choosing the model-theoretic account of first-order logical truth over one in terms of substitutions. I conclude by highlighting the need for justifying the belief that the definition of first-order logical truth in terms of models is superior to its definition in terms of substitutions.

Statements of inference and begging the question

I advance a pragmatic account of begging the question according to which a use of an argument begs the question just in case it is used as a statement of inference and it fails to state an inference the arguer or an addressee can perform given what they explicitly believe. Accordingly, what begs questions are uses of arguments as statements of inference, and the root cause of begging the question is an argument’s failure to state an inference performable by the reasoners the arguer targets. In these ways, my account is distinguished from other pragmatic accounts (e.g., Walton, Synthese 152:237–284, 2006; Hazlett, Erkenntnis, 65:343–363, 2006; Truncellito, Argumentation, 18:325–329, 2004 and Wilson, Metaphilosophy, 19:38–52 1988). By taking the defect of a question-begging use of an argument to be its failure to state its purported inference, my account highlights in a unique way why question-begging is not an epistemic defect, and why it is not a fallacy, understood as a mistake in reasoning. These points have been made elsewhere (e.g., Hazlett, Erkenntnis, 65:343–363, 2006; Woods, Dialogues, logics and other strange things: essays in honour of Shahid Rahman, 523–544, 2008), but I believe that their plausibility is enhanced by considering begging the question as nullifying the role of an argument as a statement of inference. Since question-begging uses of arguments fail to state their purported inferences, using an argument in a question-begging-way is not a ratiocinative mistake. This undermines accounts of begging the question that adopt an epistemic approach (e.g., Biro, Metaphilosophy, 8:257–271 1977; Sanford, Metaphilosophy, 12:145–158, 1981; Sinnott-Armstrong, Aus J Philos, 77:174–191, 1999).

Review of "The Tarskian Turn: Deflationism and Axiomatic Truth"

Some recent researches in experimental philosophy have posed a problem for philosophers’ appeal to intuition (hereinafter referred to as PAI); the aim of this paper is to offer an answer to this challenge. The thesis against PAI implies that, given some experimental results, intuition does not seem to be a reliable epistemic source, and —more importantly— given the actual state of knowledge about its operation, we do not have sufficient resources to mitigate its errors and thus establish its reliability. That is why PAI is hopeless. Throughout this paper I will defend my own conception of PAI, which I have called the Deliberative Conception, and consequently, I will defend intersubjective agreement as a means to mitigate PAI errors, offering empirical evidence from recent studies on the Argumentative Theory of Reason that favor the conception I defend here. Finally, I will reply to some objections that might arise against the Deliberative Conception, which will lead me to discuss some metaphilosophical issues that are significantly relevant for the future of the dispute about the appeal to intuition. 1. Preliminary remarks Before creating false expectations, I would like to clarify my purpose in this article. What I am trying to do in this paper is not to undertake an out-and-out defense of philosophers’ appeal to intuition (PAI). Nor do I want to provide the reader and the opponent to intuition with sufficient scientific or psychological evidence to establish, in an incontrovertible way, the legitimacy of appealing to intuition. In order to reach that point, I think, a huge amount of work remains to be done, especially in psychology, though remarkable advances have recently been made —among others, the one I will review in Section 3 below. Some empirical research will remain pending as regards the specific and particular problems that PAI involves and the possible ways to mitigate them, following from the substantive proposal I defend here. My aim is, then, to reply to a very particular challenge raised against PAI: the question whether there could in principle be a method to mitigate PAI errors given the actual state of psychological scientific knowledge about intuition. _____________________________ Corresponding Author: D. E. Szmuc Universidad de Buenos Aires – GAF email dami.tih@gmail.com Essays Philos (2012) 13:1 Szmuc | 337 Section 2 will discuss the challenge as described by Weinberg (2007). I will not seek to reconstruct Weinberg’s position about the appeal to intuition, but merely to state clearly and distinctly the problem of hope for PAI. The key issue will be to identify the sources of hope for an epistemic resource to be reliable, in order to examine whether intuition counts as one of these hopeful resources or not. As one might expect, given the title of this paper, I understand Weinberg and other philosophers as adhering to the position that —at least in the current state of scientific knowledge about intuition— it is not a reliable resource. In Section 3, I will discuss and explain my own proposal to solve the problem and restore hope to intuition. My proposal depends on a substantive thesis regarding intuition, which I believe to be supported by the experiments I mention there. One key requirement for the reader to understand my view is to notice that I conceive philosophical activity as essentially argumentative when it comes to expecting correct results. That is why I am interested, above all, in the use of reason and reflection in deliberative contexts. In this Section I will present a method for mitigating PAI errors which is closely tied to “reasoning,” so that the challenge could be regarded as overcome. However, as shown by the scientific studies on the Argumentative Theory of Reason that I mention, in some cases it is worth distinguishing between two kinds of reasoning: intuitive reasoning and reasoning proper. In the relevant part I will discuss whether their nature is opposed or complementary —and to what extent they can lead us to right answers. Throughout Section 4, I will deal with some problems in the conception I defend. Primarily, the idea that deliberative reflection about a certain topic could be unfortunate and lead, however, to false and intolerant beliefs that are incoherent with wellcorroborated scientific knowledge. To tackle these issues I will discuss some metaphilosophical theses of great interest for further discussion regarding the general debate on the practice of appealing to intuition. 2. The challenge: Losing hope My aim in this section is not to reconstruct Jonathan Weinberg’s position about PAI, but has rather a conceptual nature: to understand the problem posed by Weinberg (2007), which seems to me interesting to answer. I use the word “hope,” regardless of connotations, in a strictly technical sense. Weinberg says: A source of evidence that is not practically infallible is hopeful to the extent that we have the capacity to detect and correct its errors. Parallelism (as well as malice aforethought) demands that we similarly stipulate the term hopeless for devices for which our practices lack an appropriate Essays Philos (2012) 13:1 Szmuc | 338 sensitivity to their errors, and capacity for correction when such errors are found... (H): Any putative source of evidence that is hopeless ought not be trusted (2007: 327) Thus, sufficient methods to mitigate errors are, naturally, the so-called sources of hope. It is important to point out that many of the objections and fears about intuition have been highlighted particularly by authors engaged in experimental philosophy (who nevertheless have remarkable differences among themselves in interests and objectives), because of its idiosyncratic nature. In other words, through a series of experiments they have shown that when philosophically irrelevant changes are made in describing or conducting thought experiments (such as framing effects, order effects, Side-Effect effects, etc.), subjects’ intuitions tend to be incoherent and inconsistent with each other. Worse still, they have shown that the percentage sharing some intuitions varies among different ethnic, socioeconomic and cultural groups. Given this information, intuition does not seem capable to play its usual role as the last stage in the justification process. This makes it worth asking whether or not intuition is a reliable source of evidence. The sources of hope Weinberg lists are: External corroboration. Corroboration that others make of our statements and that we ourselves do of the content of our statements against the world. Thus understood, intuitions would assert a certain propositional content, which, if corroborated in most cases, would make PAI reliable. Alternatively, if we were able to mitigate PAI errors even though its results are largely not corroborated, intuition would be a reliable source of evidence. The key question is how we are going to corroborate the philosophical propositions expressed by our intuitions. Taking, for example, the case of moral philosophy, this is not at all clear, something that Weinberg admits (2007: 338-9). Thus, we have neither a general way of external corroboration for philosophical propositions nor—concomitantly—a way to mitigate any of its eventual errors, and so intuition does not have this first source of hope. Detectability of margins. In other words, sensitivity to those circumstances where the resource in question is less likely to yield good results. Weinberg argues that because there are harder and weaker intuitions, it would be necessary to provide a scale to weigh what standards of “intuitive certainty” are required not to make a hasty statement (2007: 335). However, we have not yet found a way to establish a certainty scale or to identify intuition’s margins of relevance. We do not know under which circumstances intuition might work well, and under which it might not. Therefore, intuition does not have this source of hope either. Essays Philos (2012) 13:1 Szmuc | 339 Theoretical illumination. This refers to certain knowledge about the operation of those resources we use. The existence of a complete theory is not a strictly necessary requirement (since it would be too demanding), but we can certainly expect to have the start of a theoretical formulation about the operation of the resource used. Weinberg points out that, given the obscure nature of intuition as a kind of “intellectual seeming,” we do not know its psychological origin and are not sure about the uniqueness of such origin (2007: 336-7). That is why intuition fails to have this source of hope. I believe, however, that the studies I mention in Section 3 provide an interesting objection to this claim. Internal coherence. It concerns both internal, intrasubjective, as well as external, intersubjective, coherence. If coherence can be reached through reflection, so that it can eliminate the errors from PAI outcomes, its reliability could in principle be restored. Weinberg’s answers to this alternative that thinking deeply about a certain theme could put us in touch with our true intuitions and, above all, lead us to intersubjective convergence are expressed as follows: But this is a mere empirical possibility, and there is some evidence that tells against it. (...) It seems that especially thoughtful people tend to lock in their initial judgments, and their very thoughtfulness allows them to rationalize away those considerations that might have led to future revisions. (2007: 338; emphasis mine) From which he arrives at the very challenge which has led me to write this paper: [W]hen they appeal to the claim that greater reflection will yield greater convergence, the defenders have at best a weak and untested empirical “maybe.” But they need better than that —they need to score a real source of hope, and in the absence of positive confirming evidence that reflection will yield it, the appeal to reflection here does not look like hope so much as i

A plea for logical objects

An account of validity that makes what is invalid conditional on how many individuals there are is what I call a conditional account of validity. Here I defend conditional accounts against a criticism derived from Etchemendy’s well-known criticism of the model-theoretic analysis of validity. The criticism is essentially that knowledge of the size of the universe is non-logical and so by making knowledge of the extension of validity depend on knowledge of how many individuals there are, conditional accounts fail to reflect that the former knowledge is basic, i.e., independent of knowledge derived from other sciences. Appealing to Russell’s pre-Principia logic, I defend conditional accounts against this criticism by sketching a rationale for thinking that there are infinitely many logical objects.

A defense of the kripkean account of logical truth in first-order modal logic

This paper responds to criticism of the Kripkean account of logical truth in first-order modal logic. The criticism, largely ignored in the literature, claims that when the box and diamond are interpreted as the logical modality operators, the Kripkean account is extensionally incorrect because it fails to reflect the fact that all sentences stating truths about what is logically possible are themselves logically necessary. I defend the Kripkean account by arguing that some true sentences about logical possibility are not logically necessary.