According to content externalism, the content of our thought is partly determined by the linguistic environment responsible for it. However, there is growing skepticism about the compatibility of content externalism and self-knowledge. The skeptical position holds that, if content externalism is true, then we cannot know our own thought content because we would not be able to discriminate it from relevant alternative thought contents. This argument rests on the proposition that knowledge requires some type of discriminability. In this paper, I argue that this requirement does not apply to a particular type of demonstrative thoughts, more specifically, that in a typical case where we demonstratively denote an object without taking it as anything in particular, our secondorder judgment about our own thinking, whose content includes this use of a demonstrative, constitutes knowledge without due discriminability.
This paper expounds two types of creativities in philosophy while exploring several influential philosophical views and thought experiments. The two types of creativities include constitutive creativity and depictive creativity. Constitutive creativity refers to the capabilities required for constructing theoretical equipment or tools needed to constitute the core of a given philosophical thought. It can be assessed in terms of the appropriateness of the theoretical apparatuses used in the target idea. The embodiment of constitutive creativity is often coupled with depictive creativity. Depictive creativity refers to the abilities to cite striking examples or build narratives that support the issue at hand. The assessment of depictive creativity depends on the ingenuity of the examples or stories insofar as they positively contribute to the establishment of the desired conclusion. While elucidating the notions of constitutive and depictive creativities by examining several examples in the literature of philosophy, I highlight that critical thinking operates as the cornerstone on top of which both types of creativities may be built.
The central claim of the Parfitian psychological approach to personal identity is that the fact about personal identity is underpinned by a "non-branching" psychological continuity relation. Hence, for the advocates of the Parfitian view, it is important to understand what it is for a relation to take or not take a branching form. Nonetheless, very few attempts have been made in the literature of personal identity to define the "non-branching clause." This paper undertakes this task. Drawing upon a recent debate between Anthony Brueckner and Harold Noonan on the issue, I present three candidates for the non-branching clause.The psychological approach to personal identity holds that a person existing at one time is identical to a person existing at another time just in case they stand in a certain appropriate psychological relation. One problem of this approach is that in a typical case of fission, a pre-fission subject seems to stand in a perfectly appropriate psychological relation to both post-fission offshoots; but, of course, she cannot be identical to both. As a champion of the psychological approach, Derek Parfit has responded to this problem by arguing that the fact about personal identity consists in the holding of a psychological relation that does not take a "branching" form (1984: 262-63). On this view, the prefission subject is not identical to either offshoot because the psychological relation holding between them does take a branching form.For those who follow Parfit on this solution, then, it is pressing to accomplish two tasks: (1) clarify the psychological relation that underlies personal identity and (2) define what it is for that relation to take a non-branching form. Parfit has already done successful work for the first task. He calls the desired psychological relation
Psychological Sequentialism holds that no causal constraint is necessary for the preservation of what matters in survival; rather, it is sufficient for preservation if two groups of mental states are similar enough and temporally close enough. Suppose that one's body is instantaneously dematerialized and subsequently, by an amazing coincidence, a collection of molecules is configured to form a qualitatively identical human body. According to Psychological Sequentialism, these events preserve what matters in survival. In this article, I examine some of the main arguments for the view and argue that they fail to establish that no causal constraint is necessary. I also argue that Psychological Sequentialism yields implausible consequences that render it hard to accept the view.
In addressing the Lucretian symmetry problem, the temporal bias approach claims that death is bad because it deprives us of something about which it is rational to care (e.g., future pleasures), whereas prenatal nonexistence is not bad because it only deprives us of something about which it is rational to remain indifferent (e.g., past pleasures). In a recent contribution to the debate on this approach, Miguel and Santos argue that a late beginning can deprive us of a future pleasure. Their argument is based on the claim that for birth or death to deprive a person of any value in life, the historically closest counterfactual situation that contains the value is such that the person begins to exist earlier or dies later. This is what they call the Historical Condition. However, the Historical Condition is untenable for several reasons. First, this condition substantially weakens the explanatory capacity of the deprivation account because it implies that most ordinary sorts of pleasures are not deprived by death. In addition, the Historical Condition is vulnerable to counterexamples. In particular, what they offer as a standard case of the deprivation of future pleasure due to a late beginning (what they call Seeing The Beatles), or some of its variants, can be used to falsify this condition. Finally, the Historical Condition is theoretically indefensible because it is based on a faulty analysis of deprivation. KeywordsBrueckner and Fischer • Evil of death • Historical closeness • Historical condition • Lucretius • Miguel and Santos • Symmetry problem • Temporal bias approach * Huiyuhl Yi
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