Selections from “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge”

New Essays on the Explanation of Action

“…Rejecting the first part of 3* too is a move that might be made by someone who was impressed with John McDowell's (1982) disjunctive approach to appearances that is supposed to defeat the Argument from Illusion in epistemology and who thought it could be carried over to the philosophy of action to defeat the Argument from False Belief.…”

Perceptual Recognition, Emotion, and Value

“…Of course, this raises the question of what we mean by 'reliable', but that issue can wait. 5 Also see (Dretske 1973;McDowell 1982;Cassam 2007: Ch.5;Green 2007;Green 2010;Smith 2010, Smith 2013McNeill 2012 Common-sense surely tells us that both DL e and RC e are satisfied, at least for the so-called 'basic' emotions of joy, surprise, fear, anger, disgust and sadness (Ekman & Davidson 1994: Part I). We typically suppose that there are indeed distinctive ways that joyous, surprised, fearful, angry, disgusted, and sad people look.…”

Moore’sProof, Liberals, and Conservatives – Is There a (Wittgensteinian) Third Way?

“…It is in fact equivalent to talk in terms of propositional as opposed to doxastic warrants. 12 It has to be stressed that this isn't necessarily a fall-back into seduction by the "highest common factor", denounced by McDowell [1982] (although in conversation Jim Pryor has manifested his sympathies with such a view). Even if disjunctivism about perceptual experience were true and seeing and hallucinating were two, mutually exclusive mental states, it would remain that it is metaphysically possible that a subject could not be able to tell which one he is in.…”