Carnap and Popper proposed ways scientists have to work. According to Carnap, they should look for confirmations for hypotheses. In Popper‘s view, what is important is to try to falsify hypotheses. Cognitive science seems to prove that, in real scientific research, both activities play a role. First, people attempt to confirm hypotheses. Second, they seek examples refuting those hypotheses. This paper is intended to show that the theory of mental models can describe the mental processes involved in both tasks: confirmation and falsification. It addresses the mental possibilities individuals consider in both cases. In addition, the paper reveals that, in accordance with both Carnap‘s framework and Popper‘s approach, both mental activities are related to conditional reasoning.

Blackburn and Searle have argued that Quine‘s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation results in a denial of the sort of first-person authority that we commonly concede we have over our mental and semantical content. For, the indeterminacy thesis implies that there is no determinate meaning to know at all. And, according to Quine, the indeterminacy holds at home too. For Blackburn, Quine must constrain the domain of indeterminacy to the case of translation only. Searle believes that Quine has no other choice but to give up on his behaviorism. Hylton, however, has attempted to defend Quine against these objections, by arguing that Quine‘s naturalistic claim that speaking a language is nothing but possessing certain dispositions to act in specific ways would enable him to accommodate first-person authority. I will argue that the objections from Blackburn and Searle, as well as Hylton‘s solution, are all problematic when seen from within Quine‘s philosophy. I will introduce a sort of Strawsonian-Wittgensteinian conception of first-person authority and offer that it would be more than compatible with Quine‘s naturalistic philosophy.

Philosophy plausibly aims at knowledge; it would thus be tempting to hold that much of the value of doing philosophy turns on securing knowledge. Enter the agnostic challenge: suppose that a philosophical agnostic (named 'Betsy‘) wants to discover only fundamental philosophical truths. However, the intractable disagreement among philosophical experts gives her pause. After reflecting on expert disagreement, she decides that doing philosophy, for her truth-seeking error-avoiding purposes, is irrational. In this paper, I argue that the agnostic challenge isn‘t easily overcome. Although there are many reasons to do philosophy, the agnostic challenge implies there is less value to doing philosophy than many philosophers may have believed.

According to the so-called truth norm, we ought to believe that A if and only if A is true. There are many possible interpretations of this norm. What does 'ought‘ in this norm mean? Does 'ought‘ have a wide or a narrow scope, etc.? In this paper, I will investigate one version of this norm and I will discuss two arguments for it. The 'ought‘ in the paper will be interpreted as a kind of 'rational‘ ought that takes wide scope. I will call the first argument for the truth norm 'the extrapolation argument‘ and the second argument 'the abductive argument.‘ According to the extrapolation argument, we 'derive‘ the truth norm from a reflection on what it means to be a perfect believer. According to the abductive argument, the truth norm is supported by the fact that it can be used to deduce many other plausible doxastic norms. If this argument is successful, the truth norm can be conceived as the fundamental norm of (theoretical) rationality (or wisdom).

In a recent article, Bernáth and Tőzsér (2021) defend what they call the Bias Argument, a new skeptical argument from expert peer disagreement. They argue that the best contrastive causal explanation for disagreement among leading experts in philosophy is that they adopt their positions in a biased way. But if the leading experts are biased, non-experts either are also biased or only avoid bias through epistemic inferiority. Recognizing this is expected to prompt one to decrease one‘s confidence in one‘s philosophical beliefs. This paper argues that some beliefs are immune to a key premise of the Bias Argument. To show this, the paper develops the concepts of self-favoring theories, decisive support, and standing-incommensurable disagreements. A plausible example of a self-favoring theory, dubbed Mere Reformed Protestantism, is sketched. Many disagreements over self-favoring theories and over beliefs decisively supported by self-favoring theories are shown to be standing-incommensurable. It is then argued that when non-experts are in standing-incommensurable disagreements with experts, the standards of assessing expertise are themselves controverted. This result undercuts the move in the Bias Argument from expert bias to non-expert bias. Finally, a couple reservations about the role of self-favoring theories in philosophy are addressed.

It has recently been argued that when one conducts an inquiry into some question one ought to suspend belief with respect to that question. But what about hunches? In this short note, a hunch about the cause of a phenomenon is described. The hunch plays a role in the inquiry into the cause of the phenomenon. It appears that the hunch constitutes a belief that need not be suspended during the inquiry even though belief about the precise cause of the phenomenon is suspended.

We argue that knowledge doesn‘t require any of truth, justification, or belief. This is so for four primary reasons. First, each of the three conditions has been subject to convincing counterexamples. In addition, the resultant account explains the value of knowledge, manifests important theoretical virtues (in particular, simplicity), and avoids commitment to skepticism.

In this paper, we explore some links between deliberative democracy, natural testimony, and epistemic injustice. We hope to highlight the exclusionary effects of some cases of testimony-related epistemic injustice within the deliberative democratic framework and, in particular, two subtle ways of epistemic injustice that are not often highlighted in the political domain. In other words, we hope to highlight two specific mechanisms of epistemic exclusion within the democratic deliberative process that are not explicitly noticed in the relevant literature. In section 1, we present the deliberative model of democracy and the deliberative process. We then introduce the notion of epistemic (dis)enfranchisement, which we distinguish from formal enfranchisement, and explain the role that natural testimony plays in establishing citizens‘ epistemic enfranchisement. In section 2, we introduce Fricker‘s notion of testimonial injustice and two further testimony-related forms of epistemic injustice which seem to have been largely neglected in the debate so far, namely, discursive injustice and testimonial void. We also point out negative epistemic consequences of positive identity-prejudicial stereotypes. In section 3, we argue that these testimony-related forms of epistemic injustice can lead to epistemic disenfranchisement, which, we note, is an obstacle to deliberative democracy that warrants serious consideration.

It is a widely held view that lying is defined in the traditional tripartite model as the conjunction of a statement, the false belief, and the intended deception. Much of the criticisms have been levelled at the third condition—intended deception—with contemporary counterexamples. My main criticism of the traditional and contemporary model of lying centres on that philosophers discard the social existence of the hearer. Schutz‘s phenomenological sociology gives a sheer inspiration to redefine the third condition by taking the hearer as a consciously social being into account. Lying should be an intersubjective action for the Other from the perspective of the liar; it might be, thus, reasonable to assume that there should be commonsense awareness between the speaker and the hearer. This paper, by focusing on this commonsenseness and its typifications , introduces a new approach to the third condition: S must intend that H be induced to believe that p, where p is false. In this regard, once you lie, by being subjected to the taken-for-granted commonsenseness in our daily life, you must try as hard as possible to succeed in deceiving the hearer by stating that p. You, as a typical person, tell a typical lie in typical contexts for typical Others. The focus of attention, therefore, is on the hearer and it is the key to understanding that mere intent to deceive is too broad and unpragmatic for a social human being who always intends to flee the negative consequences of the context in which she has to lie. Making the extension narrower necessitates a new term, anti-social bullshit generally being replied rhetorically as "how can you expect me to believe that?" comprises the excluded cases.

Fricker‘s Epistemic Injustice discusses the idea of testimonial injustice, specifically, being harmed in one‘s capacity as a knower. Fricker‘s own theory of testimonial injustice emphasizes the role of prejudice. She argues that prejudice is necessary for testimonial injustice and that when hearers use a prejudice to give a deficit to the credibility of speakers hearers intrinsically harm speakers in their capacity as a knower. This paper rethinks the connections between prejudice and testimonial injustice. I argue that many cases of prejudicial credibility deficits do not intrinsically harm speakers. Further, I suggest that prejudice is not necessary for harming speakers. I provide my own proposal on which testimonial injustice occurs when speaker‘s capacity as a giver of knowledge is interfered with in important ways. My proposal does not give prejudice any essential role.

In this article I discuss two counterexamples (the New Evil Demon Problem and Norman‘s Clairvoyance) to reliabilism and a potential solution: dispositional reliabilism. The latter is a recent addition to the many already-existing varieties of reliabilism and faces some serious problems of its own. I argue here that these problems are surmountable. The resulting central argument of the article aims to demonstrate how viewing reliabilism as an intrinsic dispositional property solves many of the issues facing reliabilism to date.

Günther recently suggested a 'new‘ conditional. This conditional is not new, as already remarked by Wansing and Omori. It is just David Lewis‘ forgotten alternative 'doctored‘ conditional and part of a larger class termed neutral conditionals. In this paper, I answer some questions raised by Wansing and Omori, concerning the motivation, the logic, the connexive flavor and contra-classicality of such neutralized conditionals. The main message being: Neutralizing a vacuist conditional avoids (some) paradoxes of strict implication, changes the logic essentially only by Aristotle‘s Thesis, makes strong connexivity impossible, and remains in the realm of non-contra-classical logics.

David Christensen and others argue that Dutch Strategies are more like peer disagreements than Dutch Books, and should not count against agents‘ conformity to ideal rationality. I review these arguments, then show that Dutch Books, Dutch Strategies, and peer disagreements are only possible in the case of what computer scientists call Byzantine Failures—uncorrected Byzantine Faults which update arbitrary values. Yet such Byzantine Failures make agents equally vulnerable to all three kinds of epistemic inconsistencies, so there is no principled basis for claiming that only avoidance of true Dutch Books characterizes ideally rational agents. Agents without Byzantine Failures can be ideally rational in a very strong sense, but are not normative for humans.