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2009 Abstracts

Do an agent’s desires provide her with reasons for action? On the one hand, “desire-based” theorists claim that all of an agent’s practical reasons are provided by facts about what she desires (e.g. Bernard Williams). On the other hand, “value-based” theorists claim that facts about an agent’s desires never provide reasons (e.g. T.M. Scanlon, Joseph Raz, and Derek Parfit). My task is to attempt a rapprochement between these two positions, by arguing that even the proponent of the value-based theory should accord normative significance to a special kind of desire that I refer to as an “orientation.” I suggest that a transsexual’s desire for a different body is a paradigmatic example of this type of desire, and then argue that orientations provide reasons. Moreover, these orientation-based reasons are important because they allow us to recognize the value of authenticity, which consists in being true to our feelings.

Jason Konek (Michigan): “Mixed Modality and Representation Theorems”

According to Meacham and Weisberg (2008), typical representation theorems have the following form: if an agent’s preferences obey certain constraints C, then they can be represented as resulting from a unique utility and probability function by expected utility maximization. Decision theorists, M&W think, try to use representation theorems to justify probabilism – we should have probabilistic degrees of belief – and the expected utility hypothesis – we should act as expected utility maximizers. But they fail, M&W claim. They invariably appeal to a false empirical hypothesis: if an agent’s preferences obey C, then her degrees of belief and utilities actually are the functions that representation theorems spits out. In this paper, I argue that M&W’s claim is false. I provide an argument that uses representation theorems to justify the expected utility hypothesis without depending on M&W’s false empirical hypothesis. But I point to another false empirical hypothesis plaguing these sorts of arguments that’s not so easy to dispense with.

Grant Reaber (Carnegie Mellon): “When You Think Your Degree of Belief in a Proposition Might Influence the Chance of Its Being True”

New considerations are offered in favor of the view that it can be theoretically rational to choose to come to believe a proposition if you think it will be true if you believe it. If, on the other hand, you think a proposition will be false if you believe it and true if you don’t, you might land in a theoretical dilemma, a situation in which there is no rational doxastic attitude to adopt toward a proposition. Various strategies for countering the threat posed by theoretical dilemmas are considered and shown to be unsatisfactory. The paper, unlike this abstract, takes a probabilistic approach to belief, which brings many advantages. One of them is that it can be shown that the form of doxastic voluntarism advocated is compatible with Bayesianism, neutralizing a major potential objection.

Noel Saenz (Western Michigan): “Is Modal Fictionalism a Fiction?”

Modal fictionalism’s attraction lies in its ability to make use of possible world talk without footing the ontological bill. In this paper, I will argue that modal fictionalism is self-referentially defeating, entailing the invalidity of its translation schemas. This will be done by providing the truth-conditions for the possibility of modal fictionalism’s translations schemas, arguing that those conditions do not hold, and therefore that modal fictionalism’s translation schemas entail their negation. I then consider a number of objections, concluding that they all fall short. Finally, I show how the line of reasoning used against modal fictionalism can 1) be used against fictionalism about universals and 2) applies to a type of reflexive fictionalism I call schema-reflexive fictionalism.

Rachel Sterken (St. Andrews, Arché): “Generics, Semantic Blindness and Mosquitoes”

This paper criticizes Leslie’s (2007, 2008) recent account of semantic and metaphysical truth-conditions of generics. Generics are sentences such as ‘birds fly’, ‘lions have manes’ and ‘mosquitoes carry the West Nile Virus’. They do not express claims about particular individuals, but rather express something general about individuals of a kind. Yet they do not express familiar generalizations like ‘all birds fly’ or ‘most lions have manes’ since generics tolerate exceptions in puzzling and almost indeterminate ways. Leslie’s approach to the troubling truth-conditional aspects of generics is to separate the semantic theory, which is disquotational, from the metaphysical truth-conditions. Once this is done, her metaphysical truth-conditions are rendered in terms of a psychological explanation of the troublesome cases of genericity such as ‘mosquitoes carry the WNV’. I undermine such an approach in three steps: First, by giving four distinct types of counterexamples to Leslie’s metaphysical truth-conditions. Second, by questioning the nature of troublesome generics such as ‘mosquitoes carry the WNV’ upon which Leslie’s account is based. And finally, by positing a form of semantic blindness related to generic interpretation that explains the psychological facts central to Leslie’s theory and at the same time, why the seemingly recalcitrant data is not actually so. These objections and observations taken together not only undermine the letter, but also the spirit of Leslie’s broader proposal that generics give voice to our primitive cognitive mechanisms most basic default mode of generalization.

Justin Sytsma and Jonathan Livengood (Pittsburgh, HPS): “The Case of the Diver-gent Descriptions”

In two fascinating articles, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich use experimental methods to raise a specter of doubt about reliance on intuitions in developing theories of reference which are then deployed in philosophical arguments outside the philosophy of language. Machery et al. ran a cross-cultural survey asking Western and East Asian subjects about a famous case from the philosophical literature on reference (Kripke’s Gödel example). They interpret their results as indicating that there is significant variation in subjects’ intuitions about that case. We argue that this interpretation is mistaken. We hold that there is a perspectival ambiguity in the question that Machery et al. posted to subjects and that this ambiguity could have affected their results. We do not stop there, however: Rather than rest content with a possibility claim, we ran four studies to test the impact of this ambiguity on subjects’ responses. We found that the ambiguity accounts for much of the variation found in their original experiment. We conclude that in the light of our new data, Machery et al.’s argument is no longer convincing.

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