Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

In this paper I question the lying/misleading distinction from three different angles. I argue, first, that if speakers are responsible for what they explicitly say only and hearers for what they infer that speakers implicitly convey, it is practically impossible to enforce speaker responsibility. An implication of this view is that the lying/misleading distinction is untenable. Other attempts at questioning the distinction have been countered by empirical evidence of the robustness of the distinction. However, there is also contrasting empirical evidence that people do think that it is possible to…

The debate about speech acts in sexual contexts has been dominated by discussions of consent and refusal, two illocutions strictly connected to definitions of sexual assault and rape, which constitutes a crucial step in fighting male sexual violence against women. Many authors have recently claimed that this emphasis has a distorting and harmful impact on our understanding of sexual communication—for it highlights only its negative aspects (mostly how to avoid unwanted sex). Moreover, an account in terms of consent and refusal seems to presuppose a default asymmetrical scenario, with men…

Coping is customarily understood as those thoughts and actions humans adopt while undergoing situations appraised as threatening and stressful, or when people’s sense of who they are and what they should do is significantly challenged. In these cases, coping thoughts and actions help one endure and hopefully overcome these stresses, threats, and/or challenges. Discussions of coping are common among psychologists, but nearly absent from the philosophical literature despite their importance in theories of agency and for closely related concepts like resilience. Building from psychological theories of coping, I offer a…

Generally speaking, the present literature on agency has been heavily focused on human agency. This approach proves to be very useful for the immediate applications of the philosophy of agency, e.g. to develop a definition ready for use in ethics or political philosophy. However, there are some limitations to this line of thought, as, for instance, it poses too restrictive requirements on agency, like purposefulness, consciousness, or willingness. In this paper, I would like to tackle the question of agency with the need to include non-human agency in mind. I…

In the first part of the paper, I discuss three possible ways to achieve some unity between Sellars’ manifest and scientific image of the world. The plurality of scientific methods that I am advocating is compatible with the fact that all empirical sciences strive for beliefs based on the normative concepts of evidence, explanatory power, and experimental accuracy. Such methods provide different means to reach the common purpose of justification. In the second part of the paper, I criticize Sellars’ definition of the manifest image in terms of a suddenly…

In contemporary philosophy there is much focus on conceptual engineering: the enterprise of revising and replacing concepts. In this talk, I focus on a theoretical issue that has not yet received much attention. What principled limits are there to this sort of enterprise? Are there concepts that for principled reasons cannot or should not be revised or replaced? Examples discussed include logical concepts and normative concepts.

At the commonsensical level of the manifest image, we seem to take for granted logical laws of all sorts, including classical logic (CL) and naive principles of truth and predication (TP), which, however, generate logical paradoxes such as the liar, Russell’s paradox and Curry’s paradox. The formal logic of the scientific image comes to the rescue by proposing many competing formal systems that restore consistency, by sacrificing either principles of CL or principles of TP. We wish to explore a different path, which aims at saving both CL and TP,…

We study different forms of ignorance and their correlations in a bi-modal logical language expressing the two modalities of knowledge and belief. In particular, we are mainly interested in clarifying which definitions of ignorance and which circumstances trigger higher-order forms of ignorance, inducing ignorance about ignorance and so on. To this aim, three ground conditions concerning knowledge and belief are presented, which may be seen as a cause of ignorance and can help us to identify the conditions enabling the emergence of higher-order forms of ignorance.

At least since Russell, mainstream analytic philosophy has distinguished internal and external relations and acknowledged the existence of both. This seems in line with both the manifest and scientific images of the world. However, there is a recent deflationary trend about relations, which focuses on the truthmakers of relational statements in order to show that putative external relations are in fact internal, and that internal relations do not really exist. Lowe’s posthumous 2016 paper is a thorough presentation of this line of thought. This article critically analyzes Lowe’s arguments in…