Jon Cogburn

Louisiana State University | LSU · Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies

Duncan Pritchard has argued that his basis-relative anti-luck construal of a safety condition on knowing avoids the problem with necessary truths that safety conditions are often thought to have, viz., that beliefs the contents of which are necessarily true are trivially safe. He has further argued that adding an ability condition to truth, belief,...

Standard accounts of semantics for counterfactuals confront the true–true problem: when the antecedent and consequent of a counterfactual are both actually true, the counterfactual is automatically true. This problem presents a challenge to safety-based accounts of knowledge. In this paper, drawing on work by Angelika Kratzer, Alan Penczek, and Dun...

According to an influential contextualist solution to skepticism advanced by Keith DeRose, denials of skeptical hypotheses are, in most contexts, strong yet insensitive. The strength of such denials allows for knowledge of them, thus undermining skepticism, while the insensitivity of such denials explains our intuition that we do not know them. In...

That believing truly as a matter of luck does not generally constitute knowing has become epistemic commonplace. Accounts of knowledge incorporating this anti-luck idea frequently rely on one or another of a safety or sensitivity condition. Sensitivity-based accounts of knowledge have a well-known problem with necessary truths, to wit, that any bel...

We first discuss Michael Dummett’s philosophy of mathematics and Robert Brandom’s philosophy of language to demonstrate that inferentialism entails the falsity of Church’s Thesis and, as a consequence, the Computational Theory of Mind. This amounts to an entirely novel critique of mechanism in the philosophy of mind, one we show to have tremendous...

Dummettian anti-realists have traditionally argued that verificationism entails giving up the law of excluded middle for discourses such as mathematics, which contain warrants that cannot be defeated. This chapter shows how in the case of discourses where the warrants are at best defeasible, the Dummett's master argument actually undermines the Law...

Advocates of ‘reader response’ approaches to literary criticism defend the idea that an individual reader's understanding of a text can be a factor in determining the meaning of what is written in that text, and hence must play a part in determining the very identity conditions of works of literary art. We examine some accounts that have been given...

We argue that ) Somatic Marker hypothesis can explain why humans don't generally suffer from the frame problem, arguably the greatest obstacle facing the Computational Theory of Mind. This involves showing how humans with damaged emotional centers are best understood as actually suffering from the frame problem. We are then able to show that, parad...

Neil Tennant and Joseph Salerno have recently attempted to rigorously formalize Michael Dummett's argument for logical revision. Surprisingly, both conclude that Dummett commits elementary logical errors, and hence fails to offer an argument that is even prima facie valid. After explicating the arguments Salerno and Tennant attribute to Dummett, I...

We build on some of Daniel Dennett’s ideas about predictive indispensability to characterize properties of video games discernable by people as computationally emergent if, and only if: (1) they can be instantiated by a computing machine, and (2) there is no algorithm for detecting instantiations of them. We then use this conception of emergence to...

If correct, Christopher Peacocke's (20) "manifestationism without verifi- cationism," would explode the dichotomy between realism and inferentialism in the contemporary philosophy of language. I first explicate Peacocke's theory, defending it from a criticism of Neil Tennant's. This involves devising a recursive definition for grasp of logical cont...

Frederic Fitch's celebrated reasoning to the conclusion that all truths are known can be interpreted as a reductio of the claim that all truths are knowable. Given this, nearly all of the proof's reception has involved canvassing the prospects for some form of verificationism. Unfortunately, debates of this sort discount much of the philosophical i...

A central tenet of cognitivism is that knowing how is to be explained in terms of tacitly knowing that a theory is true. By critically examining canonical anti-behaviorist arguments and contemporary appeals to tacit knowledge, I have devised a more explicit characterization in which tacitly known theories must act as justifiers for claims that the...

In Chapter 7 of The Taming of the True, Neil Tennant provides a new argument from Michael Dummett's ``manifestation requirement'' to the incorrectness of classical logic and the correctness of intuitionistic logic. I show that Tennant's new argument is only valid if one interprets crucial existence claims occurring in the proof in the manner of int...

In ``Revising the Logic of LogicalRevision'' (Philosophical Studies 99,211–227) J. Salerno attempts to undermineCrispin Wright's recent arguments forintuitionism, and to replace Wright andDummett's arguments with a revisionary argumentof his own. I show that Salerno's criticismsof Wright involve both attributing an inferenceto Wright that no intuit...

Moorean validities are any in-general invalid inferences such as: “P; therefore I believe that P”. While these are prima facie invalid, they have no counterexamples, since any assertion of the truth of the premise pragmatically forces the conclusion to be true. I first show that Dummettian anti-realists have a seemingly impossible time explaining w...