Joseph Ulatowski

• PhD
• Senior Lecturer at University of Waikato

Alfred Tarski seems to endorse a partial conception of truth, the T-schema, which he believes might be clarified by the application of empirical methods, specifically citing the experimental results of Arne Næss (1938a). The aim of this paper is to argue that Næss’ empirical work confirmed Tarski’s semantic conception of truth, among others. In the...

Alfred Tarski’s refinement of an account of truth into a formal system that turns on the acceptance of Convention-T has had a lasting impact on philosophical logic, especially work concerning truth, meaning, and other semantic notions. In a series of studies completed from the 1930s to the 1960s, Arne Næss collected and analysed intuitive responses...

This brief summary of “schema” aims to help novices better appreciate what a schema is, howit is used, and why it is important for theories of truth. The summary should not be interpretedas replacing original work on “schema;” rather, it is meant to serve as a supplement for studentswho are unfamiliar with schema in philosophy or mathematics. For a...

Over the past 20 years, predicates of personal taste (PPT) have been at the centre of a set of lively debates in the philosophy of language and linguistics. These debates have yielded many subtle and inventive analyses of PPT. There is, however, a crucial methodological question about PPT that remains underexplored: what sorts of evidence should be...

The aim of this paper is to argue that it is not possible for a person to live an indefinitely long life as a digital immortal. To argue for this, I show that there is an insurmountable problem from the digital immortal's perspective. If the digital immortal is an exact replica of a mortal, then the entirety of the digital mind will be directed tow...

Critics of the scope problem that motivates pluralism about truth have argued that it is a pseudo-problem. If the criticism is correct, then truth pluralism is left unmotivated and potentially bankrupt. In this paper, I argue that closely related to the scope problem is another problem, which I call "the scalar problem." If the property of truth is...

Analytic debates about truth are wide-ranging, but certain key themes tend to crop up time and again. The three themes that we will examine in this paper are (i) the nature and behaviour of the ordinary concept of truth, (ii) the meaning of discourse about truth, and (iii) the nature of the property *truth.* We will start by offering a brief overvi...

On the correspondence theory of truth, a proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to fact. Criticisms of the correspondence theory of truth have argued that such a strict interpretation of the correspondence relation will not be able to account for the truth of statements about fiction or mathematics. This challenge has resulted in the int...

Virtues can be considered to play a causal role in the production of behaviour and so too can our self-narratives. We identify a point of connection between the two cases and draw a parallel between them. But, those folk psychological notions, virtues and self-narratives, fail to reduce smoothly to the underlying human physiology. As a first step t...

Virtues can be considered to play a causal role in the production of behaviour, and so too can our self-narratives. We identify a point of connection between the two cases and draw a parallel between them. But, those folk-psychological notions: virtues and self-narratives, fail to reduce smoothly to the underlying human physiology. As a first step...

There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that infants and non-human primates have the ability to represent the mental states of other agents, i.e. that they possess a Theory of Mind. We will argue that this evidence also suggests that infants and non-human primates possess the concept of truth, which, as we will explain, is good ne...

In this short article, we detail some of our concerns about the popular expression 'speak my truth.' The article is also available here: https://theconversation.com/with-so-many-people-speaking-their-truth-how-do-we-know-what-the-truth-really-is-205388.

Many countries' constituencies are populated by polarised groups with sharply contrasting political loyalties and convictions, which appear to be becoming more and more extreme. We wish to explore such extreme political convictions with a focus on their place in a supporter's mind, which underpins their engagement with a political movement. We look...

This Psyche Guide discusses five big ideas in philosophical debates about truth and how we can apply them in our everyday lives. Link: https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-about-truth-in-a-philosophically-informed-way

There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that infants and non-human primates have the ability to represent the mental states of other agents, i.e. that they possess a Theory of Mind. We will argue that this evidence also suggests that infants and non-human primates possess the concept of truth, which, as we will explain, is good ne...

Overview of experimental philosophy.

There are many variants of deflationism about truth, but one of them, Paul Horwich’s minimalism, stands out because it accepts as axiomatic practical variants of the equivalence schema: 〈 p 〉 is true if and only if p . The equivalence schema is epistemologically fundamental. In this paper, I call upon empirical studies to show that practical varian...

Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a way of doing philosophy. It is “traditional” philosophy, but with a little something extra: In addition to the expected philosophical arguments and engagement, x-phi involves the use of empirical methods to test the empirical claims that arise. This extra bit strikes some as a new, perhaps radical, addition...

The time has come to consider whether experimental philosophy’s (“x-phi”) early arguments, debates, and conceptual frameworks, that may have worn well in its early days, fit with the diverse range of projects undertaken by experimental philosophers. Our aim is to propose a novel taxonomy for x-phi that identifies four paths from empirical findings...

A typical guiding principle of an account of truth is: “truth is objective,” or, to be clear, judging whether an assertion is true or false depends upon how things are in the world rather than how someone or some community believes it to be. Accordingly, whenever a claim is objectively true, its truth conditions ought not depend upon the context in...

There are different approaches to the narrative self. I limit myself to one approach that argues narratives have an important role to play in our lives without it being true that a narrative constitutes and creates the self. My own position is broadly sympathetic with that view, but my interest lies with the question of whether there is truth in th...

The aim of this paper is to show that a corollary of resolute readings of Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense cannot be sustained. First, I describe the corollary. Next, I point out the relevance to it of Wittgenstein’s discussion of family resemblance concepts. Then, I survey some typical uses of nonsense to see what they bring to an ordinary la...

A cardinal rule of academic research with human participants is to protect their confidentiality. While there are limits to confidentiality, universities and researchers will make strenuous efforts to protect the identity of participants. This is especially important where they are at risk of serious harm if confidentiality is breached. Yet, some r...

The idea of an eternal and immortal life like the one we lead now seems quite appealing because (i) it will be sufficiently like our own earth-bound life and (ii) we will have the same kinds of desires we have now to want to live an eternal life. This paper will challenge the view that we have a conception of what the conscious experience of an imm...

While the Enlightenment promoted thinking for oneself independent of religious authority, the “Endarkenment” (Millgram 2015) concerns deference to a new authority: the specialist, a hyperspecializer. Nonspecialists need to defer to such authorities, as they are unable to understand their reasoning. Millgram describes how humans are capable of being...

New developments in cosmology make it unlikely that life on Earth is unique. The Cosmic Perspective Argument states that given these developments we should not be concerned with the Earth's environmental degradation. In this paper, we argue that although scaling our analysis upwards into the cosmos provides the Cosmic Perspective with its strength,...

Truth is a pervasive feature of ordinary language, deserving of systematic study, and few theorists of truth have endeavoured to chronicle the tousled conceptual terrain forming the non-philosopher’s ordinary view. In this book, the author recasts the philosophical treatment of truth in light of historical and recent work in experimental philosophy...

This chapter provides a series of arguments against potential criticisms of endoxic alethic pluralism. The chapter is sub-divided into substantive and methodological challenges. Methodological challenges suggest that empirical studies are irrelevant, suffer from poor experimental design or statistical analyses, or the folk suffer from serious confu...

Empirical data provide us with a descriptive snapshot of ordinary views about philosophical concepts. At least one part of any ‘folk theory’ is descriptive. This project follows on what Strawson termed ‘descriptive metaphysics.’ If normative inquiries should tell us which view is better than another view (a moderate view) or which view is the best...

I argue for a new kind of alethic pluralism, endoxic alethic pluralism, which is informed in part by empirical studies on people’s notions of truth. While philosophers have generally assumed that the ordinary notion of truth aligns with their own intuitions about truth, data show that philosophers and non-philosophers’ notions of truth fail to alig...

Theorists of truth have aimed to uncover the ordinary or folk view of truth. Any view that claims to provide the folk theory needs to account for what the common conception is and how it is that they have discovered it. While it has been generally accepted that a view need not engage in any formal undertaking of how it has come up with the folk vie...

In this chapter, I argue for an ecological approach to experimental philosophy, a conservative positive programme, which accepts that empirical results are preliminary and that responses merely provide a theorist with a wide topographical view of the commonsense conceptual terrain. It is our theoretical responsibility to argue for any philosophical...

The liar paradox is widely conceived as a problem for logic and semantics. On the basis of empirical studies presented here, we suggest that there is an underappreciated psychological dimension to the liar paradox and related problems, conceived as a problem for human thinkers. Specific findings suggest that how one interprets the liar sentence and...

The notion of an agent and the notion of a self are connected, for agency is one role played by the self. Millgram argues for a disunity thesis of agency on the basis of extreme incommensurability across some major life events. We propose a similar negative thesis about the self, that it is composed of relatively independent threads reflecting the...

This commentary on Stephen Yablo's ‘If-Thenism’ challenges whether the remainder, ρ, is an inaccurate representation of the conditions that are supposed to complete the enthymeme from ϕ to ψ. Whilst inaccuracies shouldn't set off any alarm bells, the truth of ρ is too inexact. The content of ρ, a partial truth, must be sensitive to contextual backg...

‘Scaffolded learning’ describes a cluster of instructional techniques designed to move students from a novice position toward greater understanding, such that they become independent learners. Our Socratic Model of Scaffolded Learning (‘SMSL’) includes two phases not normally included in discussions of scaffolded learning, the preparatory and probl...

Students often find Socrates unsettling because they are largely distracted by his overtly hostile and arrogant behavior. While dialogues such as Euthyphro and Apology are widely taught in college courses, and are generally thought to offer a reasonable representation of the historical Socrates, they do not offer a complete picture of the variety o...

Elsewhere Stephen Yablo has employed Kendall Walton’s (1990; 1993) pretense view to argue for a figurative fictionalism that interprets mathematical language as figurative or metaphorical. In ‘If-Thenism’, Yablo has adopted a subtraction account, φY = φ ~ ψ, where “~” (read as: ‘minus’) is a non-truth-conditional connective, to support figuralism....

Many of Tarski’s better known papers are either about or include lengthy discussions of how to properly define various concepts: truth, logical consequence, semantic concepts, or definability. In general, these papers identify two primary conditions for successful definitions: formal correctness and material (or intuitive) adequacy. Material adequa...

This paper argues that a well known passage from Plato’s Meno exemplifies how to employ scaffolded learning in the philosophy classroom. It explores scaffolded learning by fully defining it, explaining it, and gesturing at some ways in which scaffolding has been implemented. We then offer our own model of scaffolded learning in terms of four phases...

People commonly believe that any form of deception, no matter how innocuous it is and no matter whether the deceiving person intended it otherwise, is always morally wrong. In this paper, I will argue that deceiving in real-time is morally distinguishable from deceiving on-line because online actions aren't as fine-grained as actions occurring in r...

Philosophical theorizing about truth manifests a desire to conform to the ordinary or folk notion of truth. This practice often involves attempts to accommodate some form of correspondence. We discuss this accommodation project in light of two empirical projects intended to describe the content of the ordinary conception of truth. One, due to Arne...

We regularly teach for the Wyoming High School Institute (“HSI”), a three-week college experience for rising high school juniors. The purpose of HSI is to introduce pre-college students to subjects not regularly taught in the secondary school curriculum. In our course, we introduce moral philosophy through the use of feature films. More narrowly, w...

Accounts of act individuation have attempted to capture peoples’ pre-theoretic intuitions. Donald Davidson has argued that a multitude of action descriptions designate only one act, while Alvin Goldman has averred that each action description refers to a distinct act. Following on recent empirical studies, I subject these accounts of act individuat...

Although we agree with the spirit of Knobe's competence model, our aim in this commentary is to argue that the default position should be made more precise. Our quibble with Knobe's model is that we find it hard to ascribe a coherent view to some experimental subjects if the default position is not clearly defined.

Th ough golf does not require great stamina, the coordination involved in hitting a ball hundreds of yards to a small patch of grass is a testament to human evolution and perseverance. Indeed, given the difficulty of the game and the frustration it engenders, it is not surprising that large numbers of those who try the game quit within a relatively...

Recent work by Joshua Knobe indicates that people's intuitions about whether an action was intentional depends on whether the outcome is good or bad. This paper argues that part of the explanation for this effect is that there are stable individual differences in how 'intentional' gets interpreted. That is, in Knobe's cases, different people interp...

Tarski (1944) establishes two conditions that any theory of truth ought to satisfy: formal correctness and material adequacy. Though not widely noted, Tarski indicated that the material adequacy condition might be clarified by the application of empirical methods, specifically citing Naess (1938). We examine this empirical work and consider some im...