He has more than three years of experience in design and simulation of innovative machines, drives, controls, and electromechanical components. He is a Senior Engineer in the Advanced MotorTech LLC, Largo, FL. His recent research interests include CAE electrical machine design, modeling and analysis of motor drives, thermal analysis, and coupled-physic field analysis.
Many psychologists studying lay belief attribution and behavior explanation cite Donald Davidson in support of their assumption that people construe beliefs as inner causes. But Davidson's influential argument is unsound; there are no objective grounds for the intuition that the folk construe beliefs as inner causes that produce behavior. Indeed, recent experimental work by Ian Apperly, Bertram Malle, Henry Wellman, and Tania Lombrozo provides an empirical framework that accords well with Gilbert Ryle's alternative thesis that the folk construe beliefs as patterns of living that contextualize behavior.
This article reconsiders the relationship between interpretivism about belief and normative standards. Interpretivists have traditionally taken beliefs (and thus veridicality conditions for belief attribution) to be fixed in relation to norms of interpretation. However, recent work by philosophers and psychologists reveals that human belief attribution practices are governed by a rich diversity of normative standards. Interpretivists thus face a dilemma: either give up on the idea that belief is constitutively normative or countenance a context-sensitive disjunction of norms that constitute belief. Either way, interpretivists should embrace the intersubjective indeterminacy of belief.
Interpretivism without judgement-dependence Devin Sanchez Curry Forthcoming in Philosophia Interpretivists about a mental phenomenon hold that it emerges only in relation to an interpretive activity, capacity, or scheme. For instance, interpretivism about belief is the view that to believe is to be aptly interpretable as believing-not because what somebody believes is necessarily epistemically accessible, but because an interpreter renders them a believer in the first place. Krzysztof Poslajko (forthcoming) has approvingly reconstructed Alex Byrne's (1998) dilemma for interpretivism about belief and the other so-called propositional attitudes. I will argue that due reflection on recent work on folk psychology undermines that dilemma. On the first horn of Byrne's dilemma, the interpretivist takes attitudes to emerge relative to an ideal interpreter. On the second horn, the interpretivist takes attitudes to emerge relative to individuals' judgements. Poslajko argues that both horns are unacceptably pointy: "in the end, as Bryne correctly observes, the interpretivist must either idealize the interpreter to the point at which he loses any connection to the actual subjects who are engaged in real-life interpretation processes, or he must deny the possibility of errors in the attribution of mental states" (§6). To be an attractive metaphysics of the objects of folk psychology, interpretivism must relativize them to actual folk psychological practices. But Byrne and Poslajko contend that, in so doing, the interpretivist must commit to an absurdity by giving up on the idea that folks can be wrong about what people believe and desire. Byrne and Poslajko are right that both of these horns are unacceptably pointy, but wrong that the interpretivist must be speared by one or the other. Interpretivists can viably reject the notion of an ideal (or even canonical) interpreter without taking on board the unacceptable epistemological consequences of allowing that attitudes are judgement-dependent. I am an interpretivist about many mental phenomena, including most attitudes, and I have argued (Curry 2020) that my fellow interpretivists Donald Davidson (2001), Daniel Dennett (1987), and Bruno Mölder (2010) are wrong to cast attitudes as existing relative to idealized normative standards of attitude ascription-and, relatedly, to divorce the metaphysics of attitudes from the messy details of actual folk psychological practices. I am not thereby doomed to render attitudes judgementdependent. To see why, one need look no further than those messy details of actual folk psychological practices. Looking at those practices, it is plain that there is a distinction to be drawn between how folks conceive of an attitude, on the one hand, and whether they accurately judge that somebody has an attitude, as folks conceive of it, on the other hand. All sorts of factors play into a judgement-an actual ascription of an attitude to an individual-that are irrelevant to the question of how the ascriber conceives of the attitude in question. Perhaps most...
In Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee reveals that American man of integrity Atticus Finch harbors deep-seated racist beliefs. Bob Ewell, Finch's nemesis in To Kill a Mockingbird, harbors the same beliefs. But the two men live out their shared racist beliefs in dramatically different fashions. This article argues that extant dispositionalist accounts of belief lack the tools to accommodate Finch and Ewell's divergent styles of believing. It then draws on literary and philosophical character studies to construct the required tools.
this article offers an interpretation of Descartes's method of doubt. it wields an examination of Descartes's pedagogy-as exemplified by The Search for Truth as well as the Meditations-to make the case for the sincerity (as opposed to artificiality) of the doubts engendered by the First Meditation. Descartes was vigilant about balancing the need to use his method of doubt to achieve absolute certainty with the need to compensate for the various foibles of his scholastic and unschooled readers. Nevertheless, Descartes endeavored to instill willful, context-independent, universal doubt across his readership. if all goes well, readers of the Meditations are like method actors; the Meditator is the character they are meant to bring to life, via the method of meditating on reasons for doubt. the article concludes with the suggestion that Descartes was the same kind of skeptic as the early academic skeptics arcesilaus and Carneades.
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