The other reason I haven't been posting much is that, for all of this summer, and much of the past year, I've been, when focused on philosophy, focused on work on a co-authored book monograph with Benjamin Jarvis. That's been on a relatively grand scale, and didn't lend itself well to blogging. However, we now have a draft of a book monograph, and we're ready to give it a limited distribution to philosophers who might have comments and suggestions for us.
Our book is tentatively titled Rational Thinking: Philosophical and Quotidian. It offers a theory of mental content, a characterization of the relation between rationality and apriority, and a treatment of philosophical methodology. It is descended in fairly direct ways from the work we've done in our two previous co-authored papers, here and here.
If you're interested in having a look, email me and I'll send you the pdf. I'm placing a detailed table of contents below the fold, to better indicate the sort of topics we're covering.
Maybe now that we've gotten the manuscript to this stage, I'll find myself blogging on philosophy more often. I have an idea for a paper about the relation between modal epistemology and linguistic treatments of modality.
UPDATE 15 JULY 2011: new TOC and downloadable new draft available here. Old TOC below.
Rational Thinking: Philosophical and Quotidian
Part I: Propositions, Fregean Sense, and Conceptual Modality
Chapter One: The Nature of Purely Rational Inquiry
§1.1. Philosophical Traditionalism
§1.2. Philosophical Anti-Exceptionalism
§1.3. Traditional Philosophy as Unexceptional
§1.4. Motivations for Philosophical Traditionalism
§1.5. A Theory of the A priori
§1.6. Intuitions and Rational Thinking
Chapter Two: A Fregean Theory of Propositions and Attitudes
§2.1. Propositions as Structures of Concepts
§2.2. Conclusive Rational Relations
§2.3. Fregean Senses
§2.4. Standing in Relation to Propositions
§2.5. Rules and Rationality
§2.6. Conclusive Rationality and Defeasibility
Chapter Three: A Theory of Conceptual Modality
§3.1. Conceptual Entailment
§3.2. Conceptual and Metaphysical Entailment
§3.3. Coherence and Conceptual Modality
§3.4. Conceptually Possible Scenarios and Truth Conditions
§3.5. A Further Consideration in Favor of Conceptual Entailment
§3.6. Scott Soames’s ‘Epistemic Possibilities’
§3.7. David Chalmers’s ‘Epistemic Possibilities’
§3.8. Conceptual Modality and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction
Chapter Four: The Psychological Realization of Fregean Sense
§4.1. Ontology
§4.2. Quine’s Objections to the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction: Cases of Revision
§4.3. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
§4.4. The Psychological Reality of Conceptual Entailment
§4.5. Indeterminite Rational Relations
§4.6. Our Theory of Psychological Reality Contrasted
§4.7. The Psychological Reality of Conceptual Entailment Summarized
§4.8. Non-intentional Rule-Following
§4.9. Fregean Sense, Descriptivism, and Conceptual Role
Chapter Five: Making Our Fregean Theory Sociable Enough
§5.1. Public Versus Individual Views of Mental Content
§5.2. Fixing Conceptual Roles to Words in a Public Language
§5.3. Timothy Williamson on Conceptual Truths
§5.4. Conceptual Refinement
§5.5. Propositional Attitude Ascriptions and Testimony
Part II: Rationality, Apriority, and Philosophy
Chapter Six: A Theory of the A Priori
§6.1. Apriority and Propositional Justification
§6.2. An Alternative Approach: Albert Casullo
§6.3. A Priori Transitions in Thought
§6.4. Experience in a Warranting Role
§6.5. Experience and D-Justification
§6.6. Apriority and Indefeasibility
§6.7. The Nature of Experience
Chapter Seven: The Content of Thought-Experiment Judgments
§7.1. Formalizing Thought-Experiment Arguments: Necessity?
§7.2. Timothy Williamson’s Counterfactual Formulation
§7.3. Against the Counterfactual Formulation
§7.4. Attempted Patches
§7.5. Thought Experiments as Fictions
§7.6. Fictions Fixing Content
§7.7. Disanalogies between Thought Experiments and Fictions?
§7.8. Reasoning and Thought Experiments
Chapter Eight: The Epistemology of Thought Experiment Judgments
§8.1. Content and Inferential Competencies
§8.2. Reliability about Imaginary Scenarios
§8.3. Knowledge of Necessity
§8.4. Categorization and Apriority
§8.5. On Conceptual Analysis
Chapter Nine: Rational Imagination and Modal Epistemology
§9.1. Imagination as Supposition
§9.2. Imagination and Possibility
§9.3. Coherent Imagination
§9.4. Rational Imagination
§9.5. Defeasible Inference in Imagination
§9.6. Conceptual and Metaphysical Modality
§9.7. The Coherent Impossible
§9.8. From Conceptual to Metaphysical Possibility
§9.9. Basic Moral Principles
§9.10. Mathematical Truths
§9.11. A Priori Knowledge of Conceptual Modality
§9.12. Overstipulation
Appendix A: The Misidentification Response
Appendix B: Natural Kinds
Chapter Ten: A Priori Philosophy: Responses to Objections
§10.1. A Posteriori Knowledge of A Priori Faculties
§10.2. Knowledge and Knowledge of Knowledge
§10.3. A Priori Reliability of A Priori Methods
§10.4. Philosophy and Knowledge of Philosophical Abilities
§10.5. Thought Experiments and the Quotidian
§10.6. Stephen Yablo on the Aposteriority of ‘Peeking’
§10.7. Peeking and Perceptual Faculties
§10.8. John Hawthorne’s ‘A Priori Gas’
Part III: Intuitions and Philosophy
Chapter Eleven: The Nature of Intuitions
§11.1. Eliminativism
§11.2. Reductionism
§11.3. The Robust Picture of Intuitions
§11.4. Williamson on Phenomenology
§11.5. Earlenbaugh and Molyneux
§11.6. Reductionism Without Insignificance
Chapter Twelve: Intuitions and Evidence
§12.1. Evidence, Justification, and Potential Evidence
§12.2. Intuitions as Evidence
§12.3. Side Note: Psychologizing Evidence
§12.4. Modality and Explanation
§12.5. Possibly, Intuitions are not Evidence (Not Even Ceteris Paribus)
§12.6. Intuitions do not Contribute to Evidence
§12.7. Intuitions and Realizing Potential Evidence
§12.8. Intuitions and Purely Rational Inquiry
Chapter Thirteen: Intuition as a Source of Evidence?
§13.1. A Simple Argument
§13.2. Intuitions, Psychological Facts, and Evidence
§13.3. Evidence and Psychology, Revisited
§13.4. Difference of Evidence in ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Cases
§13.5. Perceptual Justification and the Problem of the Speckled Hen
§13.6. Failure of Justified belief
§13.7. Intuiting and Perceiving
§13.8. The Difference
§13.9. The Benacerraf-Field Challenge
Chapter Fourteen: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Methodology
§14.1. Positive Experimental Philosophy
§14.2. Negative Experimental Philosophy
§14.3. The Use of Intuitions in Philosophy
§14.4. The Critique Generalized?
§14.5. Epistemology and Methodology
§14.6. Traditional Methodology and Experimental Philosophy
§14.7. Philosophy and the Quotidian
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