Eric Gordon Epstein
Point Lobos in California, 2013
RESEARCH
One of philosophy’s greatest strengths is its willingness to question what others take to be common sense. However, sometimes common sense proves robust. My research examines the cases against two fundamental concepts of common sense, and argues that these concepts are more resilient than their philosophical detractors have appreciated.
On Truth
In the Liar paradox, the notion of truth features centrally in the derivation of a contradiction. This has led some philosophers to wonder whether this concept is somehow inconsistent, and thus in need of being replaced. However, I argue that even in the face of the paradox, we can give a consistent account of the concept of truth; and so this concept does not need to be replaced. I call my account aberrationism. Aberrationism’s central assertion is that when, but only when, the word ‘true’ occurs in a paradox-inducing sentence, the occurrence of ‘true’ in that sentence fails to refer to truth. Thus Liar sentences and their ilk fail to say what they would have to say to give rise to paradox. The point of this view is that it takes great pains to respect our ordinary reasoning with the word ‘true’. After seeing the Liar paradox, most people do not stop speaking of truth altogether, quarantining the notion as one infected with paradox. Rather, they simply move on, continuing to speak of truth in much the way they always did, as if the paradox were restricted to the sentences that generate it. Aberrationism proposes to take this behavior seriously, and explain how it might be justified in light of the nature of the paradox itself. Thus my view treats paradoxical sentences as witnessing one-off aberrations in the behavior of ‘true’.
On Belief
When it comes to belief, I engage with several philosophers who take a cue from Quine on translation. These thinkers hold that when it comes to explaining people’s behaviors, there are always multiple, radically different attributions of beliefs that will serve equally well. However, I show that attributions of beliefs are modally informative in a way that makes them not interchangeable when they are radically different. Thus, our traditional concept of belief is richer and less trivial than has been appreciated.
Please feel free to download all available papers below, in which I develop these two projects.
Here is the long version.
In this paper, I describe and motivate a new approach to the Liar Paradox and its kin, which I call aberrationism. On this view, seemingly paradoxical sentences fail to say what they appear to say. I trace this failure to a distinctive feature of our semantic expressions: in any such sentence, one of the occurrences of its semantic expressions differs in reference from the expression of which it is an occurrence. I clarify aberrationism by distinguishing between a radical version and a moderate version of it, and argue for the latter. Then I respond to the classic problem of revenge, and close by contrasting aberrationism with a number of more familiar solutions in the literature.
Here, I explain how abererationism can be used to solve a variety of different Liar-like paradoxes other than the Strong Liar Paradox, such as the Contingent Liar Paradox, Curry’s paradox, Yablo’s and Cook’s paradoxes, and the No-No paradox. I also explain how aberrationism differs from other solutions that share some of its commitments. At the end I articulate a general criterion for the applicability of aberrationism, one that enables this approach to apply to all of the Liar-like paradoxes described throughout the paper. This criterion is motivated by reflection on the common features of all these different paradoxes.
Philosophers often take for granted that different attributions of beliefs, and, likewise, different interpretations of a language, are wantonly interchangeable: that multiple, radically different and incompatible interpretations or belief-attributions can always be jerry-rigged ad hoc to provide equally good explanations of the same behaviors. However, I argue that the assertion of wanton interchangeability is false, at least when it comes to belief: belief-attributions are modally informative in a distinctive way that makes it hard to replace them with other, aberrant attributions. Our everyday discourse about the mind is therefore richer than many philosophers have recognized. I explore the consequences of this conclusion for the claim that belief-attribution can be excised from scientific psychology, and the claim that beliefs are not fully real.
Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (REC) tries to understand as much cognition as it can without positing contentful mental entities. Thus, in one prominent formulation, REC claims that content is involved neither in visual perception nor in any more elementary form of cognition. Arguments for REC tend to rely heavily on considerations of ontological parsimony, with authors frequently pointing to the difficulty of explaining content in naturalistically acceptable terms. However, these arguments embrace implausible views about the need to define basic terms in order to do good science. Moreover, many prominent concerns about the difficulty of naturalizing content likewise threaten the credentials of intentionality, which even advocates of REC take to be a fundamental feature of cognition. In particular, classic concerns about indeterminacy of content can be run on intentionality as well. Here, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin point the way toward a response; I take it a step further, arguing that attention to the modal features of contentful states can help illuminate the facts that underlie their intentionality and content.
Work In Progress
Available on request
Philosophers standardly take the alethic paradoxes to show that we must restrict either classical logic or disquotation. In different ways, Williamson (2017) and Scharp (2017) argue that we should retain classical logic at the expense of the concept of truth. However, the perception that we face a dilemma between giving up classical logic and giving up disquotation rests on an interpretation of the Liar paradox that, while compelling, need not be forced on us. In various works, Haim Gaifman, Bruno Whittle, and I develop non-compositional views about the Liar paradox. On these views, Liar sentences and their ilk are subject to exceptions to compositional semantic rules, and therefore fail to express propositions. If some non-compositional view is correct, then one can retain both disquotation and classical logic; for in that case the failure of Liar sentences to satisfy disquotational principles is no more problematic than the failure of rocks, sweaters, and other entities that do not express propositions to satisfy disquotational principles. Of course, like all solutions to the Liar, non-compositional views have their problems. I discuss whether these problems neutralize non-compositional approaches as a response to Scharp and Williamson.