Diversity Reading List

These two sets of comments on Volume II of my Rationality and the Structure of the Self (henceforth RSS II), from the two leading philosophers in their respective areas of specialization – Kant scholarship and decision theory – are the very first to appear from any quarter within academic philosophy. My gratitude to Paul Guyer and Richard Bradley for the seriousness, thoroughness and respect with which they treat RSS – and my admiration for their readiness to acknowledge the existence of books that in fact have been in wide circulation for a long time – know no bounds. Their comments and criticisms, though sharp, are always constructive. I take my role here to be to incorporate those comments and criticisms where they hit the mark, and, where they go astray, to further articulate my view to meet the standard of clarity they demand. While Guyer’s and Bradley’s comments both pertain to the substantive view elaborated in RSS II, my responses often refer back to the critical background it presupposes that I offer in RSS Volume I: The Humean Conception (henceforth RSS I). I address Guyer’s more exegetically oriented remarks first, in order to provide a general philosophical framework within which to then discuss the decision-theoretic core of the project that is the focus of Bradley’s comments.

Adrian Piper argues that the Humean conception can be made to work only if it is placed in the context of a wider and genuinely universal conception of the self, whose origins are to be found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This conception comprises the basic canons of classical logic, which provide both a model of motivation and a model of rationality. These supply necessary conditions both for the coherence and integrity of the self and also for unified agency. The Kantian conception solves certain intractable problems in decision theory by integrating it into classical predicate logic, and provides answers to longstanding controversies in metaethics concerning moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification that the Humean conception engenders. In addition, it sheds light on certain kinds of moral behavior – for example, the whistleblower – that the Humean conception is at a loss to explain.

In this paper, we provide a recipe that not only captures the common structure of semantic paradoxes but also captures our intuitions regarding the relations between these paradoxes. Before we unveil our recipe, we first discuss a well-known schema introduced by Graham Priest, namely,the Inclosure Schema. Without rehashing previous arguments against the Inclosure Schema, we contribute different arguments for the same concern that the Inclosure Schema bundles together the wrong paradoxes. That is, we will provide further arguments on why the Inclosure Schema is both too narrow and too broad. We then spell out our recipe. The recipe shows that all of the following paradoxes share the same structure: The Liar, Curry’s paradox, Validity Curry, Provability Liar, Provability Curry, Knower’s paradox, Knower’s Curry, Grelling-Nelson’s paradox, Russell’s paradox in terms of extensions, alternative Liar and alternative Curry, and hitherto unexplored paradoxes.We conclude the paper by stating the lessons that we can learn from the recipe, and what kind of solutions the recipe suggests if we want to adhere to the Principle of Uniform Solution.

We propose a logic of imagination, based on simulated belief revision, that intends to uncover the logical patterns governing the development of imagination in pretense. Our system complements the currently prominent logics of imagination in that ours in particular formalises (1) the algorithm that specifies what goes on in between receiving a certain input for an imaginative episode and what is imagined in the resulting imagination, as well as (2) the goal-orientedness of imagination, by allowing the context to determine, what we call, the overall topic of the imaginative episode. To achieve this, we employ well-developed tools and techniques from dynamic epistemic logic and belief revision theory, enriched with a topicality component which has been exploited in the recent literature. As a result, our logic models a great number of cognitive theories of pretense and imagination [cf. Currie and Ravenscroft (Recreative minds, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002); Nichols and Stich (Mindreading: an integrated account of pretence, self-awareness, and understanding other minds, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003); Byrne (The rational imagination, The MIT Press, London, 2005); Williamson (The philosophy of philosophy, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2007); Langland-Hassan (Philos Stud 159:155–179, 2012, in: Kind and Kung (eds) Knowledge through imaginaion, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016].

Is it possible for one and the same person to be a feminist and a logician, or does this entail a psychic rift of such proportions that one is plunged into an endless cycle of self-contradiction? Andrea Nye's book, Words of Power (1990), is an eloquent affirmation of the psychic rift position. In what follows, I shall discuss Nye's proscription of logic as well as her perceived alternatives of a woman's language and reading. This will be followed by a discussion more sharply focused on Nye's feminist response to logic, namely, her claim that feminism and logic are incompatible. I will end by offering a sketch of a class in the life of a feminist teaching logic, a sketch which is both a response to Nye (in Nye's sense of the word) and a counter-example to her thesis that logic is necessarily destructive to any genuine feminist enterprise.

After introducing the adoption problem (AP) as the claim that certain basic logical principles cannot be adopted, I offer a characterization of this notion as a two-phase process consisting in (1) the acceptance of a basic logical principle, and (2) the development, in virtue of Phase 1, of a practice of inferring in accordance with that principle. The case of a subject who does not infer in accordance with universal instantiation is considered in detail. I argue that the AP has deep and wide implications for the epistemology of logic, extending well beyond Kripke’s original target, viz. Putnam’s proposal for the empirical revision of logic and its background Quinean epistemology. In particular, the AP questions whether basic logical principles could have a fundamental role in our inferential practices, drawing our attention to the nature of basic inferences and the need to have a clearer conception of them before taking a stand on the matter of the epistemic justification of the logical principles.