(12) J. Cogburn, "The Philosophical
Basis of What? The Anti-Realist Case For Dialethism," in
The
Law of Non-Contradiction, ed. Graham Priest, J.C. Beall,
and Bradley Armour-Garb, Oxford University Press, (2004). [ABSTRACT]
(13) J. Cogburn, "Deconstructing Dummett's
Anti-Realism: A New Argument Against Church's Thesis," The
Logica Yearbook (2002). [ABSTRACT]
UNDER REVIEW AND IN PROGRESS
SINGLE AUTHORED
(14) J. Cogburn, "Notes From the Ungerground."
[ABSTRACT]
(15) J. Cogburn, "Moore's Paradox as
a Problem for Anti-Realism." [ABSTRACT]
(16) J. Cogburn, "Kripke Animadversions
and the Stich's Normative Naturalism: A Critique of Quine's Criteria
for Ontological Commitment."
(17) J. Cogburn, "A Defense of Modal
Truthmakers." [ABSTRACT]
JOINTLY AUTHORED
(18) J. Cogburn and M. Silcox, Philosophy
Through Video Games. [ABSTRACT]
(19) M. Silcox and J. Cogburn, Playing
the World: Computational Emergence in Art and Mind. [ABSTRACT]
(20) J. Cogburn and S. Florio, "Varieties
of (Dummettian Anti-Realism)" [ABSTRACT]
(21) M. Silcox and J. Cogburn, "Against
the Demarcation Problem" [ABSTRACT]
(22) J. Cogburn and J. Megill, "Are
Turing Machines Platonists? Inferentialism and the Computational
Theory of Mind." [ABSTRACT]
(23) J. Cogburn and M. Silcox, "Could
Just Anything Be a Digital Computer?" [ABSTRACT]
(24) J. Cogburn and M. Silcox, "The
Emergence of Emergence: Computability and Ontology." [ABSTRACT]
(25) M. Silcox and J. Cogburn, "Does
the Reader Make the Text? Some Thoughts on Literary Competence."
[ABSTRACT]
ABSTRACT: The cognitive sciences are replete with attempts
to model cognitive abilities in terms of tacit knowledge of a
theory. In this manner knowing how to do something is explained
in terms of knowing that a theory is true. Strangely, while this
order of explanation is ubiquitous, existing philosophical discussions
of tacit knowledge are limited to narrow domains. I address these
discussions, as well as uses of tacit knowledge in linguistics,
psychology, and artificial intelligence, to analyze tacit knowledge
in terms of the justificatory role (tacitly known) theories play
vis a vis our own explicit knowledge.
ABSTRACT: Neil Tennant and Joseph Salerno have recently attempted
to rigorously formalize Michael Dummett's argument for logical
revision. Surprisingly, both conclude that Dummett commits elementary
logical errors, and hence fails to offer an argument that is
even prima facie valid. After explicating the arguments
Salerno and Tennant attribute to Dummett, I show how broader
attention to Dummett's writings on the theory of meaning allows
one to discern, and formalize, a valid argument for logical revision.
Then, after correctly providing a rigorous statement of the argument,
I am able to delineate four possible anti-Dummettian responses.
Following recent work by Stewart Shapiro and Crispin Wright,
I conclude that progress in the anti-realist's dialectic requires
greater clarity about the key modal notions used in Dummett's
proof.
3. J. Cogburn, "Tonking a
Theory of Content: An Inferentialist Rejoinder," Logic and Logical Philosophy, 13 (2005),
pp. 31-36.
ABSTRACT: If correct, Christopher Peacocke's "manifestationism
without verificationism," would explode the dichotomy between
realism and inferentialism in the contemporary philosophy of
language. I first explicate Peacocke's original theory, and then
defend it against Neil Tennant's criticism that it is inconsistent
with the topic-neutrality of logic. My defense involves devising
a recursive definition for grasp of logical contents along the
lines Peacocke suggests. Unfortunately though, the definition
reveals the Achilles' heel of the whole project. By inventing
a new logical operator with the introduction rule for the existential
quantifier and the elimination rule for the universal quantifier,
I am able to show that Peacocke's theory only avoids verificationism
to the extent that it does not satisfy manifestationism.
ABSTRACT: I argue that Frederic Fitch's proof to the conclusion
that all truths are known is a key lemma both in an inductive
argument for the existence of God, and in a deductive argument
to the conclusion that God cannot exist. The argument against
God's existence is an epistemic analog to the paradox of the
stone. Surprisingly, the analog to the traditional solution to
the paradox of the stone is identical with the restricted form
of verificationism recently defended by Neil Tennant in The
Taming of the True. From these considerations, as well as
discussion of recent arguments by Michael Hand and Jonathan Kvanvig,
it follows that, pace Hand, Kvanvig, and Timothy Williamson,
Tennant's reaction to Fitch's proof is very well motivated.
ABSTRACT: In Chapter 7 of The Taming of the True, Neil Tennant
provides a new argument from Michael Dummett's "manifestation
requirement" to the incorrectness of classical logic and
the correctness of intuitionistic logic. I show that Tennant's
new argument is only valid if one interprets crucial existence
claims occurring in the proof in the manner of intuitionists.
If one interprets the existence claims as a classical logician
would, then one can accept Tennant's premises while rejecting
his conclusion of logical revision. Thus, Tennant has provided
no evidence that should convince anyone who is not already an
intuitionist. Since his proof is a proof for the correctness
of intuitionism, it begs the question.
ABSTRACT: In "Revising the Logic of Logical Revision"
(Philosophical Studies, 99, 211-227) J. Salerno attempts to undermine
Crispin Wright's recent arguments for intuitionism, and to replace
Wright and Dummett's arguments with a revisionary argument of
his own. I show that Salerno's criticisms of Wright involve both
uncharitably foisting an inference on Wright that no intuitionist
would make and fallaciously treating an existentially instantiated
variable as a proper name. Then I show how very general considerations
about the nature of warrant undermine both Wright and Salerno's
arguments.
ABSTRACT: Advocates of ‘reader response’ approaches
to literarycriticism defend the idea that an individual
reader's understandingof a text can be a factor in
determining the meaning of whatis written in that
text, and hence must play a part in determiningthe
very identity conditions of works of literary art. We examinesome accounts that have been given of the type of readerly
‘competence’that a reader must have in
order for her responses to a textto play this sort
of constitutive role. We argue that the analogydrawn
by Stanley Fish and Jonathan Culler between literary andlinguistic competence is philosophically flawed and explanatorily unfruitful, and that a better way of understanding the
notionof literary competence can be constructed by
appeal to some limitation results in formal logic
and computability theory.
8. J. Cogburn and R. Cook, "Inverted
Space: Minimal Verificationism, Propositional Attitudes, and
Compositionality," Philosophia: Philosophical Quarterly of Israel,
32.1-4 (2005), pp. 73-92.
ABSTRACT: We use the duality theorem of projective geometry
to describe an inverted spectrum type thought experiment, and
then show how this undermines the verificationism of Michael
Dummett. In closing we discuss varieties of compositionality
to suggest that a limited form of holism can preserve most of
Dummett's view.
ABSTRACT: We argue that A. Damasio's Somatic Marker hypothesis
can explain why humans don't generally suffer from the frame
problem, arguably the greatest obstacle facing the Computational
Theory of Mind. This involves showing how humans with damaged
emotional centers are best understood as actually suffering from
the frame problem. We are then able to show that, paradoxically,
these results provide evidence for the Computational Theory of
Mind, and in addition call into question the very distinction
between easy and hard problems in the contemporary philosophy
of mind.
ABSTRACT: We build on some of Daniel Dennett's ideas about
predictive indispensability to characterize properties recognizable
to people as computationally emergent if, and only if: (1) they
can be instantiated by a computing machine, and (2) there is
no algorithm for detecting instantiations of them. We then use
this conception of emergence to provide support to the aesthetic
ideas of Stanley Fish and recent metaphysical conjectures of
Chomsky.
11. R. Cook and J. Cogburn, "What
Negation is Not: Intuitionism and '0=1'," Analysis, 60.1 (2000), pp. 5-12.
ABSTRACT: Dummett's second through seventh axioms for intuitionistic
arithmetic are shown to be consistent with the claim that zero
equals one. From this it is shown that intuitionistic negation
cannot be defined in terms of zero being equal to one.
12. J. Cogburn, "The Philosophical
Basis of What? The Anti-Realist Case For Dialethism," in
The
Law of Non-Contradiction, ed. Graham Priest, J.C. Beall,
and Bradley Armour-Garb, Oxford University Press, (2004).
ABSTRACT: In the first half of the paper I show how considerations
about the defeasibility of evidence commit the Dummettian anti-realist
to dialetheism. Rather than conclude that Dummettian anti-realism
is false, I argue in the second half that such dialetheist anti-realism
is a very plausible way to characterize discourses with epistemically
constrained yet defeasible truth predicates, such as ethics and
aesthetics.
ABSTRACT: Peter Unger's view that sorites susceptible predicates
have empty extensions has been recently critiqued by Rosanna
Keefe and Timothy Williamson, who respectively argue that this
renders communication impossible and philosophy superficial.
By appealing to the distinction between asserted and implicated
content, I am able to undermine these criticisms and show Unger
style nihilism to be at least more plausible than Williamson's
epistemicism.
15. J. Cogburn, "Moore Problems
for the Anti-Realist."
ABSTRACT: Moorean validities are any in-general invalid inferences
such as P; therefore I believe that P. While these are prima
facie invalid, they have no counterexamples, since any assertion
of the truth of the premise pragmatically forces the conclusion
to be true. I first show that Dummettian anti-realists have a
seemingly impossible time explaining why Moorean validities are
not valid. Then I argue that the anti-realist could restrict
applications of Moorean validities to inferential situations
outside of the scope of things assumed hypothetically for further
discharge. In conclusion, I suggest that Berkeley and Davidson's
non-trivial Moorean arguments run afoul of this restriction.
22. J. Cogburn and J. Megill,
"Are Turing Machines Platonists? Inferentialism and the
Computational Theory of Mind."
ABSTRACT: Building on the argument of Cogburn's "Deconstructing
Dummett's Anti-Realism: A New Argument Against Church's Thesis"
(The Logica Yearbook, ed. T. Childers, Prague: Filozofia.)
we first discuss Michael Dummett's philosophy of mathematics
and Robert Brandom's philosophy of language to demonstrate that
Inferentialism entails the falsity of Church's Thesis and, as
a consequence, the Computational Theory of Mind. This amounts
to an entirely novel critique of mechanism in the philosophy
of mind, one we show to have tremendous advantages over the traditional
Lucas-Penrose argument.
23. J. Cogburn and M. Silcox,
"Could Just Anything Be a Digital Computer?"
ABSTRACT: John Searle has argued that the brain cannot be a
digital computer. The very question of whether the brain is a
computer is (he thinks) an entirely meaningless one. Computational
structure is 'not discovered, but assigned' to objects in the
natural world. And because the property of being a computer is
'observer-relative' in this way, just anything could be one,
depending solely upon how we choose to look at it. In defending
this position, Searle makes reference to formal results in computability
theory. We argue here that Searle's appeals to computability
theory are badly confused. Once these confusions are cleared
up, Searle's argument becomes recognizable as nothing more than
a variation of Hilary Putnam's generalized model-theoretic argument
for internal realism. We show that the most plausible objections
to Putnam's famous argument also undermine Searle's.
24. J.
Cogburn and M. Silcox, "The Emergence of Emergence: Computability
and Ontology."
ABSTRACT: We begin by canvassing and rejecting three possible
ways to differentiate genuinely (ontologically) emergent properties
from those that are merely heuristic aids (epistemically emergent
properties). We then propose that a property of any mereological
sum M is epistemically emergent if, and only if, there is a recursive
procedure that maps observed instantiations of the properties
of M's parts onto "1" if the emergent property is instantiated
by M and "0" if it is not. The property is ontologically
emergent if there is no such procedure. We discuss the halting
program in order to prove that there are ontologically emergent
properties and suggest that certain sorts of secondary, mind
dependent properties might fulfill our criterion for ontological
emergence.
25. M. Silcox and J. Cogburn,
"Does the Reader Make the Text? Some Thoughts on Literary
Competence."
ABSTRACT: Advocates of "reader response" approaches
to literary criticism defend the idea that an individual reader's
understanding of a text can be a factor in determining the meaning
of what is written in that text, and hence must play a part in
determining the very identity conditions of works of literary
art. We examine some accounts that have been given of the type
of readerly "competence" that a reader must have in
order for her responses to a text to play this sort of a constitutive
role. We argue that the analogy that is drawn by Stanley Fish
and Jonathan Culler between literary and linguistic competence
is philosophically flawed and explanatorily unfruitful, and that
a better way of understanding the notion of literary competence
can be constructed by appeal to limitation results in formal
logic and computability theory.