Single Authored Papers in Peer Reviewed Journals
- Jon Cogburn, "Inferentialism and Tacit Knowledge," Behavior and Philosophy, 32 (2005), pp. 503-524.[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.]
- Jon Cogburn, "The Logic of Logical Revision: Formalizing Dummett's Argument," The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 83.1 (2005), pp. 15-32. [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.]
- Jon 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.]
- Jon Cogburn, "Paradox Lost," Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 34.2 (2004), pp. 195-216. [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.]
- Jon Cogburn, "Manifest Invalidity: Neil Tennant's New Argument for Intuitionism," Synthese, 134.3 (2003), pp. 353-362. Jon Cogburn, "The Logic of Logical Revision: Formalizing Dummett's Argument," The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 83.1 (2005), pp. 15-32. [ABSTRACT: Neil Tennant and Joseph Salerno 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.]
- Jon Cogburn, "Logical Revision Re-revisited: The Wright/Salerno Argument for Intuitionism," Philosophical Studies, 60.1 (2000), pp. 5-12. [ABSTRACT: In "Revising the Logic of Logical Revision" (Philosophical Studies, 99, 211-227) Jon 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.]
- Co-Authored Papers in Peer Reviewed Journals
- Jon Cogburn and Jason Megill, "Are Turing Machines Platonists? Intuitionism and the Computational Theory of Mind," Minds and Machines, (forthcoming) [ABSTRACT: We show that both Michael Dummett's philosophy of mathematics and Robert Brandom's philosophy of language entail 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. ]
- Mark Silcox and Jon Cogburn, "The Emergence of Emergence: Computability and Ontology." American Philosophical Quarterly (forthcoming) [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.]
- Mark Silcox and Jon Cogburn, "Computability Theory and Literary Competence," The British Journal of Aesthetics, 46.5, (2006), pp. 369-386. [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 constitutive role. We argue that the analogy 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 some limitation results in formal logic and computability theory.]
- Mark Silcox and Jon 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.]
- Jon Cogburn and Roy 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.]
- Jon Megill and Jon Cogburn, "Easy's Getting Harder all the Time: Human Emotions and the Frame Problem," Ratio, XVII 3 (2005), pp. 306-316. [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 probleMark 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.]
- Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, "Computing Machinery and Emergence," Minds and Machines, 15.1 (2005), pp. 73-89. [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 theMark We then use this conception of emergence to provide support to the aesthetic ideas of Stanley Fish and recent metaphysical conjectures of Chomsky.]
- Roy Cook and Jon 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.]
- Other Single Authored Peer Reviewed Papers
- Jon Cogburn, J. Cogburn, "Moore's
Paradox as an Argument Against Anti-Realism," in Rahman,
S., Marion, M. et Keiff, L. (éds.) [à paraître]
: (Anti)Realism in the Formal Sciences, coll. Logic, Epistemology
and the Unity of Science, Springer-Verlag, Dordrecht (forthcoming).
- [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.]
- Jon 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 dialetheisMark 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.]
- Jon Cogburn, "Deconstructing Dummett's Anti-Realism: A New Argument Against Church's Thesis," The Logica Yearbook (2002). [ABSTRACT: Dummettian anti-realism is shown to contradict Church's Thesis.]
- Other Jointly Authored Peer Reviewed Papers
- Mark Mark Silcox and Jon Cogburn, "Sill Playing, or Just Living? Azeroth and the Experience Machine" in World of Warcraft and Philosophy: Wrath of the Philosopher King ed. Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger, Open Court, (2009). [ABSTRACT: We consider World of Warcraft as a Nozickean "experience machine," evaluationg the three reasons Nozick takes it to be the case that a rational person would not subject herself to such a thing.]
- Non Peer Reviewed Things on Web
- Jon Cogburn, Notes on German Idealism (began Spring 2010) [ABSTRACT: I just started this, so there's almost nothing on here. My interest in realism/anti-realism has led me backwards to this period, so I've started really slowly learning it. Right now I'm just going through Kant's first Critique, since it all stems from there. My immediate goal is to get enough notes by the end of Summer 2010 to be able to teach a class on Kant. My long term goal is to have a nice set of notes to help people read everything from Kant to Schopenhauer and Hegel. It's not crazy to attempt that by Summer 2020. Sinking time into this might hinder my shot at getting Full Professor according to the six year clock, but that's too bad. I have to follow the muse.]
- Jon Cogburn and Clint Mitchell, Notes on Biblical Authority and Interpretation (Fall 2009) [ABSTRACT: These are handouts from an adult Sunday School class that Pastor Mitchell and I taught. There's some interesting philosophy in here that I'd like to develop into something at some point.]
- Jon Cogburn, Philosophy of Mind. (Summer 2005) [ABSTRACT: This is the penultimate draft for an article wrote this for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy when I was the Area Editor for Philosophy of Mind. It was rejected as too long by James Fieser (I think it's eighty single spaced pages). It had taken me a whole summer to write BEFORE I HAD TENURE, and really ernestly reflected the level of detail I wanted in articles. I don't remember if I was let go or resigned from the gig. In any case, it was amicable; and I'm still a big fan of what Fieser and Dowden have accomplished.]
- Jon Cogburn, Akbar and Jeff's Guide to Crispin Wright's Truth and Objectivity (Summer 2005)[ABSTRACT: These were just some student notes for a class I taught on Wright. I wish I did this kind of thing more often. I'm developing a set on philosophy of language more generally, but want to redo them a couple of times before putting them out here.]
