Volume 7, Issue 1

Crispin Wright has recently introduced a non-evidential notion of warrant, entitlement of cognitive project, as a promising response to certain sceptical arguments that purport to show that we cannot claim any warrant for a wide range of beliefs that we ordinarily take ourselves to possess a warrant for. The basic idea is that, for a given class of cognitive projects, there are certain basic propositions – entitlements – which one is warranted in trusting provided there is no sufficient reason to think them false. Having presented Wright's notion of entitlement and rehearsed the sceptical arguments he invokes the notion to respond to, we proceed to raise what will be referred to as “the generality problem”. The problem raises the question whether entitlements come on the cheap. The good news delivered by entitlement is that it seems to deliver a way of resisting the sceptical conclusion. The bad news, however, is that it also appears to do much more than that by supporting, or providing a foundation for, what we would consider crazy and bizarre cognitive projects.

What can modest transcendental claims do against skepticism? In this paper, I examine various anti-skeptical roles for modest transcendental claims suggested by Barry Stroud, Christopher Hookway, and Robert Stern (Stern, On Kant's Response to Hume: The Second Analogy asTranscendental Argument, Clarendon Oxford Press, 1999a, Stern, Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects, Clarendon Oxford Press, 1999b, Hookway, Modest Transcendental Arguments and Sceptical Doubts: A Reply to Stroud, Oxford University Press, 1999, Stroud, Kantian Argument, Conceptual Capacities, and Invulnerability, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994, Stroud, The Goal of Transcendental Arguments, Clarendon Oxford Press, 1999). I argue that contrary to what these writers suggest, modest transcendental claims do not achieve much. The strategies on offer either (i) fail to identify a clear anti-skeptical role for modest transcendental claims (Stroud), (ii) they do identify such a role, but only on the assumption that we are facing a non-standard skeptical challenge (Hookway), or (iii) the anti-skeptical strategies do successfully engage with standard forms of skeptical challenges, but they work only because of epistemological assumptions that make the transcendental claims largely redundant (Stern).

This paper will deal explicitly with the positions of Habermas and Apel on the status of the consensual conditions of the discourse. My usage of the Habermas-Apel-debate will serve two functions. The first purpose is to accomplish a clarification of the problems attached to a purely discursive justification of the consensual conditions, which represents the approach defended by Habermas. Contrary to Habermas, Apel's approach includes two different levels of justification, i.e., reflexive and discursive, and conceives them as complementary, although principally different. The second purpose is to elucidate the strength of Apel's approach through the critical objections made by Habermas. Finally, I would like to distinguish between two different functions of the consensual conditions/meta-norms within Apel's approach: a validational versus a critical. Here, the topic of reflexive justification will be connected to the meta-normative status of the conditions, and to the difference between validation and critique.

According to Jerry Fodor, a characteristic assumption of modern philosophy of mind is that the content of a person's concepts is individuated on the basis of the roles the concepts have. Fodor has instead argued that conceptual content merely depends on extension. The most influential argument for this atomism of conceptual content claims that since there is no analytic-synthetic distinction, a conceptual role theorist must accept that there is no principled distinction between content and not-content determining conceptual roles. But accepting this, the argument holds, forces the conceptual role theorist to accept global meaning holism, a consequence Fodor thinks is intolerable. I argue that Tyler Burge's social externalism represents an objection to the holism argument: social externalism can be understood as a conceptual role theory in the relevant sense. According to social externalism, there is no principled distinction between content and not-content determining conceptual roles in the sense relevant for the argument. Social externalism does not, however, imply global meaning holism.

In this paper I want to show that emotions have essentially a metaphoric structure. I will start by discussing metaphors and metaphoric structures, then turn to emotions. I defend Max Black's view that metaphors are essentially seeing-as against David Cooper's criticism. Then I define the concept of a metaphoric structure. In the section on emotion I discuss Robert C. Roberts's idea that emotions are construals, i.e. seeing-as. I try to show that this means that emotions have a metaphoric structure. Both metaphors and emotions can “transform” their “objects” in a cognitively productive way. This transformation can show us the salience of phenomena.