Volume 29, Issue 3

Self-exempting conciliationism is the view that it is rational to give weight to the opinions of peers in disagreement, except in disagreements about how to respond to disagreement. The special treatment of disagreements about disagreement, which is important to avoid self-undermining, seems arbitrary. Two arguments against this objection were put forward. Elga [3] aims to show that there is an independent motivation for conciliationism to be self-exempting. Pittard [5] argues that the special treatment is not arbitrary because the concern for epistemic deference motivates conciliatory responses only in ordinary disagreements, but not in disagreements about disagreement. I will argue that both replies fail|none of them can provide a consistent justication for why one ought to be conciliatory in disagreements except in cases of disagreement about disagreement.

Those who I call meta-skeptics in my paper argue that one should suspend judgment about every philosophical question. Most often they use the argument from disagreement to show that the suspension of our philosophical beliefs is our epistemic obligation. In the present paper I argue against the main motivation for this view and show that since even the meta-skeptics' stance is a contested philosophical one, their argument cannot succeed without refuting itself. Various meta-skeptics proposed counter- objections to this self-refutation objection. I consider here Jason Brennan's quite simple and Bryan Frances's more sophisticated counter-objections. Their proposals are even more interesting because they di er from the typical points of meta-skeptics: Brennan argues for outsider skepticism, that is non-philosophers should suspend judgment about philosophical issues, and Frances relies on the notion of epistemic superior instead of epistemic peer. I consider their points in two ways: whether their counter-objections can help regular meta-skepticism and whether their skepticism can stand on its own. In my replies to these proposals I show why both are problematic in each of these two ways. Brennan says that widespread disagreement is a sign of philosophy's unreliability. Yet, he can only address the charge that his point is a philosophical one and not the objection that there can be disagreement about it. And since there is good reason to think that even his position is subject to disagreement, it is self-undermining. Furthermore, Brennan does not give any reason why any first-order philosophical theory must lack the virtues that his argument displays. Frances argues that even if the argument from disagreement is self-refuting and meta-skeptics have to suspend judgment about it, they might still remain skeptics after all. In my reply I show how Frances's defense of his position still relies on principles that could be the objects of further arguments from disagreement.

We interact with value in two ways: we recognize objects as valuable and we take objects up as significant for our lives by valuing them. These two modes of interaction involve different kinds of reasons. Recognizing an object as valuable involves recognizing reasons that everyone shares, but agents can differ with respect to their reasons to value the object, and the reasons which are then involved in valuing. Using this observation, I argue that our relations to value and reasons are irreducible to each other by rejecting two views that attempt to interpret value in terms of reasons and vice versa.

On the surface, one of the main di erences between John Mc- Dowell and Wilfrid Sellars when it comes to their conceptions of intentionality has to do with their respective accounts of meaning. McDowell advocates a relational account of meaning, whereas Sellars holds, on the contrary, that a correct view of intentionality is only possible through a non-relational account of meaning. According to McDowell, Sellars does not consider the possibility of his own relational view because he su ers from a `blind spot'. It is implied that if Sellars saw this possibility, he would see the light and embrace something like McDowell's own account. I would like to argue in this paper that the whole issue goes much deeper than that. Sellars does not su er from a `blind spot' and showing why this is the case should give us an idea of how far apart these two thinkers really are, appearances notwithstanding. It will also reveal that the heart of their disagreement does not consist in a dispute over whether the correct shape of an account of meaning should be relational or not. Sellars's and McDowell's respective outlooks on intentionality di er fundamentally with regards to the concept of objectivity.

This paper discusses whether other people's mental states are, at times, perceivable. Against such a possibility it was objected that other people's mental states are not empirically accessible and therefore, at best, recognizable by inference to the best explanation of their behaviour. However, this fairly common view is committed to a narrow empiricist concept of perception. Hence, this article explores a broader concept of perception and analyses its application-conditions with respect to the perception of other people's mental states.