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Whereas the progressive nature of science is widely recognised, specifying the standards of scientific progress has been subject to philosophical debate since the enlightenment. Recently, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Alexander Bird, and Finnur Dellsfien have revived this debate by setting forward a semantic, epistemic and noetic ac- count of scientific progress respectively. I argue that none of these accounts is satisfactory. The semantic and epistemic accounts might advance necessary conditions for scientific progress, namely an accumulation of true, justified, and non-Gettiered beliefs, but fail to specify sufficient conditions. The noetic account, in contrast, advances sufficient conditions for scientific progress, namely an increase of genuine understanding, but fails to specify the necessary conditions. To remedy these deficits, I advance a hybrid account of scientific progress between the epistemic and noetic accounts, according to which the accumulation of explanatorily or predictively powerful knowledge constitutes scientific progress. In contrast to the epistemic account, my account ensures that only scientifically relevant knowledge constitutes scientific progress, thereby evading the threat of underdemandingness. In contrast to the noetic account, my account does not impose a psychological requirement of grasping the explanatory or predictive power of a scientific development, thereby evading the threat of overdemandingness. A further advantage of my account is that it can preserve plausible features of the noetic account.

In their recent paper, \Epistemology for Beginners: Two to Five-Year-Old Children's Representation of Falsity," Olivier Mascaro and Olivier Morin study the ontogeny of a naive understanding of truth in humans. Their paper is fascinating for several reasons, but most striking is their claim (given a rather optimistic reading of epistemology) that toddlers as young as two can, at times, recognize false from true assertions. Their Optimistic Epistemology Hypothesis holds that children seem to have an innate capacity to represent a state of affairs truthfully. In the following paper, I investigate the problems this research poses for deationist theories of truth. Richard Rorty and Huw Price hold that the best way to understand truth or \the truth" is to understand the necessary conditions required for assertoric practice. Both philosophers present unique and very different deationary theories when it comes to construing truth. I argue that neither philosopher's approach is successful because they focus on truth and fail to recognize truthfulness as a norm of assertoric practice. I show that truthfulness is the elusive third norm of claim-based discourse and is consistent with Mascaro and Morin's findings.

This article proposes an interpretive key to Bernard Williams's philosophy. It posits the idea that at its core, his philosophy consists in the following interconnected epistemological and metaphysical views: (1) scientific realism, (2) metaphysical naturalism, (3) methodological pluralism, (4) anthropological contingentism and (5) a post-analytical/humanistic under- standing of philosophy. These are extracted in the first two sections. The third section provides a demonstration of how this interpretation can be applied vis-a-vis Williams's critique of morality. The text concludes with some critical remarks on Williams's metaphilosophical position.

Ordinary language contains groups of related predicates with different arities. Interpreting utterances that appear to contain an n-place predicate by using an n+m-place predicate to dissolve merely apparent disagreements and other misunderstandings is an established practice in everyday discourse. This paper aims to present hermeneutical maxims to guide and evaluate these interpretations through arity raising. In interpreting utterances by using a higher-place predicate, we should use only expressions that their authors themselves reasonably could have used and which would have been suitable to achieve their supposed purposes. The goal is to achieve a charitable, accurate reading that also maximizes the text's transparency to improve our understanding of it.