Re-Considerations

Can philosophers change their minds? A friend of mine in graduate school used to say that almost all philosophers, after they've completed their PhD dissertations, never read anything new, never work on anything new, and never change their minds about anything, for the rest of their lives. This was cynical. But cynicism, as a jaded or pessimistic attitude towards human life and (especially other) people's motives, isn't always exaggerated or false. And in fact, my 25 years of first-hand experience inside professional academic philosophy fully confirmed my friend's cynical claim, provided that we introduce the following seven clarifications and qualifications. First, "almost all" means "as many as 99%-but not absolutely all." There are a few exceptions, let's say 1%.

Forthcoming in Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology, (eds: Overgaard and D'Oro) Many philosophers (and non-philosophers) think persistent disagreement is a characteristic feature of philosophy. This thought is central is much scepticism about philosophy as a discipline: Surely, the thought goes, if the goal is to find answers to important questions, philosophers have failed: they've been at it for more than 2000 years and they haven't managed to agree on anything! This paper is an extended response to that line of thought and also an exploration of the sources of persistent disagreement in philosophy. 1 I argue for three central theses: 1. We have no evidence that there is more persistent disagreement in philosophy than in relevantly similar disciplines.

Skepticism about the epistemic value of intuition in theoretical and philosophical inquiry fueled by the empirical discovery of irrational bias (e.g., the order effect) in people’s judgments has recently been challenged by research suggesting that people can introspectively track intuitional instability. The two studies reported here build upon this, the first by demonstrating that people are able to introspectively track instability that was experimentally induced by introducing conflicting expert opinion about certain cases, and the second by demonstrating that it was the presence of instability—not merely the presence of conflicting information—that resulted in changes in the relevant attitudinal states (i.e., confidence and belief strength). The paper closes with the suggestion that perhaps the best explanation for these (and other) findings may be that intuitional instability is not actually ‘‘intuitional.’’

Open Philosophy

In this study, I juxtapose the views of Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Menachem Fisch on radical changes of mind. I note in particular the common aspects of their proposal that typically, radical change is not, indeed, cannot be justified by reasons. Their responses to and arguments for this threat to rationality are critically examined. Hili Razinsky’s analysis of ambivalence is shown to contribute to the understanding of change by providing a broader perspective on the rationality of belief. Her work thus provides a promising alternative to the above positions and the impasse they confront.

Journal of Philosophical Research, 2022

At the center of much contemporary work on self-knowledge of our attitudes is a debate between Agentialists and Empiricists. Empiricists hold that first-person knowledge of one's own attitudes possesses a broadly empirical basis, such as observation or inference. Agentialists insist that an account of self-knowledge must make sense of the intimate connection between knowing one's attitudes and actively forming them in response to reasons. But it is plausible to suppose that a psychologically realistic account of self-knowledge will emphasize both active and passive elements. Focusing on the idea that we form self-ascriptions of belief on the basis of active deliberation, this paper outlines such a middle ground position.

2023

Philosophy begins and ends in disagreement. Philosophers disagree among themselves in innumerable ways, and this pervasive and permanent dissent is a sign of their inability to solve philosophical problems and present well-established substantive truths. This raises the question: “What should we do with our philosophical beliefs in light of philosophy's epistemic failure?” In this open access book, János Tozsér analyzes the possible answers to this question, develops them into comprehensive metaphilosophical visions, and argues that we cannot commit ourselves to any of them in peace, with a clear intellectual conscience, and without self-deception. Tozsér calls this disheartening insight “the experience of breakdown,” claiming that no matter how we struggle, we are unable to create substantive philosophical knowledge that goes beyond the cost-benefit analysis of philosophical theories. He makes the case that, at the same time, we cannot suspend all of our beliefs about the most fundamental facts of our world once and for all, and so forever give up on seeking substantive philosophical truths.

Atlas of Aspect Change, 2022

In this paper it is argued that philosophy might benefit from a return to its episodic roots, i.e., to everyday individual problems, and that such a return needs an equally 'episodic' method, i.e., the discovery and design of ways of seeing. The argument is made in terms of an exploration of the potential relevance of Wittgenstein's views on aspect for such a switch.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1988

Essentis AG, 2022

When you're stuck in a complex situation, feeling that there are no viable options left or feeling lost in intricacies and turning in circles, you must rethink. In this article, we will reflect on how the inherentbut often unrecognised-complexity of many business management situations can lead us to 'being stuck' and we will discuss how the required rethinking can be achieved. To this end, we will be studying the concept of cultural and ethical neutrality, as well as the value of neutrality-a phrase taken from a seminal article by Stuart D.G. Robinson-when dealing with the type of complex situations permeating senior management work. First, the nature of this complexity is outlined, with a nod to what have been called wicked and messy problems. Next, we turn to ourselves, the people involved in tackling these complex situations, and study pertinent cultural aspects, thinking preferences and behavioural patterns which fundamentally influence our perception and thinking, as well as how we cooperate with others to address the complexity surrounding us. Finally, the contribution of neutrality to our problem-solving endeavours is discussed: how it can support us in cutting right to the very essence of the complexity at hand, offering the possibility to fundamentally rethink and find a clear way forward.

Erkenntnis, 2011

Belief revision (BR) and truthlikeness (TL) emerged independently as two research programmes in formal methodology in the 1970s. A natural way of connecting BR and TL is to ask under what conditions the revision of a belief system by new input information leads the system towards the truth. It turns out that, for the AGM model of belief revision, the only safe case is the expansion of true beliefs by true input, but this is not very interesting or realistic as a model of theory change in science. The new accounts of non-prioritized belief revision do not seem more promising in this respect, and the alternative BR account of updating by imaging leads to other problems. Still, positive results about increasing truthlikeness by belief revision may be sought by restricting attention to special kinds of theories. Another approach is to link truthlikeness to epistemic matters by an estimation function which calculates expected degrees of truthlikeness relative to evidence. Then we can study how the expected truthlikeness of a theory changes when probabilities are revised by conditionalization or imaging. Again, we can ask under what conditions such changes lead our best theories towards the truth.