Philosophy Articles
2022 (2013)
Something happened during 2013 that I don’t remember. Because there were (at least) two papers I forgot about shortly after writing them. This is the second one that I’ve found recently (this year). I actually did submit it to a journal at one point but was so taken aback by the poor quality of the referee reports that I was stymied (and then turned to doing something else and eventually forgot about the paper). An appealing view about logic is that it really is a matter of (unconsciously applied) rules. In turn, these rules are arbitrary insofar as there’s nothing metaphysical that forces these rules to be ones of “logic” except that they’re an optimal choice for a number of pragmatic reasons. In this sense logic is “conventional.” I think this view is (largely) right but there are so many philosophical objections to it that it’s almost hard for anyone to take it seriously. So one thing I’ve been doing now and again over the years is undercutting (in different papers, books, etc.) the reasons not to take the view seriously. This paper illustrates some of that undercutting. The view I target is one that essentially says that we need a notion of logical possibility that’s metaphysically primitive because otherwise we’ll have no way of evaluating our choice of logic. That, I think, is what the debate boils down to, although if you read this paper you’ll see that all sorts of technicalities about model theory, logics (first-order and otherwise) get involved. How it often happens in philosophy.
An apparently central tool in contemporary (analytic) philosophy is the use of “intuitions.” These are impressions that philosophers take to be widely shared and that can be used as a provisional basis for evidence or support for one or another philosophical theory. Examples are the intuitions elicited by thought experiments such as Judith Jarvis Thompson’s trolley car dilemma (in ethics) or Edmund Gettier’s cases of justified true belief that aren’t knowledge (in epistemology), or Hilary Putnam’s thought experiments about our discovering that domestic cats were actually Martian-designed robots (in philosophy of language). At the time I wrote this paper (2013) a new branch of philosophy was being established, “experimental philosophy”: the use of social-pschological techniques (e.g. questionnaires) to test whether these intuitions were, in fact, widely shared. This paper was the basis for a talk I gave at a conference at Tufts in 2013, where I defended a certain narrow use of “intuitions”—one which is shared by philosophers and by bona fide scientists, namely linguists. Because this was a paper I wrote as a talk, I didn’t try to send it out but intended to use it as material in a book on epistemology I thought I would write at some point or another. So I forgot about it. Rediscovering it recently (after having, unfortunately, written two books in epistemology), I thought it deserved publication but didn’t need to appear in a professional philosophical journal. (I’ve got other work on this issue forthcoming in an anthology.) So I decided to publish it at jodyazzouni.com so that people who aren’t in philosophy might have a look at it and see what they think.
2021
Philosophers are hard to understand; they really are. I remember reading Hegel as a first-year: It read like science fiction to me. Here are all these words that I understand (or think I understand) but somehow they’re being used in a way that leads to paragraphs, if not sentences, that make no sense at all. Even subsequent training in philosophy—substantial training—can leave this impression, at times, intact. This is because, in part, philosophers are engaging in conceptual renovation/study. This is (also) because, in part, philosophers don’t always—can’t always—articulate all their assumptions and presumptions. Like all of us do when we argue, they leave a lot implicit, and this can make what’s going on very hard to understand. This is true even of a philosopher like G.E. Moore, who tries to be as flat-footed and explicit as anyone has ever tried to be. I flatter myself (as they used to say) that I’ve really succeeded in interpreting a couple of papers of Moore’s that have puzzled pretty much everyone who has ever thought about them. What on Earth is Moore up to when he offers his “proof of an external world”? Why does he think that waving his hands in the sceptic’s face while saying, “Here is one hand. And here is another,” is going to move that sceptic? Somehow a shifting of the burden of proof is involved—everyone sees that, anyway. I try to make clear what that shift in burden can be, and in the process, I think (I flatter myself in thinking) that I’ve found something new to say about burden of proofs. It’s hard to say something new about burdens of proofs, so maybe I haven’t, of course. One bit of shifting terminology (apologies): I call my epistemic position, “Initial position epistemology.” But that’s not what I call it in Challenging Knowledge: How we (sometimes) don’t know what we think we know. There, I call it: Starting point epistemology.
2019
This paper is very technical (so be forewarned). It gives a new approach to recognizing when two logics are notational variants of one another. Theories that seem to be committed to certain objects when characterized against a background of a particular logic don’t seem to be committed to those objects when the theory is transliterated against the background of a different logic. The reason this purely formal issue is relevant to metaphysics is this: Some philosophers hope to avoid what are described as “ontological commitments” by changing the logic that a theory presupposes. I show that in many cases, the logics that are used for these purposes are actually notational variants of one another—thus the “ontological commitments” of the theories, relative to the different logics, are the same even though they don’t appear to be.
2015
Fictional characters aren’t the only things humans create out of nothing. Mathematics is full of things we made up: numbers, geometrical objects, functions. The difference between them and fictional characters is that we know (most of us do, anyway) that fictional characters don’t exist but many of us—maybe most of us—think numbers and other mathematical objects do exist. I explain why this is, why our “ontological” thinking about mathematical objects is so different from our thinking about fictional characters.
Nominalism is the view that mathematical objects don’t exist. Platonism (named after Plato) is the view that mathematical objects do exist. One important difference between fictions in stories and mathematics is that mathematics is indispensable to science. Platonists think that this is because mathematical objects are real: if they weren’t real, mathematical language wouldn’t be valuable; in fact there wouldn’t be mathematical truths at all. (2+2=4 would be as true as 2+2=5 if there wasn’t a 2 or 4 or 5.) These concerns look fatal to nominalism; but they’re not—that’s what I show here.
Some papers in philosophy of mathematics require knowing a lot of mathematics, or at least (especially if those papers are written by philosophers) a lot of logic. Not this one. That’s because the debate between the deflationary nominalist (e.g. me) and the deflationary nominalist who’s additionally an agnostic (e.g. Bueno) doesn’t turn on the fine structure of mathematical practice. It turns on questions of when terms in language refer and when they don’t. The plot of the paper, thus, is pretty simple. When we’re pretending to be talking about people (telling a story) or using grammar, and we talk about specific people, Mary and John, or specific creatures, trolls or hobbits, we’re not using our language to refer to anything. So agnosticism doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense to say: Do Mary and John exist? Not if “Mary and John skipped rope,” is a sentence in a grammar class illustrating the role of conjunction. It doesn’t make sense to ask “Do trolls or hobbits exist?” Not if we’re all reading fiction. I argue, in this paper, that mathematical terms are like this: it doesn’t make sense to wonder if they refer and so agnosticism about mathematical objects doesn’t make sense.
2014
The old view of a scientific theory was that it was a collection of sentences—specifically, generalizations of certain sorts. A new view—that’s become very popular—is that scientific theories aren’t collections of sentences at all; rather, they’re collections of models. I argue that the old view is the better view of scientific theories.
2010
This paper is an early version of a book I subsequently published on Wittgenstein, and Saul Kripke’s commentary on Wittgenstein. The classic interpretation of Wittgenstein’s rule following problem is that it results in the surprising claim that we cannot follow rules—mathematical rules like those for addition and multiplication—on our own, privately (as it were). We need public standards in order to determine when we’re applying the rules rightly or wrongly. I argue this is not true.