Jonathan Ichikawa's Blog
Posted in Philosophy on Jun 28th, 2009
I’m kicking off the Arché Summer School this year; here are the slides for my talk. (PowerPoint) (pdf)
(This is mostly designed for the attendees, although I guess it’s conceivable that others could find them interesting. I don’t have a handout; instead, I have a URL where interested parties can look at the slides, quotes, references, [...]
Posted in Blog on blog on Jun 28th, 2009
I’ve added two kinda neat things to my sidebar: “Current Research Topic” and “Currently Reading”. So if for whatever reason you’re wondering what philosophical issues I happen to be thinking about on any given day, or what book I have in progress, my sidebar’s a good place to look.
I’m trying to figure out a way [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jun 24th, 2009
Something cool happened in our methodology seminar last week. Some people like to remark on real-world Gettier cases they find themselves in. I found myself last week in the presence of a real-life deviant Gettier case.
A deviant Gettier case (what Ben Jarvis and I have also called a ‘bad Gettier case’) is a situation in [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jun 21st, 2009
Matt Weiner argues that ‘our use of the word “know” is best captured by’ an inconsistent set of inference rules. His setup strikes me as strange. He writes:
These are the Knowledge Principles:
(Disquotational Principle) An utterance of “S knows that p” at time t is true iff at time t S knows-tenseless that p.
(Practical Environment Principle) [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jun 20th, 2009
Brian recently wondered whether philosophy is deductive or somehow ampliative. I don’t think I believe in ampliative inference. I think that all reasoning is deductive.
By ‘deductive inference,’ I mean inferences where the premises entail the conclusion, and one is led to accept the conclusion on the basis of the believed premises. (I’ll limit this to [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 20th, 2009
I finally got around to changing some things around on this site; I’m no longer embarrassed by it, although it still needs work. Let me know if you see anything wrong, or if you have suggestions for content/design/whatever.
Posted in papers on Jun 20th, 2009
Rational Imagination and Modal Knowledge, with Benjamin Jarvis. Version of 17 June, 2009. Under review.
How do we know what’s (metaphysically) possible and impossible? Kripke-Putnam considerations suggest that possibility is not merely a matter of (coherent) conceivability/imaginability. For example, we can coherently imagine that Hesperus and Phosphorus are distinct objects even though they are not possibly [...]
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Quantifiers, Knowledge, and Counterfactuals, forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Many of the motivations in favor of contextualism about knowledge apply also to a contextualist approach to counterfactuals. I motivate and articulate such an approach, in terms of the context-sensitive ‘all cases’, in the spirit of David Lewis’s contextualist view about knowledge. The resulting view explains [...]
Posted in papers, publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Explaining Away Intuitions, Forthcoming in Studia Philosophica Estonica, special issue on intuitions.
What is it to ‘explain away’ an intuition? Philosophers often attempt to explain intuitions away, but it is often unclear what the success conditions for their project consist in. I attempt to articulate these conditions, using several philosophical case studies as guides. I will [...]
Posted in papers on Jun 20th, 2009
Quantifiers and Epistemic Contextualism, Version of 25 May, 2010. Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.
I defend a neo-Lewisean form of contextualism about knowledge attributions. Understanding the context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions in terms of the context-sensitivity of universal generalizations provides an appealing approach to knowledge. Among the virtues of this approach are solutions to the skeptical paradox and [...]
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Knowing the Intuition and Knowing the Counterfactual, (2009) Philosophical Studies, 145(3), September 2009: 435-443. Please refer to published version here. For a Philosophical Studies book symposium on Timothy Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy. See also Williamson’s response here.
I criticize Timothy Williamson’s characterization of thought experiments on which the central judgments are judgments of contingent counterfactuals. The fragility [...]
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Dreaming, with Ernest Sosa. Forthcoming in The Oxford Companion to Consciousness.
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Thought-Experiment Intuitions and Truth in Fiction, with Benjamin Jarvis. (2009) Philosophical Studies 142 (2), January 2009: 221-246. Please refer to published version, available online here.
What sorts of things are the intuitions generated via thought experiment? Timothy Williamson has responded to naturalistic skeptics by arguing that thought-experiment intuitions are judgments of ordinary counterfactuals. On this view, [...]
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Scepticism and the Imagination Model of Dreaming. (2008) The Philosophical Quarterly, 58 (232), July 2008: 519–527 doi:10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.546.x Penultimate draft; please refer to published version, available online here.
Ernest Sosa has argued that the solution to dream skepticism lies in an understanding of dreams as imaginative experiences – when we dream, on this suggestion, we do not [...]
Posted in papers on Jun 20th, 2009
Intuitions and Begging the Question. Under Review. Version of 4 July, 2009.
What are philosophical intuitions? There is a tension between two intuitive criteria. On the one hand, many of our ordinary beliefs do not seem intuitively to be intuitions; this suggests a relatively restrictionist approach to intuitions. (A few attempts to restrict: intuitions must be [...]
Posted in papers on Jun 20th, 2009
Sosa on Virtues, Perception, and Intuition. Version of 19 January, 2009.
I critically evaluate Ernest Sosa’s (2007) contrast between intuitive justification and perceptual justification. I defend a competence-based approach to intuitive justification that is continuous with epistemic justification generally.
Posted in papers on Jun 20th, 2009
Who Needs Intuitions? Version of 7 September, 2008. Under review.
“Intuitions play critical evidential roles in philosophy.” This statement has air of truism about it; it is widely assumed, and occasionally explicitly argued, to be correct. It forms the basis of an influential series of challenges to traditional philosophical methodology; among these are a reliability challenge—’how [...]
Posted in papers, publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Dreaming and Imagination, (2009) Mind and Language, 24 (1), February 2009: 103-121. Please refer to published version, available online here.
I argue, on philosophical, psychological, and neurophysiological grounds, that contrary to an orthodox view, dreams do not typically involve misleading sensations and false beliefs. I am thus in partial agreement with Colin McGinn, who has [...]
Posted in papers on Jun 19th, 2009
The Audacity of Hopeful Philosophical Appeals to Intuition, Version of 8 July, 2009. Under review.
According to some critics, traditional armchair philosophical methodology relies in an illicit way on intuitions. But the particular structure of the critique is not often carefully articulated—a significant omission, since some of the critics arguments for skepticism about philosophy threaten to [...]
Posted in Recommendations on Jun 7th, 2009
Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double), read by Isaiah Sheffer on PRI’s Selected Shorts.
Posted in Philosophy on Jun 7th, 2009
Stephen Yablo argues that knowledge of things like shapes, insofar as they depend on visual imagination, cannot be a priori. Here is one of his arguments:
[S]ome imagined reactions are a better guide to real reactions than others. Imagined shape reactions are a good guide, you say, and you are probably right. But it is hard [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 3rd, 2009
Sorry for all the technical difficulties in the past week. It now appears that my blog works. I’m still hoping to import my posts from my old blog, but, I’m sorry to say, I’m becoming decreasingly optimistic. We’ll see. Expect things to shift around here quite a bit over the next few weeks; my coding [...]