Jonathan Ichikawa's Blog
Posted in Philosophy on Jul 25th, 2009
In his 2002 paper “Assertion, Knowledge, and Context,” Keith DeRose gave an argument for contextualism about ‘knows’ that took basically this form: knowledge is the norm of assertion; assertability varies according to context; therefore, knowledge varies according to context.
This was a pretty confused argument — though of course this is much clearer in retrospect, with [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jul 22nd, 2009
I’m reviewing a book for the first time; do any philosophers have tips on how to plan/organize/read/etc.? This is all new to me, and I’d welcome any advice from veterans on how to proceed. Do you like to take notes along the way? Should I plan on reading cover-to-cover more than once? How do you [...]
Posted in papers on Jul 21st, 2009
Is Imagination A Priori? Draft of 21 July, 2009. Will be subsumed into a longer piece.
Sometimes, we come to new knowledge via imaginative processes; plausibly, sometimes, such imagination plays an indispensably warranting role. Is such a role for imagination inconsistent with the apriority of our new knowledge? Stephen Yablo has argued that a certain kind [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jul 5th, 2009
According to orthodoxy, what’s true in a fiction goes beyond what’s entailed by the text making up the story. Although fictions are gappy (there’s no fact about whether Hamlet had an even number of hairs), some things are determinately true without being stated, or being entailed by thugs that are stated (Hamlet was not a [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jul 4th, 2009
Intuitions and Begging the Question is now under review. Check it out if you’re interested in reading what I think about intuitions, and making me wish I’d asked you for comments on it before submitting it.
My next project: making revisions to Explaining Away Intuitions.
Here, incidentally, is where I have all my papers online now.
Posted in Thought on Jul 1st, 2009
I’m reading, and enjoying, Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, which catalogues a number of systematic ways in which human economic decisions fall short of the sort of ideal that traditional economic theory assumes. Some, but nothing close to all, of the data was already familiar to me, and I’ve always been interested and impressed by [...]