conceptual

Contextualist and relativists regarding epistemic modals quarrel on how to account for phenomena like the following: Sally’s mother comes into Sally’s bedroom to find her looking under the bed. “What is going on?” asks Sally’s mother, “why are you looking under the bed?” (1) “My glasses, they might be there,” replies Sally. After taking a long look under he bed, Sally finds no glasses under it. So she moves on to look in other places, but not before saying, (2) “Oops, I was wrong.” What is going on here? According to me, this is just a case of moral luck, but in the context of assertion. According to Andrew Latus (2001): The problem of moral luck traps us between an intuition and a fact: . 1)  the intuition that luck must not make moral differences (e.g., that luck must not affect a person’s moral worth, that luck must not affect what a person is morally responsible for).  . 2)  the fact [Berg-Cross 1975, Cushman et.al. 2009, Cushman 2008, etc.] tha...

The goal of this brief note is to sketch a modest form of aesthetic realism. In particular, I want to defend that at least some aesthetic properties are objective or, to be more precise, that some aesthetic predicates have non-subject-dependent extensions. As example, I will work with the predicate “tasty”  (and its antonym “disgusting”) to argue that its extension is fixed by an objective property: flavour. In other words, when we say of something that it is tasty, we are not saying how it tastes to us, but just how it tastes period. The structure is as follows. First I will sketch the phenomenon of using subjective, perspectival or context-dependent language for talking of objective, non-perspectival and/or context-invariant properties. I will present first the abstract general account and then illustrate it with the expression “to the left”. This is a perspectival expression, we use to talk about a non-perspectival property of objects: their location. Then, I will argue that w...