The concept of conditional probability has been employed for hundreds of years. Thomas Bayes used the expression "the probability that [B] on the supposition that [A] " in the statement of a basic law (1763, p. 378). Frank Ramsey, developing the application of probability to uncertain epistemic attitudes, the "logic of partial belief (1926, p. 166), wrote of your "degree of belief in [B] given [A]": there are degrees of belief (degrees of closeness to certainty); and there are degrees of belief-under-a-supposition. Ramsey suggested that the latter illuminate conditional judgements—judgements expressed using "if: we add the antecedent hypothetically to our stock of beliefs, and assess the consequent on that basis (1929, p. 247). The idea is attractive. Will I recover if I have the operation? Trying to answer questions like that can leave you more or less uncertain. "On the supposition that", "given", and "if are prima facie interchangeable. Especially since Ernest Adams's work (1965), many (I think most) philosophers who have a working knowledge of probability theory, a sympathy for its application to uncertain epistemic attitudes, and an interest in the theory of conditionals, have recognized a promising connection here. 1 According to E. J. Lowe (1996) they are rather obviously mistaken: on its "standard definition" conditional probability throws no light on conditionals (pp. 604-6); the same is true on Lowe's preferred definition of conditional probability (pp. 608—9), for it presupposes an understanding of a conditional judgement (p. 609); and anyway, conditional probability is an incorrect measure of the degree to which a conditional judgement is acceptable (pp.

this paper evolved out of discussions with Michael Root over fifteen years ago. Earlier drafts of this paper were read at the Universities of Salzburg, Florence, Bologna, Genova, Palermo, and Venice; and at a conference honoring Professor Quine at Wittenberg College, April, 1992. I want to thank Professor Quine for his comments there. Also, I had some extremely helpful conversations with Paul Boghossian and Barry Loewer during various stages in writing this paper. I would like to thank Bruce Aune, Burt Dreben, Jerry Fodor and especially Roger Gibson for detailed comments on earlier drafts.

Abstract. It is commonplace in cognitive science that concepts are individuated in terms of the roles they play in the cognitive lives of thinkers, a view that Jerry Fodor has recently dubbed ‘Concept Pragmatism’. Quinean critics of Pragmatism have long argued that it founders on its commitment to the analytic/synthetic distinction, since without such a distinction there is plausibly no way to distinguish constitutive from non-constitutive roles in cognition. This paper considers Fodor’s empirical arguments against analyticity, and in particular his arguments against lexical decomposition and definitions, and argues that Concept Pragmatists have two viable options with respect to them. First, Concept Pragmatists can confront them head-on, and argue that they do not show that lexical items are semantically primitive or that lexical concepts are internally unstructured. Second, Pragmatists may accept that these arguments show that lexical concepts are atomic, but insist that this need not entail that Pragmatism is false. For there is a viable version of Concept Pragmatism that does not take lexical items to be semantically structured or lexical concepts to be internally structured. Adopting a version of Pragmatism that takes meaning relations to be specified by inference rules, or meaning postulates, allows one to accept the empirical arguments in favor of Concept Atomism, while at the same time deny that such arguments show that there are no analyticities. The paper concludes by responding to Fodor’s recent objection that such a version of Concept Pragmatism has unhappy consequences concerning the relation between concept constitution and concept possession. 1.

Abstract. This paper concerns the dialectal role of Frege Cases in the debate between Concept Cartesians and Concept Pragmatists. I take as a starting point Christopher Peacocke’s argument that, unlike Cartesianism, his ‘Fregean ’ Pragmatism can account for facts about the rationality and epistemic status of certain judgments. I argue that since this argument presupposes that the rationality of thoughts turns on their content, it is thus questionbegging against Cartesians, who claim that issues about rationality turn on the form, not the content, of thoughts. I then consider Jerry Fodor’s argument that ‘modes of presentation ’ are not identical with Fregean senses, and argue that explanatory considerations should leads us to reject his ‘syntactic ’ treatment of Frege cases. Rejecting the Cartesian treatment of Frege cases, however, is not tantamount to accepting Peacocke’s claim that reasons and rationality are central to the individuation of concepts. For I argue that we can steer a middle course between Fodor’s Cartesianism and Peacocke’s Pragmatism, and adopt a form of Pragmatism that is constrained by Fregean considerations, but at the same time denies that concepts are constitutively tied to reasons and rationality. The philosophical debate over the nature of concepts has recently been cast as a battle between ‘Concept Cartesians ’ and ‘Concept Pragmatists ’ (Fodor 2003, 2004). Pragmatists claim that concepts are individuated in terms of the role they play in the cognitive lives of thinkers, e.g. in terms of their role in inference, perception, and judgment. Cartesians, on the other hand, hold

ABSTRACT. It has been commonplace in epistemology since its inception to idealize away from computational resource constraints, i.e., from the constraints of time and memory. One thought is that a kind of ideal rationality can be specified that ignores the constraints imposed by limited time and memory, and that actual cognitive performance can be seen as an interaction between the norms of ideal rationality and the practicalities of time and memory limitations. But a cornerstone of naturalistic epistemology is that normative assessment is constrained by capacities: you cannot require someone to do something they cannot or, as it is usually put, ought implies can. This much we take to be uncontroversial. We argue that differences in architectures, goals and resources imply substantial differences in capacity, and that some of these differences are ineliminable. It follows that some differences in goals and architectural and computational resources matter at the normative level: they constrain what principles of normative epistemology can be used to describe and prescribe their behavior. As a result, we can expect there to be important epistemic differences between the way brains, individuals, and science work. 1.

Anumberofdeviantdeductivesystemshavebeenproposedwhichdiffer in some way from classical logic. An influential philosophical interpretation of plurality in logic has been developed by Quine, who introduced the meaningchange thesis, summarized in his "Change of logic, change of subject". We show that if Quine is right about the consequences of his thesis, then the systems of classical logic can only be rejected as unscientific or meaningless, and not refined as inadequate. We show that there are good reasons both for and against his thesis. We argue against Local Pluralism, on the basis that it is incompatible with the universality and normativity of logic. We then assess Beall and Restall’s logical pluralism, which is shown to be not sufficiently fine-grained in that it leads to relativism in logic. We finally introduce Dalla Pozza’s Global Pluralism, where deviant logics are viewed as dealing with specific pragmatic meta-concepts, which are distinct from