This chapter examines ethnic differences in responses to alcohol. Specifically, it discusses the subjective effects of alcohol on Asians, Native Americans, and Jews. Recent studies have shown that genetic variations in the enzymes that metabolize alcohol lead to individual differences in the subjective effects of alcohol, typically in the form of increased sensitivity to its effects. It is also recognized that these gene variations are associated with lower rates of alcohol consumption and alcohol use disorders, and possibly other substance use (...) and substance use disorders. Causes of decreased intensity or more pleasurable effects associated with alcohol or other drug use in ethnic groups, whether such variations exist, and to what extent they are genetically and environmentally influenced, remain currently unanswered questions. (shrink)

A continuous Oxford tradition on knowledge runs from John Cook Wilson to John McDowell. A central idea is that knowledge is not a species of belief, or that, in McDowell's terms, it is not a hybrid state; that, moreover, it is a kind of taking in of what is there that precludes one's being, for all one can see, wrong. Cook Wilson and McDowell differ on what this means as to the scope of knowledge. J.L. Austin set out (...) the requisite foundations for McDowell to be right. McDowell has shown why the tradition, and his version of it, need to be right. But he does not accept Austin's innovation. That is a shame. For, despite McDowell's very great insightfulness, precisely that much separates him from a very powerful, and correct, view of what knowledge is. (shrink)

This essay outlines a certain 20th century Oxonian tradition in epistemology, contrasting it with another line of thought set out by Michael Ayers. The tradition begins with Cook Wilson and the idea that knowing is never having evidence, no matter how strong. It takes a turn in J.L. Austin, introducing two ideas into philosophy: disjunctivism and occasion-sensitivity. The last section considers whether either can really live without the other. The first part of the essay is a general consideration of (...) the relation between two forms of awareness: perceptual, and ‘propositional’, and of how the first may furnish proof of the second. The second part considers Ayers’ view of the relation, particularly as expressed in his idea of primary and secondary knowledge, and its relation to disjunctivism about knowledge. (shrink)

This chapter explores the views of John Cook Wilson, J. L. Austin, and John McDowell. Some stances aim at the world: if all goes well, stance and world match. Some stances contain the world: for one to have that stance towards something is for that thing to be so (or there). Some of these simply contain their object: taking them is not aiming at their object (which then, happily, is there to hit). John Cook Wilson saw knowledge as (...) a stance of this last sort. John McDowell showed why knowledge needs to be like that. But it was J. L. Austin who made the idea viable. He did it by showing how a sense of occasion is required for proper ascription of epistemic notions. (shrink)

Odd and memorable examples are a distinctive feature of Charles Travis's work: cases involving squash balls, soot-covered kettles, walls that emit poison gas, faces turning puce, ties made of freshly cooked linguine, and people grunting when punched in the solar plexus all figure in his arguments. One of Travis's examples, involving a pair of situations in which the leaves of a Japanese maple tree are painted green, has even spawned its own literature consisting of attempts to explain the (...) context sensitivity of color adjectives ("green", e.g.). For Travis, these examples play a central role in his arguments for occasion-sensitivity, which he takes to be a pervasive feature of how we understand natural language. But how, exactly, do these examples work? My aims in this paper are to put Travis’s examples under the microscope, using recent experimental studies of Travis-style cases to raise worries about aspects of the way Travis's cases are informally presented, but then show how his examples can be redesigned to respond to these doubts. (shrink)

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in (...) perception, criticizing both empiricism and idealism, and argued for a moderate nominalist view of universals as being in rebus and only ‘apprehended’ by their particulars. His influence helped swaying Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, or J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to some extent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which defined much of Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth-century. Nevertheless, his name and legacy were all but forgotten for generations after World War II. Still, his views on knowledge are with us today, being in part at work in the writings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

Odd and memorable examples are a distinctive feature of Charles Travis’s work: cases involving squash balls, soot-covered kettles, walls that emit poison gas, faces turning puce, ties made of freshly cooked linguine, and people grunting when punched in the solar plexus all figure in his arguments. One of Travis’s examples, involving a pair of situations in which the leaves of a Japanese maple tree are painted green, has even spawned its own literature consisting of attempts to explain the (...) context sensitivity of color adjectives (“green”, e.g.). For Travis, these examples play a central role in his arguments for occasion-sensitivity, which he takes to be a pervasive feature of how we understand natural language. But how, exactly, do these examples work? My aims in this paper are to put Travis’s examples under the microscope, using recent experimental studies of Travis-style cases to raise worries about the way Travis’s cases are informally presented, and then to show how his examples can be redesigned to address those worries. (shrink)

Charles Travis presents a series of essays on philosophy of perception, inspired by the insights of Gottlob Frege. He engages with a range of contemporary thinkers, and explores key issues including how perception can make the world bear on what we do or think, and what sorts of capacities we draw on in representing something as (being) something.

Charles Travis presents a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive view of the relation of thought to language. The key idea is "occasion-sensitivity": what it is for words to express a given concept is for them to be apt for contributing to any of many different conditions of correctness (notably truth conditions). Since words mean what they do by expressing a given concept, it follows that meaning does not determine truth conditions. This view ties thoughts (...) less tightly to the linguistic forms which express them than traditional views of the matter, and in two directions: a given linguistic form, meaning fixed, may express an indefinite variety of thoughts; one thought can be expressed in an indefinite number of syntactically and semantically distinct ways. Travis highlights the importance of this view for linguistic theory, and shows how it gives new form to a variety of traditional philosophical problems. (shrink)

This book provides a novel interpretation of the ideas about language in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Travis places the "private language argument" in the context of wider themes in the Investigations, and thereby develops a picture of what it is for words to bear the meaning they do. He elaborates two versions of a private language argument, and shows the consequences of these for current trends in the philosophical theory of meaning.

There is a view abroad on which perceptual experience has representational content in this sense: in it something is represented to the perceiver as so. On the view, a perceptual experience has a face value at which it may be taken, or which may be rejected. This paper argues that that view is mistaken: there is nothing in perceptual experience which makes it so that in it anything is represented as so. In that sense, the senses are silent, or, in (...) Austin's term, dumb. Perceptual experience is not as such either veridical or delusive. It may mislead, but it does not take representation to accomplish that. (shrink)

Dispositionalism is the view that causal powers are among the irreducible properties of nature. It has long been among the core competing positions in the metaphysics of laws, but its potential implications for other key debates within metaphysics and the philosophy of science have remained under-explored. Travis Dumsday fills this major gap in the literature by establishing new connections between dispositionalism and such topics as substance ontology, ontic structural realism, material composition, emergentism, natural-kind essentialism, perdurantism, time travel, and spacetime (...) substantivalism. He also puts forward a novel view concerning the precise relationship between causal powers and the fundamental laws of nature. His rich and accessible study will appeal to readers interested in contemporary analytic metaphysics and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Charles Travis; IX*—On Constraints of Generality, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 165–188, https://doi.org/10.10.

Thought's Footing is an enquiry into the relationship between the ways things are and the way we think and talk about them. It is also a study of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: Charles Travis develops his account of certain key themes into a unified view of the work as a whole. The central question is: how does thought get its footing? How can the thought that things are a certain way be connected to things being that way?

Peter Singer argues that we’re obligated to donate our entire expendable income to aid organizations. One premiss of his argument is "If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so." Singer defends this by noting that commonsense morality requires us to save a child we find drowning in a shallow pond. I argue that Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment doesn’t justify this premiss. I offer (...) my own Drowning Children thought experiment, which should reveal that commonsense morality entails that premiss two is actually false. (shrink)

Alternative Conceptions of the Spiritual engages with polytheism, henotheism, pandeism, cosmopsychism, world-soul ontologies, animism and theophanism as propounded by recent philosophers and by members of lesser-known non-western faith communities, new religious movements, and esoteric groups. Treating the topics with comparative philosophical exploration and assessment, Travis Dumsday brings Christian doctrines, specifically from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, into dialogue with these alternative viewpoints.

Let us begin with a piece of intellectual history. The story begins in a period encapsulating the second world war – say the ‘40’s, give and take a bit. Around then, it began to be argued with force that an expression – e.g., an English one – while it well might mean something, does not say anything, and notably no one thing in particular. The principal behind the argument was surely J.L. Austin, though, I would claim, the same point was (...) argued in a somewhat different way by Wittgenstein. The intended point was not merely a grammatical one: we say of an expression that it means such and such, but not that it says such and such. Be that as it may, the main point was quite substantive: typically, an English expression is such that, with its meaning fixed, there are a variety of distinct things to be said in using it on some production of it or other. (shrink)

Do facts about what an agent would freely do in certain circumstances at least partly determine any of her moral obligations? Actualists answer ‘yes’, while possibilists answer ‘no’. We defend two novel hybrid accounts that are alternatives to actualism and possibilism: Dual Obligations Hybridism and Single Obligation Hybridism. By positing two moral ‘oughts’, each account retains the benefits of actualism and possibilism, yet is immune from the prima facie problems that face actualism and possibilism. We conclude by highlighting one substantive (...) difference between our two hybrid accounts. (shrink)

This article is a response to Shieh from Travis.

The main thrust of the present work is to show why truth and truth bearers lie essentially beyond the descriptive reach of semantics, and to outline a theory of ...

This paper proposes a third meditation-category—automatic self-transcending— to extend the dichotomy of focused attention and open monitoring proposed by Lutz. Automaticself-transcending includes techniques designed to transcend their own activity. This contrasts with focused attention, which keeps attention focused on an object; and open monitoring, which keeps attention involved in the monitoring process. Each category was assigned EEG bands, based on reported brain patterns during mental tasks, and meditations were categorized based on their reported EEG. Focused attention, characterized by beta/gamma activity, (...) included meditations from Tibetan Buddhist, Buddhist, and Chinese traditions. Open monitoring, characterized by theta activity, included meditations from Buddhist, Chinese, and Vedic traditions. Automaticself-transcending, characterized by alpha1 activity, included meditations from Vedic and Chinese traditions. Between categories, the included meditations differed in focus, subject/object relation, and procedures. These findings shed light on the common mistake of averaging meditations together to determine mechanisms or clinical effects. (shrink)

What words mean plays a role in determining when they would be true; but not an exhaustive one. For that role leaves room for variation in truth conditions, with meanings fixed, from one speaking of words to another. What role meaning plays depends on what truth is; on what words, by virtue of meaning what they do are requied to have done (as spoken) in order to have said what is true. There is a deflationist position on what truth is: (...) the notion is exhausted by a given, specified, mass of 'platitudes', each to the effect that if words said (say) things to be thus, things must be that way. (The thought that thus-and-so is true iff thus-and-so.) These platitudes, and so deflationism, miss that aspect of truth that determines meaning's role. Truth requires words to have the uses which, given what they mean, they should have in the circumstances of their speaking. Through this link with use, when words would be true is a factor fixing what it is they said. (shrink)

We examine the prevalent use of the phrase “local realism” in the context of Bell’s Theorem and associated experiments, with a focus on the question: what exactly is the ‘realism’ in ‘local realism’ supposed to mean? Carefully surveying several possible meanings, we argue that all of them are flawed in one way or another as attempts to point out a second premise (in addition to locality) on which the Bell inequalities rest, and (hence) which might be rejected in the face (...) of empirical data violating the inequalities. We thus suggest that the phrase ‘local realism’ should be banned from future discussions of these issues, and urge physicists to revisit the foundational questions behind Bell’s Theorem. (shrink)

Deprivationism cannot accommodate the common sense assumption that we should lament our death iff, and to the extent that, it is bad for us. Call this the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption. As such, either this assumption needs to be rejected or deprivationism does. I first argue that the Nothing Bad, Nothing to Lament Assumption is false. I then attempt to figure out which facts our attitudes concerning death should track. I suggest that each person should have two distinct (...) attitudes toward death: one determined by agent’s reasonable expectations about when she will die and one determined by the amount of metaphysically possible good one reasonably believes death precludes. (shrink)

On Schellenberg’s formulation of the problem of divine hiddenness, a loving God would ensure that anyone capable of having a relationship with Him, and not resisting it, would be granted sufficient evidence to make belief in God rationally indubitable. And He would do this by granting a powerful religious experience to every person at the moment he or she reaches the age of reason. Here I lay out a new reason why God might delay revelation of himself, justifiably allowing for (...) some nonresistant nonbelief. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 1-11 DOI 10.1007/s11153-012-9338-5 Authors Travis Dumsday, Department of Religious Studies, Livingstone College, 701 West Monroe St., Salisbury, NC 28144, USA Journal International Journal for Philosophy of Religion Online ISSN 1572-8684 Print ISSN 0020-7047. (shrink)

What laws of logic say -- Frege's target -- The twilight of empiricism -- Psychologism -- Morally alien thought -- To represent as so -- The proposition's progress -- Truth and merit -- The shape of the conceptual -- Thought's social nature -- Faust's way.

A relatively new debate in ethics concerns the relationship between one's present obligations and how one would act in the future. One popular view is actualism, which holds that what an agent would do in the future affects her present obligations. Agent's future behavior is held fixed and the agent's present obligations are determined by what would be best to do now in light of how the agent would act in the future. Doug Portmore defends a new view he calls (...) moral securitism, which is supposed to avoid the problems associated with actualism. On this account, what an agent would do in the future is treated as fixed iff that agent's future actions are not currently under the agent's present deliberative control. φ-ing is under an agent's present deliberative control iff whether the agent φ's depends upon the immediate outcome of the agent's present deliberations. I argue that moral securitism falls prey to two of the same serious problems that actualism does: it lets agents avoid incurring moral obligations because they have rotten moral dispositions and entails that agents ought to perform truly terribly acts. After providing a few standard counter-examples to actualism to show how it is plagued with these two problems, I offer my own example which demonstrates that moral securitism is subject to a version of these same two problems. I then review Portmore's response to my objection, arguing that it fails. I end the paper by offering a tentative revision of moral securitism that would allow it to avoid the aforementioned problems. (shrink)

It is shown how, starting with the de Broglie–Bohm pilot-wave theory, one can construct a new theory of the sort envisioned by several of QM’s founders: a Theory of Exclusively Local Beables (TELB). In particular, the usual quantum mechanical wave function (a function on a high-dimensional configuration space) is not among the beables posited by the new theory. Instead, each particle has an associated “pilot-wave” field (living in physical space). A number of additional fields (also fields on physical space) maintain (...) what is described, in ordinary quantum theory, as “entanglement.” The theory allows some interesting new perspective on the kind of causation involved in pilot-wave theories in general. And it provides also a concrete example of an empirically viable quantum theory in whose formulation the wave function (on configuration space) does not appear—i.e., it is a theory according to which nothing corresponding to the configuration space wave function need actually exist. That is the theory’s raison d’etre and perhaps its only virtue. Its vices include the fact that it only reproduces the empirical predictions of the ordinary pilot-wave theory (equivalent, of course, to the predictions of ordinary quantum theory) for spinless non-relativistic particles, and only then for wave functions that are everywhere analytic. The goal is thus not to recommend the TELB proposed here as a replacement for ordinary pilot-wave theory (or ordinary quantum theory), but is rather to illustrate (with a crude first stab) that it might be possible to construct a plausible, empirically viable TELB, and to recommend this as an interesting and perhaps-fruitful program for future research. (shrink)

A warm, personal guide to building a strong ethical and moral compass in the midst of today's confusing, scary, global problems. The moral challenges of today are unfamiliar in the history of philosophy. Climate change is the paradigm example of what Travis Rieder calls "The Puzzle" in the way your choices can seem at odds with what the planet urgently needs. How do we decide the right thing to do in the face of a massive collective challenge? Should you (...) drink water from a plastic bottle or not? Drive a Tesla? Or is that just what Elon and all the other corporations want you to think? What makes individual ethics difficult to think about in the case of catastrophic climate change makes ethics difficult to think about in many other contexts as well. The Puzzle, as he explains, is everywhere now. The chapters include a lively, meaningful tour of traditional moral reasoning looking at the contributions of Plato, Hegel, and Kant among others. But they could not grasp The Puzzle we now face. Old fashioned exercises like trolley problems involving sacrificing one person on this track for a bunch of people on the other don't address the huge consequential and complex crises our global community faces today. The tools most of us unthinkingly rely on when we try to do the right thing don't help when it comes to reasoning about individual responsibility for large collective problems. Expanding our suite of ethical concepts is now urgently required. Rieder defines exactly how to change our thinking, addressing mundane issues like bottled water to the biggies like whether to have children. This is a way to live a morally decent life in the scary, always complicated world we and our children live in. It's how to build your own Catastrophe Ethics. (shrink)

Comment garantir l’objectivité de notre rapport au monde? Le rationalisme et l’empirisme renvoient, chacun à leur manière, à une capacité générale de l’esprit humain – capacité désengagée du monde, décontextualisée. La nouveauté radicale qu’introduit Wittgenstein dans sa seconde philosophie est une vision contextualiste et proprement humaine de l’objectivité.Dans cet ouvrage, issu de leçons données au Collège de France en 2002, Charles Travis prend appui sur Frege, Wittgenstein et J.L. Austin pour montrer que l’opération de désangagement du monde propre aux (...) différentes théories de la connaissance contemporaines ne permet plus à la pensée d’être objective et a fortiori d’être vraie. Elle ne permet pas de véritable rapport au monde. C’est plutôt au sein de nos pratiques les plus ordinaires que se fondent l’objectivité qui est la nôtre, la vérité, ainsi que les différents accords du monde avec le langage et la pensée. La vérité n’est pas abstraite, nos représentations sont situées. Toute signification, comme toute pensée, est sensible à l’occasion. Charles Travis propose ici une lecture originale de Wittgenstein, conjuguée à une approche particulière des grands problèmes de la philosophie analytique. (shrink)

If God exists, why isn't His existence more apparent? In recent analytic philosophy this longstanding question has been developed into an argument for atheism typically referred to as the 'problem of divine hiddenness'. My goal here is to put forward a new reply. The basic idea is that there is some reason to think that for many of us, our moral conduct would not improve even if God's existence were not subject to doubt. However, immoral conduct in such a state (...) of affairs would be even more immoral, and hence justly subject to greater punishment, than it is in a state of affairs in which God's existence is subject to doubt. As such, God mercifully remains 'hidden' in order to limit our moral culpability. (shrink)

Natural-kind essentialism faces an important but neglected difficulty: the problem of complex essences (PCE). This is the question of how to account for the unity of an instantiated kind-essence when that essence consists of multiple distinct properties, some of which lack an inherent necessary connection between them. My central goal here is to propose an essentialism-friendly solution to this problem. Along the way I also employ some points from that solution to argue for the necessary truth of essentialism (necessary, that (...) is, in all possible worlds in which there are material objects), and to support the essentialist ontology of laws over and against a major rival. (shrink)

Most discussions of John Doris’s situationism center on what can be called descriptive situationism, the claim that our folk usage of global personality and character traits in describing and predicting human behavior is empirically unsupported. Philosophers have not yet paid much attention to another central claim of situationism, which says that given that local traits are empirically supported, we can more successfully act in line with our moral values if, in our deliberation about what to do, we focus on our (...) situation instead of on our moral character. Call this prescriptive situationism. In this paper, we will point toward a previously unrecognized tension between these two situationist theses and explore some ways for the situationist to address it. (shrink)