Bar Luzon - Research

Research

Publications

2024. The Euthyphro Challenge in Metasemantics. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. [penultimate] [final]

This paper argues that functionalist metasemantic views, such as Conceptual Role Semantics and Interpretivism, face a Euthyphro challenge. The challenge, put roughly, is this: functionalist metasemantic views reverse the order of explanation. According to such views, representational mental states have the contents that they do partly because they play certain roles in our mental lives. According to an intuitive picture of the roles that representational mental states play in our mental lives, however, these states play the roles they do partly because they have the contents that they do. Since explanations—even partial ones—are asymmetric (call this principle ‘the Euthyphro Principle’), we can’t accept both this intuitive picture and a functionalist metasemantics. Hence, we should reject all versions of the latter.

.

2022. Losing Grip on the Third Realm: Against Naive Realism for Intuitions. Analysis. (With Preston J. Werner.) [penultimate] [final]

Naive realism in philosophy of perception is the view that (successful) perception involves a direct relation between perceiving subjects and the world. The naive realist says that your perception of a cat on the mat is a worldly relation which is partially constituted by the cat and the mat; a spatio-temporal chunk of the world is presenting itself to you. Recently, Elijah Chudnoff and John Bengson have independently developed an extension of this view to intellectual experiences, or intuitions, for traditionally a priori domains. We argue that this view, which we call ‘Intuitional Naive Realism’ (INR), will not have the epistemic advantages that Chudnoff and Bengson claim that it does. In perception, but not intuition, there is a deeper explanation of what makes it the case that one experience is constituted by the world while another is not. Whether or not INR is true, then, it does no interesting epistemological work for traditionally a priori domains.

Work in Progress

A paper about the asymmetry of determination. [draft] [handout]

A paper about epistemic akrasia. [draft]

A paper developing a novel causal-historical view of mental content. [handout]

A paper developing a novel view of vehicles of representation. (With Verónica Gómez Sánchez.)

A paper developing an externalist yet defeat-friendly view of epistemic justification. (With Richard Roth.)

Dissertation

2024. Explaining Content. [penultimate]

Having a mind involves having a perspective on the world. Creatures like us gather information about the world, form initial opinions, do some reasoning, form firmer opinions, make decisions about how to act, and eventually execute some of these decisions. All of these abilities depend upon our ability to represent the world—on having the world in mind, so to speak. We keep track of information using representations, we reason with those very same representations, and we act on the basis of those representations. Moreover, we do so partly in virtue of those representations' content. I'm disposed to token the concept DOG when I'm in front of dogs partly in virtue of the fact that DOG means dog. And you are disposed to go to the fridge to grab beer partly because you believe that there's beer in the fridge. A good theory of mental content—a view that tells us in virtue of what we represent the parts of the world that we do—must meet this adequacy condition, and let mental content be explanatorily efficacious. It turns out that meeting the explanatory efficacy condition is no easy task: since explanations (even partial ones) are asymmetric, many views end up incompatible with this adequacy condition. For example, information-based views of mental content take my dispositions to token the concept DOG in front of dogs to partly explain the content of that very concept, and so cannot appeal to that content in order to explain those dispositions. Similarly, functionalist views of mental content take your disposition to go to the fridge to grab beer to partly explain the content of your belief that that there's beer in the fridge, and so cannot appeal to that content in order to explain that disposition. In my dissertation, I develop a novel causal-historical view of mental content which is meant to validate explanatory efficacy. According to this view, the content of a mental representation is determined by the causal relations that are in place at the moment of its formation. In a slogan, this view claims that representation is re-presentation, where presentation is understood in causal terms. This view meets explanatory efficacy quite naturally. Our intuitive picture of mental representations is silent on what explains the formation of a certain mental representation. That is, we are not committed to any claim of the form 'S formed mental representation R because R means M'. Since, according to the Re-Presentation view, mental content is determined only by what happens in the context of forming the relevant mental representation, we are free to appeal to it in explaining all of the uses of that mental representation.