Màster - Filosofia Analítica (APhil)

URI permanent per a aquesta col·leccióhttps://diposit.ub.edu/handle/2445/195585

Treballs finals del Màster en Filosofia Analítica (APhil). Facultad de Filosofía de la Universitat de Barcelona.

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From Practical Knowledge to Forms of Life: Toward an Account of the Unity of Animal Action
(2025-10) Castañón Schroder, Diego; Shepherd, Joshua
This paper explores the idea of animal intentional action. My aim is to advance a thesis about the logical form that our judgment takes when attributing intentionality to animal action, thereby allowing us to distinguish it from human action. To this end, I first criticize the so-called “standard theory of action” —which locates intentionality in mental events separate from the event itself— for its failure to adequately explain how we ascribe intentionality to animals in the first place. I then develop an alternative within theories of practical knowledge, particularly Anscombe’s account, which explains in a different way the unity and form of human action. My thesis holds that whereas human action derives its unity from practical knowledge as the agent’s self-consciousness of practical means and ends, animal action — lacking such self-consciousness— receives its unity through our judgments that refer to their very “forms of life”, a notion I explain by drawing on Michael Thompson’s theory
De Se Attitudes: Indexicality, Communication, Phenomenology
(2025-07) Simpson, Valentine; García-Carpintero, Manuel
For some, de se attitudes, singular thoughts about oneself “as oneself”, pose a significant philosophical problem. For others, they are an illusion, easily explained away along the same lines that traditional propositional attitudes are accounted for. This essay lifts off from the assumption that the de se effect is real and in need of an explanation other than the one given for traditional propositional attitudes. I begin by giving an overview of the discussion around de se attitudes, from John Perry’s seminal paper on the topic, which initiated much of the actual discussion, to the more recent and sophisticated views that have developed since. Next, I plan to provide a short critical assessment of Recanati’s (2016) mental file framework, García-Carpintero’s (2016, 2017) tokenreflexive indexical model, and Guillot’s (2016) phenomenal model for the de se. I divide the discussion into two separate axis, one concerning the communication of de se attitudes, and another regarding their phenomenology. Ultimately, I want to argue that, while the mental file and indexical models might be well suited to account for the linguistic aspect of de se attitudes and their communication, an appeal to the phenomenology of thought, in particular de se thought, is crucial if we want to understand the nature of such attitudes.
A Sociocultural Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value
(2025-01) Roberto Paul, Moshammer; Doran, Ryan P.
Realist theories of value assert that evaluative truths exist independently of human minds. At the same time, the content and formation of evaluative judgements are affected by sociocultural forces. This thesis critically analyzes the compatibility of realist theories of value with the influence of sociocultural forces on evaluative judgments. Realists must explain how this culturally shaped evaluative content relates to the mind-independent evaluative truths they posit. I argue that moral realists encounter a dilemma in reconciling the existence of mind-independent evaluative truths with the influence of sociocultural forces on evaluative judgements. The dilemma presented in this thesis consists of two problematic pathways for realism. The first option claims no relation between sociocultural influences and independent evaluative truths. This leads to our evaluative judgments likely being distorted, and a skeptical view about the ability to access true moral knowledge. On the other hand, realists can posit that sociocultural evaluative judgments are aligned with independent truths. In that case, they must account for how these judgments, which are shaped by diverse and often conflicting cultural influences, reliably track objective moral facts. I conclude that they are not able to do so, leaving the realist with no satisfactory account explaining the relation between socioculturally shaped evaluative attitudes and mind-independent evaluative truth.
A Distributive Justice Approach to Blameworthiness Over Time
(2024-12) Oliver, Robert; Marques, Teresa; Casal, Paula
This paper brings together two recent shifts in the moral responsibility debate: on one side, the distinction between synchronic and diachronic responsibility; on the other, the incorporation of the distribution of responsibility itself into the domain of distributive justice. Focusing on individuals with morally arbitrary traits that increase their likelihood of wrongdoing and thus of being blameworthy, it argues that society has a duty not only to allocate resources to correct these unjust inequalities, but also to transfer resources to support those who seek to mitigate their blameworthiness. Combining these latest shifts in theories of moral responsibility, the paper argues for a distributive justice-oriented approach to addressing blameworthiness over time.
An analysis of King's problems with belief individuation
(2024-03) Aguado Nocilla, Adriano; García-Carpintero, Manuel
In this paper I will take the proposal of Jeffry C. King in his book The nature and Structure of Content (King 2007) and raise the objection that his proposal has some problems in individuating some beliefs in an accurate way. In doing so we will see that there seems to be a tension between fulfilling this role and at the same time the role of being what different vehicles with the same content have in common. In this book King's main purpose is to provide an account of propositions playing basic explanatory roles, among which is that propositions are the content or object of beliefs and other propositional attitudes (King 2019, 2). This entails that if the critique of this paper is correct, it would show a partial failure of King's purposes and therefore the critique, if accurate, would be entirely relevant. For this purpose, I will present King’s proposal in the first section. In the second section I will present the objection that his propositions can fully perform the task of being the content of propositional attitudes. In the third section we will explore ILFs as a possible way out of the problem and consider their shortcomings and in the fourth section we will consider an alternative solution that avoids the problems of ILFs but, as we shall see, has its own difficulties.
A Dilemma for Essentialism in the Epistemology of Modality
(2024-11) Pazos Solla, Iván; García-Carpintero, Manuel
I analyze the viability of essentialist accounts in the epistemology of modality. I present a dilemma they face due to their commitment to the thesis of Finean Essentialism, according to which metaphysical necessities find their source in the essence of entities. According to this dilemma, either essences have a modal character, specifically, they are metaphysically necessary, or they have no modal character at all. In the first case, a problem arises when attempting to account for the metaphysical necessity of essences. In the second, it seems that essences, given their non-modal character, are not suitable for accounting for metaphysical necessities, as the thesis of Finean Essentialism intends. I examine some responses that have been offered to both horns of the dilemma.
The Problem of Expert Appraisal: Metacognition and the Rationality of “Thinking for Yourself”
(2024-10) Cruz Centeno, Cathlene; Sturm, Thomas
In our current age of hyperspecialization, we often turn to experts to help us settle many of our important questions. But faced with uncertainty of when to trust experts and which ones to trust, we are led to ask, when and to what extent is it rational for novices to think for themselves? In response, I will argue that 1) there are some specific cases where the novice would not be rational in deferring to expert judgment, 2) but that for most others, the rationality of thinking for oneself becomes doubtful ultimately due to problems of metacognition, and 3) that this does not support the pessimistic conclusion that that the novice is essentially “blind” in her trust of experts. Ultimately my aim is to defend the novice’s rationality in thinking for herself even in difficult cases of expert deference, and against the claim that such deference cannot be rationally grounded. In Section 1, I develop a more realistic understanding of expertise and highlight cases where the novice would be rational in thinking for herself when there is empirical evidence of expert unreliability. In Section 2, I show that even in deferring to experts, novices must still think for herself by engaging in some degree of inquiry about which source and expert to believe. Although second-order appraisal strategies have been proposed to guide this inquiry, they ultimately run into problems concerning metacognition. In Section 3, I argue against Neil Levy’s (2024) pessimistic argument that these problems render the strategies unemployable and that the novice cannot be rationally justified in thinking for herself via their use. I then propose further strategies the novice may use, how this may be incorporated into the Boost program, and conclude by suggesting further avenues for future research.
Transparent desires and the uniformity of self-knowledge
(2024-10) Cortés Bau, Juan Pablo; Broncano-Berrocal, Fernando
The transparency method claims that we can gain knowledge of our own minds by considering the world. In particular, it says that a subject can know whether she believes that p by a world-directed question of the form “Is p true?”. Something similar could be tried regarding desires: I can know what I desire by considering the qualities of the intentional object of desire. Defending this last claim involves formulating a world-directed question for the method and defending that this method possesses a strong degree of epistemic warrant. The most prominent theories of the transparency method applied to desire are the bypass view (Fernández 2008), the desirability rule (Byrne 2018), and the conceptual approach (Andreotta 2020). This paper argues that none of these proposals apply successfully the transparency method to desires. Finally, I argue that the transparency method can be partially applied to desires if we take into consideration the distinction between passive and active self-knowledge (Boyle 2009).
The fate of presentism in modern physics: A matter of perspectives and contingencies
(2024-10) Rahaman Alhassan, Aslak; Martinez Merino, Manuel Jesus
Within the philosophy of time, there is an ancient debate between eternalists who defend the unreality of time and presentists who want to reify the time of our experience. Contemporary debate has clarified and crystallised the strongest arguments for these two disparate ontologies of time, drawing from modern physics in the case of eternalism and from common-sense intuitions relating directly to our experience of time in the case of presentism. Recent attempts at resolving this ontological dispute purport to be able to reconstruct the time of our experience from our physical conception of time as a perspectival phenomenon, thus integrating both approaches to ontology. This paper argues that a principled investigation of mental representations of time will serve to further motivate such a reconciliatory project but also does important explanatory work alongside the considerations from physics seen in existing accounts such as Jenann Ismael’s. Specifically, an analysis of mental representations of time through the teleosemantic framework reveals our sense of time as domain specific and rhythmic, undermining presentists’ justificatory basis for drawing inferences regarding absolute simultaneity from our perception of simultaneity as well as exposing our perception of temporal flow as an artifice of cognitive processing. Similarly, considerations from teleosemantic theory regarding the faithfulness of our mental representations seem to refute eternalists’ justification for discarding our experience of time as illusory. Finally, I briefly suggest an avenue for further investigation into understanding the emergence of the various properties of subjective time from physical time through the observation that we are not simply subjects in time, but, in some sense, embedded and embodied participants in time.
The Emotional Action Analogy
(2024-09) Chakkour El Onsri, Hamsa; Pineda Oliva, David
I defend that emotions should be elucidated by reference to the kind of actions we do when we experience an emotion, namely, emotional actions. This claim is not trivial, as there are theorists that submit that emotion should be elucidated by reference to sensory perception (Tappolet, 2016) and others by reference to action in general (Naar, 2022). Both views are supported by analogies, given the pretheoretical similarities that we find between, in one case, emotion and sensory perception, and between emotion and action, in the other. Thus, in order to defend my claim, I show why both analogies are problematic. First, there are important disanalogies between emotion and sensory perception and an analogy with action is better (Brady, 2013; Naar, 2022). Second, I point out that the action analogy faces its own problems —as it does not account correctly for the phenomenology of emotion, nor is it able to individuate emotions types from one another (Ballard, 2021). Drawing ideas from the literature of the psychology of human emotional development, I present and defend an analogy between basic emotion and emotional action and, in order to extend it to emotion in general, I suggest a dispositional analysis for non-basic emotions. The resulting view is that non-basic emotions should be understood as dispositions to undergo basic emotions depending on the context, and such basic emotions should be analysed in terms of emotional actions.
From Searle's Constitutive Rules to the Law
(2023) Lojo Caride, Alba; Martí, Genoveva; Ramírez Ludeña, Lorena
John R. Searle is the philosopher that introduces the distinction between constitutive rules and regulative rules for the first time1. He uses them to theorize about philosophy of language and about social ontology. In this paper, I will try to show the importance of the figure of constitutive rules to understand some aspects of the legal field. I will propose to focus in two key elements to understand how to apply Searle's theory to the law, and the advantages and disadvantages that this application has. I will also introduce some theories of philosophy of law related, and I will connect them with my proposal. The paper is organised as follows. In the first section, I will present the two theories where Searle presents and uses constitutive rules, and their main problems. In the second section, I will show the general problems of connecting Searle's theory with the legal field, and some theories that have tried to relate them. In the third section, I will defend that the assignment of a function and the collective acceptance are the two key elements of Searle's theory that solve most of his problems, and they allow us to understand how to apply his theory to the legal field. Finally, I will reflect about the importance that both elements have in the theories previously explored, and about the general advantages and disadvantages of applying Searle's theory to the law.
You shall not lie nor mislead (unless it is a need)
(2023) Huete Rodríguez, Andrea; Marques, Teresa
In this paper, I defend the thesis that we have no grounds to say that misleading is morally preferable to lying. For this purpose, I first examine all the relevant philosophical positions on the discussion of the moral standing of lying in contrast with misleading, reviewing not only the main arguments for each one but also specific objections against most of them. Then, I carefully analyze Herzog’s very recent argument which seems to be in favor of the traditional idea that misleading is better than lying and give reasons as to why her proposal is not convincing. Since Herzog's attempt to defend the traditional view is unsuccessful, as previous ones made by other philosophers, I argue that, in general, we have no good reason to think of misleading as a respectable alternative to lying.
God and Necessity. The Ontological Argument and Plantinga’s Modal Argument
(2023) Cotet Bonamusa, Alex; Martínez Fernández, José, 1969-
This essay purports to criticize the modal version of the ontological argument, a classical argument that pretends to be a proof for the existence of God, put forward by Alvin Plantinga in his book The Nature of Necessity , which tries to prove God’s necessary existence . The essay first considers the ontological argument in its classical form, as it was formulated by Anselm of Canterbury in his Proslogion . Then it considers other versions of the argument (such as those of Descartes and Leibniz) and criticisms directed to it (by, for example, Gaunilo and Kant). Finally, Plantinga’s argument is analyzed and considered, fo llowed by some criticisms, that purport to show the circular and question begging nature of the argument The conclusions arrived at in this paper may shed light to the fact that, to some extent, this is a problem that all versions of the argument face, so that the ontological argument, independently of whether one believes in the existence of God, will stand as a failed piece of natural theology.
The Meaning of Tonk
(2023) Viñeta, Javier; Martínez Fernández, José, 1969-
The present article follows on a line of research proposed by Ripley in his 2015 article ‘Anything goes’, where he proposes a conception of logical consequence bearing the peculiar characteristic of discarding the cut rule entirely, and transitivity with it. This is, of course, a bold step to take, given transitivity’s usefulness. It still bears some fruitful advantages for an inferential theory of meaning nonetheless, as it allows entrance into the inferential realm of meaning to many previously problematic entities -such as connectives like Prior’s infamous tonk. As the title of Ripley’s article suggests, it seems that in this interpretation of the turnstile (almost) anything goes. But how exactly does it go, we may ask ourselves. And indeed, this shall be the question we will try to sketch an answer for presently. What exactly could the meaning of tonk be in a framework which accounts for it, i.e. Ripley’s? We believe Ripley’s intuition to be mainly right, and that connectives like tonk do indeed possess a meaning, so we will try to delve deeper into what the meaning of these faulty connectives could be about. We will also briefly consider a side issue, which has to do with the fact that, even if everything goes, it does not seem to be the case that everything goes in the same way. Indeed, thanks to the many responses to Prior’s article numerous differences have been spotted between regular, ‘healthy’ connectives like conjunction and problematic ones like tonk.
Localism in Logic: an Analysis of Chunk and Permeate Methodology
(2023) Benito Monsalvo, Carlos; Martínez Fernández, José, 1969-
In this paper we present a different approach in the classical debate over pluralism and monism. This approach focuses on whether the application of logic is local or global. The thesis we will defend is in favour of localism. In doing so, we will introduce the methodology of Chunk and Permeate, in order to give an account of one of the problems that localism faces.
A Theory of Emotions Plausibly Consistent with CBT
(2023) Álvarez González, Aarón; Pineda Oliva, David
Emotions are complex phenomena constituted by several dimensions. Among them, their intentionality, their phenomenology, their natural history, their developmental course and their normativity. Focusing on some of these dimensions, several theories of emotions have been proposed. At the same time, there is a scientifically supported therapy for emotional disturbances, Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT), that points out to the centrality of the normative dimension of emotions. This paper is about finding a theory of emotions, among the already existent, not only consistent with CBT, and the normativity implied by it, but also with a satisfactory explanation of the other mentioned dimensions. That is, a theory of emotions plausibly consistent with CBT.
Kinds and Essences: Rescuing the New Biological Essentialism
(2023) Kortabarria Areitio, Markel; Díaz León, Encarnación
After the rise of Darwin’s theory of evolution it seemed that the much-feared ghost of traditional essentialism had disappeared from biology. However, developments of the last century in analytic metaphysics (Kripke, Putnam, Wiggins) appear to have resurrected the Aristotelian monster in various forms. The aim of this paper is to investigate the revival of the essentialist doctrine as applied to biological species, namely the thesis that organisms belong to a particular natural kind in virtue of possessing certain essential properties, and examine to what extent these new biological essentialisms are sustainable. For this purpose, I intend to analyze these proposals in both their forms, relational essentialism (Okasha, LaPorte) and intrinsic essentialism (Devitt), and confront them with their main anti-essentialist criticisms. The answer, I advance, is that natural kind essentialism as applied to biological taxa is, not only tenable, but theoretically adequate. Yet not in its typical variants. I contend that understood as HPC kinds (Boyd, Wilson), organisms possess clusters of co-occurring properties that are caused by various mechanisms which in turn determine the shared similarities that define membership to species. Such an approach encompasses both the intrinsic and relational mechanisms that make species members be what they are. However, this theory faces criticisms regarding circularity and the problem of polymorphism (Ereshefsky & Matthen). I suggest that reinterpreting the HPC theory as informationally-connected property clusters (Martínez) solves the objection posing an improved version of the HPC theory and providing what I believe is a theoretically adequate and explanatorily robust version of biological essentialism.
Griffiths' psychoevolutionary theory of basic emotions: is the automatic appraisal mechanism informationally encapsulated?
(2023) Aliffi, Matilde; Pineda Oliva, David
Griffiths argues that a system which triggers the emotional response, named automatic appraisal mechanism (AAM), is informationally encapsulated (Griffiths, 1997). After proposing a clarification of the AAM using Shea's taxonomy (Shea, 2013), I will claim that Griffiths' inference to the best explanation in favor of the informational encapsulation of the AAM is not compelling. I will present empirical evidence (Paquette et al., 2003) that is incompatible with the thesis of the informational encapsulation of the AAM in order to cast doubts on Griffiths' explanation, and I will propose an alternative one. My alternative explanation will be that the AAM is synchronically impenetrable, and I will affirm that it is preferable over Griffiths' one because is less theoretically demanding, and moreover in accordance with empirical evidence that shows the possibility of diachronic cognitive penetration of the AAM. I will conclude by claiming that this revision can provide also a better account of the irrationality of recalcitrant emotions.
Intentional Is Not Voluntary: An Epistemic Approach
(2023) Carbonell Palasí, Christian; Prades, Josep Lluís
While concepts such as intentional action, action done for reasons, or expressive action have been the focus of much contemporary work in the philosophy of action, the concept of voluntary action has not received as much attention in the last century. So much so that the current bibliography about voluntariness is rather scarce. An interesting exception can be found in the recent work of John Hyman (2013, 2015, 2016), whose account of voluntariness is remarkably aimed at rejecting what I will call the Intentional-Voluntary Sufficiency Thesis (IVST henceforth): IVST. For any act-description A and any agent S, if S A-s intentionally then S also A-s voluntarily. Hyman’s main argument against IVST concerns cases of action done under compulsion that falls short of total control over the agent. The argument goes as follows. If S consents to A-ing because she is compelled to do it by a sufficiently grave threat, then S does not A voluntarily although she A-s
Issues On the Nature of Sounds
(2023) Buccella, Alessandra; García-Carpintero, Manuel
What are sounds? For a philosopher in particular, they are very tricky objects. In this paper I will go through the many theories about the nature of sounds that have been put forward, trying to see whether there's at least one that “sounds” plausible. Then, I will examine some additional issues useful, in my opinion, to support the view I chose.

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