Books by Joseph Ulatowski
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Anthologies and Topical Collections by Joseph Ulatowski
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Virtue, Narrative, and the Self: Explorations of Character in the Philosophy of Mind and Action, 2020
This volume aims to expand the reach of virtue theory beyond the confines of virtue ethics and vi... more This volume aims to expand the reach of virtue theory beyond the confines of virtue ethics and virtue epistemology, while at the same time revealing how discussions of narrativity and self may inform work in virtue theory. The task we set before us is one that moves discussion forward into issues of philosophical psychology, action theory, and the philosophy of mind. Comparatively little work has been done to show how virtue may inform debates in these important areas of philosophical research. The exercise of virtuous character arises from a disposition to act in certain ways and those dispositions may be formed in part by what is constitutive of the self or the story we tell about ourselves. Similarly, what the self is and how we talk about the self may inform discussion of virtuous character and human flourishing. Virtue theorists have only begun to consider the ways in which research in action theory and the philosophy of mind can enrich theorising about virtue, right action, and human flourishing. Our hope for this volume is to begin a sustained and fruitful dialogue between virtue theorists, action theorists, and philosophers of mind.
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Publications by Joseph Ulatowski
Second Death: Experiences of Death Across Different Technologies, 2024
The aim of this paper is to argue that it is not possible for a person to live an indefinitely lo... more The aim of this paper is to argue that it is not possible for a person to live an indefinitely long life as a digital immortal. To argue for this, I show that there is an insurmountable problem from the digital immortal's perspective. If the digital immortal is an exact replica of a mortal, then the entirety of the digital mind will be directed toward offline content, e.g., from big events like birthday parties, weddings, and the birth of one's children to the more mundane such as what the embodied mortal had for breakfast on 22 June 1987. The possibility of digital immortals living a person's life indefinitely means that the digital immortal is able to conceive of and understand the content of the mortal's embodied mind. To conceive of and to understand the content of a mortal's embodied mind the digital immortal must know what it is like to be an embodied mortal. However, the digital immortal cannot conceive of what it is like to be an embodied mortal because the experience would be so transformative that it would be irrational to consider it (cf. Paul 2014) and because it would have to conceive of its own offline afterlife, which is something well beyond its capacity. Just as we cannot conceive what it's like to be immortal because of its highly transformative experience (cf. Ulatowski 2019), digital immortals would be similarly perplexed by an offline afterlife. Our digital döppelganger would have no way of knowing what meaty embodied lives are like. The pollyannaish view of living forever as a digital döppelganger gives rise to the realisation that our functionally equivalent digital replica would be filled by memories, experiences, and other content of which it cannot possibly conceive.
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Studia Philosophia, 2024
Critics of the scope problem that motivates pluralism about truth have argued that it is a pseudo... more Critics of the scope problem that motivates pluralism about truth have argued that it is a pseudo-problem. If the criticism is correct, then truth pluralism is left unmotivated and potentially bankrupt. In this paper, I argue that closely related to the scope problem is another problem, which I call "the scalar problem." If the property of truth is sensitive to how an agent expresses the truth predicate within a single linguistic discourse and different agents or groups of agents express truth differently within that discourse, then there are different ways of being true within the same linguistic discourse. Given this possibility, even if the scope problem fails, truth pluralism remains fully motivated.
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Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, 2023
On the correspondence theory of truth, a proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to fac... more On the correspondence theory of truth, a proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to fact. Criticisms of the correspondence theory of truth have argued that such a strict interpretation of the correspondence relation will not be able to account for the truth of statements about fiction or mathematics. This challenge has resulted in the introduction of more permissive correspondence relations, such as Austin's correspondence as correlation or Tarski's correspondence as reference satisfaction. Recently, some mediated correspondence theorists of truth have proposed that the correspondence relation holds not only between thought and world but also between thought and language. In this paper, I argue that correspondence truth, direct or mediated, is not a monistic theory of truth, the view that there is one and only way for a proposition to be true. To argue for this position, I will have to show that each of the correspondence theories accept direct and indirect ways of understanding the correspondence relation as well as address potential objections to the view that correspondence theory is not singular and monolithic.
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Acta Analytica, 2023
Virtues can be considered to play a causal role in the production of behaviour, and so too can ou... more Virtues can be considered to play a causal role in the production of behaviour, and so too can our self-narratives. We identify a point of connection between the two cases and draw a parallel between them. But, those folk-psychological notions: virtues and self-narratives, fail to reduce smoothly to the underlying human physiology. As a first step towards handling that failure to connect with the scientific framework that is the familiar grounding for our understanding of causation, we consider the causal theory of action, a leading theory of action, which shows how reasons, understood as an appropriate pair of beliefs and desires, can be treated as causes of action. Davidson's picture is based on cause as a relation between events, which can have both a description in scientific terms and in folk psychological terms. The character of both virtues and self-narratives is not that of events, even extended ones, so we need to refer to examples of scientific explanation that incorporate structural properties of objects. While we retain the spirit of the causal theory, we wish to guard against any unwarranted optimism that an explicitly scientific explanation for human action lies in our future, drawing on Chomsky's view that a causal explanation of human actions is likely to remain beyond human science forming capacities. We take a mild-realist view of virtues and self-narratives, in the style of Dennett. We argue that, in spite of that limited form of realism, underlined by Chomsky's mysterian position in this domain, we still need to frame our explanations of behaviour based on virtues and self-narratives in causal terms.
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Social Epistemology, 2023
Many countries' constituencies are populated by polarised groups with sharply contrasting politic... more Many countries' constituencies are populated by polarised groups with sharply contrasting political loyalties and convictions, which appear to be becoming more and more extreme. We wish to explore such extreme political convictions with a focus on their place in a supporter's mind, which underpins their engagement with a political movement. We look at how a political narrative can be internalised within the person as one of their narrative threads alongside other narratives concerning, for example, familial relationships, hobbies, and work. Such a bundle of narrative threads, or at least the more central ones, can be said to constitute their identity. Using that framework, we explore the mechanisms that foster such extreme political engagement and the way a group member is committed to a political narrative. As even a very powerful political narrative is not the totality of a person's internal narrative we can see how an individual has the potential to release the hold of a political narrative, particularly if those outside the political narrative can recognise and acknowledge those non-political parts of their identity. In this way, people can build bridges across socio-political divides.
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Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects, 2022
There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that infants and non-human primates hav... more There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that infants and non-human primates have the ability to represent the mental states of other agents, i.e. that they possess a Theory of Mind. We will argue that this evidence also suggests that infants and non-human primates possess the concept of truth, which, as we will explain, is good news for primitivists about truth. First, we will offer a brief overview of alethic primitivism, focusing on Jamin Asay's conceptual version of the view. Next, we will survey relevant work on Theory of Mind which indicates that children younger than two and non-human primates are able to attribute false beliefs. Then, we will bring these falsebelief data to bear on Asay's form of primitivism, arguing that the data support two of the four distinctive theses of this view and offering some remarks about the empirical evaluability of the two remaining theses. We hope that our discussion will help to bridge the gap between psychological and philosophical inquiry and that it will encourage further empirical research on the cognitive significance of the concept of truth for humans and other thinking creatures.
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Experimental philosophy (or "x-phi") is a way of doing philosophy. It is "traditional" philosophy... more Experimental philosophy (or "x-phi") is a way of doing philosophy. It is "traditional" philosophy, but with a little something extra: In addition to the expected philosophical arguments and engagement, x-phi involves the use of empirical methods to test the empirical claims that arise. This extra bit strikes some as a new, perhaps radical, addition to philosophical practice. We don't think so. As this chapter will show, empirical claims have been common across the history of Western philosophy, as have appeals to empirical observation in attempting to support or subvert these claims. While conceptions of philosophy have changed over time, across these changes we find philosophers employing empirical methods in pursuing their philosophical questions. Our primary aim in this chapter is to illustrate this fact. We begin by discussing the relevance of history to experimental philosophy (Section 2), then offer a necessarily condensed and highly selective history of empirical work in Western philosophy, ranging from the ancients (Section 3), to the early moderns (Section 4), to the late moderns (Section 5), and on to the present (Section 6).
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Axiomathes: Global Philosophy, 2022
There are many variants of deflationism about truth, but one of them, Paul Horwich's minimalism, ... more There are many variants of deflationism about truth, but one of them, Paul Horwich's minimalism, stands out because it accepts as axiomatic practical variants of the equivalence schema: ⟨p⟩ is true if and only if p. The equivalence schema is epistemologically fundamental. In this paper, I call upon empirical studies to show that practical variants of the equivalence schema are widely accepted by non-philosophers. While in the empirical data there is variation in how non-philosophers and philosophers talk about truth and how they judge that a sentence is true, a significant amount of data collected over the years reveal that the ordinary or folk view of truth is compatible with the epistemological fundamentality of alethic minimalism. This, I take it, suggests that people share in the same intuitions that form the bedrock of Horwich's minimalism.
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Rationality of Rationalism(s): On Communicable Truths and Testable Knowledge, 2022
The Lvov-Warsaw School's logistic anti-irrationalism-particularly in the works of Kazimierz Ajduk... more The Lvov-Warsaw School's logistic anti-irrationalism-particularly in the works of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Izydora Dąmbska, and Jan Woleński-offered an intellectually distinct alternative to the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. However, its attempt to critique the Franco-German currents of mysticism and romanticism in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, especially in the works of Henri Bergson, open it up to the question of whether its members fully appreciated the consequences of accepting that rational cognition is abstract and schematic. We argue that the abstract nature of rational cognition provides reasons to countenance approximate truth; but doing so seems to have revisionary consequences for the conception of scientific knowledge. The consequences of these arguments seem not to have been anticipated, and point to a new direction for research about the achievability of certain ambitious goals of the Lvov-Warsaw School's logistic anti-irrationalism.
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The Cambridge Handbook of Analytic Philosophy, 2022
An overview of experimental philosophy.
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Filozofia Nauki, 2021
The time has come to consider whether experimental philosophy's ("x-phi") early arguments, debate... more The time has come to consider whether experimental philosophy's ("x-phi") early arguments, debates, and conceptual frameworks, that may have worn well in its early days, fit with the diverse range of projects undertaken by experimental philosophers. Our aim is to propose a novel taxonomy for x-phi that identifies four paths from empirical findings to philosophical consequences, which we call the "fourfold route." We show how this taxonomy can be fruitfully applied even at what one might have taken to be the furthest edges of possible applications of x-phi in metaphysics and formal philosophy. Ultimately, the fourfold route helps us understand a different kind of empirical fact: the development of x-phi itself.
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Virtue, Narrative, and the Self: Explorations of Character in the Philosophy of Mind and Action, 2021
In this introduction, we justify the expansion of virtue theory into the domains of philosophy of... more In this introduction, we justify the expansion of virtue theory into the domains of philosophy of mind and philosophy of action. First, in §2, they provide some exegesis on the recent history of virtue theory. “The Virtue Turn,” as it is sometimes called, may be traced to two sources: Elizabeth Anscombe in ethics and Ernest Sosa in epistemology. This return to virtue theory has sparked some significant and fascinating debates. In §3, we defend the expansion of virtue-theoretic talk into discussions of narrative and the self, and vice versa. Our arguments revolve around the broad connections that may be made between virtue, narrative, and the self. For example, we show how living well involves the cultivation of good character, which makes telling a story of one’s self equally worthwhile. Our understanding of the self is and the stories we tell about events that occur in a lifetime, are enriched by the virtuous (or vicious) character that we have nurtured during that lifetime. The final section provides summaries of each contribution.
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Australasian Philosophical Review, 2021
Glen Pettigrove addresses the proportionality principle in ethics, the principle that “our action... more Glen Pettigrove addresses the proportionality principle in ethics, the principle that “our actions, attitudes, or emotions should be proportional to the degree of value present in the object or events to which they are responding” [p. 1]. He argues this is inconsistent with some familiar features of common-sense morality. In response, he brings virtuous character into the picture, a move we support but wish to modify. We show that certain helping actions should be guided by whether one has the virtue profile most suited to the situation from amongst a surrounding network of people.
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Virtue, Self, and Narrative: Explorations of Character in the Philosophy of Mind and Action, 2021
While the nature of the virtues and their role in human action are controversial, we wish to expl... more While the nature of the virtues and their role in human action are controversial, we wish to explore the thesis that virtues play a causal role in the production of action. One fruitful, though controversial, approach to understanding the nature of the self is through the notion of a narrative and in particular a person's self narrative or narratives. Similarly we wish to explore the thesis that self narratives play a causal role in action. We consider how virtues and self-narratives interrelate and, in particular, how they play a comparable role in the production of action. The basic ideas in the literature concerning reasons as causes of action provide us with a useful starting point even though the focus on reasons has tended to sideline potential causal roles for both virtues and self-narratives. Without attempting to develop a new theory of causation, we draw a picture of how virtues and self-narratives, in relation to each other, can be regarded as causally effective in producing action.
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Balkan Journal of Philosophy, Apr 15, 2021
There are a variety of options in a narrative approach to the self. I limit myself to one approa... more There are a variety of options in a narrative approach to the self. I limit myself to one approach that argues narratives have important roles in our lives without it being true that a narrative constitutes and creates the self. My own position is broadly sympathetic with that view, but my interest lies with the question of whether there is truth in the claim that to create one’s self-narrative is to create oneself. I argue that a self-narrative may be multiply realised by the inner self—impressions and emotions—and the outer self—roles in work and life. I take an optimistic attitude to the idea that narrative provides a metaphor that may stimulate insight in the nature of self if we accept a plurality of narrative selves. This paper mines a vein of research on narratives for insights into selves without being bewitched into accepting implausible conclusions.
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Academia Letters, 2021
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Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 2020
The aim of this paper is to show that a corollary of resolute readings of Wittgenstein's concepti... more The aim of this paper is to show that a corollary of resolute readings of Wittgenstein's conception of nonsense cannot be sustained. First, I describe the corollary. Next, I point out the relevance to it of Wittgenstein's discussion of family resemblance concepts. Then I survey some typical uses of nonsense to see what they bring to an ordinary language treatment of the word "nonsense" and its relatives. I will subsequently consider the objection, on behalf of a resolute reading, that "nonsense" is a term of philosophical criticism. Finally, I conclude that resolute readings have not sufficiently accounted for how nonsense behaves in our language; they have failed to heed Wittgenstein's warning: "don't think, but look!"
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Books by Joseph Ulatowski
Anthologies and Topical Collections by Joseph Ulatowski
Publications by Joseph Ulatowski
Through careful analysis of sections of the Platonic dialogues, we argue that particular aspects of discussions between Socrates and his interlocutors should serve as object lessons not only for students but also for instructors. For students, rather than seeing philosophy as merely a body of doctrines transmitted from instructor to student, we argue that they should also see, in Socrates’ interactions, that learning to philosophize is a matter of developing the skill of philosophical argumentation and conceptual understanding. For instructors, one ought to be cognizant of the abilities of one’s students, as well as other information relevant to learning. In particular, we show how it is incumbent to recognize that students can vary in their background experience when they reach our classrooms, and may be at differing levels of development in their philosophical thinking.
Perhaps the most important point we wish to bring home is that Socrates’ interactions are carefully differentiated for each conversation with his interlocutors. Most, if not all, of his discussions are carefully calibrated according to a certain social awareness, wherein he pays attention to background features of the conversational context, including facts about his interlocutors, such as social and cultural influences, and perhaps especially their philosophical aptitude. The upshot of paying attention to Socrates’ interactions is that these features can augment instructors and students’ understanding, facilitating the cultivation and development of philosophical skills.
(This draft originally was authored collaboratively with Justus Johnson, and it is currently under revision independent of him after his departure from the profession.)
While I believe the content of the paper is promising, I believe now, after having read the paper through a few times, that the paper needs to be divided into two independent papers, one addressing the "scalar problem" and the other a counter-argument against something Julian Dodd argued recently. Because of this, I have chosen not to provide a link to the paper. One will be coming soon, though!