Developmental psychology and cultural evolution are concerned with the same research questions but rarely interact. Collaboration between these fields could lead to substantial progress. Developmental psychology and related fields such as educational science and linguistics explore how behavior and cognition develop through combinations of social and individual experiences and efforts. Human developmental processes display remarkable plasticity, allowing children to master complex tasks, many which are of recent origin and not part of our biological history, such as mental arithmetic or pottery. It is this potency of human developmental mechanisms that allow humans to have culture on a grand scale. Biological evolution would only establish such plasticity if the combinatorial problems associated with flexibility could be solved, biological goals be reasonably safeguarded, and cultural transmission faithful. We suggest that cultural information can guide development in similar way as genes, provided that cultural evolution can establish productive transmission/teaching trajectories that allow for incremental acquisition of complex tasks. We construct a principle model of development that fulfills the needs of both subjects that we refer to as Incremental Functional Development. This process is driven by an error-correcting mechanism that attempts to fulfill combinations of cultural and inborn goals, using cultural information about structure. It supports the acquisition of complex skills. Over generations, it maintains function rather than structure, and this may solve outstanding issues about cultural transmission. The presence of cultural goals gives the mechanisms an open architecture that become an engine for cultural evolution.

In this chapter, I take issue with a popular version of physicalism about intentionality, the view that the semantic facts—such as the fact that Maya means addition by ‘plus’ or believes that there is chocolate in the cupboard—are fully grounded in the physical facts. I present an explanatory gap argument against this view, albeit one that departs significantly from traditional explanatory gap arguments against physicalism, since it does not rely on a controversial inference from conceivability to possibility. Whereas traditional explanatory gap arguments stem from the failure of analytic reductive explanation, the explanatory gap I point to stems from the failure of metaphysical explanation.

I argue for the following theses. First, semantico-physical grounding claims must be deducible from facts about essence, if they are to provide adequate metaphysical explanations of the semantic facts, without appeal to conceptual analysis. Second, semantic properties are essentially weakly normative: it lies in their natures to have correctness conditions, in virtue of which they are apt to subjectively rationalize—rather than merely cause—behaviour. As a consequence, third, semantico-physical grounding claims cannot be deduced from facts about essence, and there is an explanatory gap between intentionality and the physical. This provides us with powerful reason to think that the semantic facts are not fully grounded in the physical facts.

In this paper, I take issue with a core commitment of logical conventionalism: that we impose a logic on ourselves by adopting general linguistic conventions governing our use of logical terms, thereby determining the meanings of the logical constants and which of our inferences are valid. Drawing on Kripke’s ‘adoption problem’, I argue that general logical principles cannot be adopted, either explicitly or implicitly. I go on to argue that the meanings of our logical terms, and the validity of our inferences, cannot depend on our adoption of logico-linguistic conventions.

John MacFarlane has recently argued that his brand of truth relativism provides the best solution to the puzzle of future contingents: assertions about the future that express propositions that are metaphysically neither necessary nor impossible. In this paper, we show that even if we grant all of the metaphysical, semantic and pragmatic assumptions in terms of which MacFarlane sets and aims to solve the puzzle, his truth relativism is not apt to solve the problem of future contingents. We argue that the theory fails to vindicate the intuition that future contingent propositions are neither true nor false, leaving the theory open to a charge of Reductio. We show that these problems cannot be answered while preserving the core tenets of truth relativism.

This paper takes issue with an influential interpretationist argument for physicalism about intentionality based on the possibility of radical interpretation. The interpretationist defends the physicalist thesis that the intentional truths supervene on the physical truths by arguing that it is possible for a radical interpreter, who knows all of the physical truths, to work out the intentional truths about what an arbitrary agent believes, desires, and means without recourse to any further empirical information. One of the most compelling arguments for the possibility of radical interpretation, associated most closely with David Lewis and Donald Davidson, gives a central role to decision theoretic representation theorems, which demonstrate that if an agent's preferences satisfy certain constraints, it is possible to deduce probability and utility functions that represent her beliefs and desires. We argue that an interpretationist who wants to rely on existing representation theorems in defence of the possibility of radical interpretation faces a trilemma, each horn of which is incompatible with the possibility of radical interpretation.

This paper takes issue with Lewis' influential argument for the supervenience of the semantic on the non-semantic based on the possibility of radical interpretation. Radical interpretation is possible only if an ideal being, who is omniscient about the non-semantic truths, can deduce the semantic truths a priori. The radical interpreter appeals to a set of criteria of interpretation choice, such as most notably some kind of Principle of Charity. It is argued in this paper that the radical interpreter faces an insoluble aggregation problem: the radical interpreter must jointly apply several criteria for evaluating interpretations in order to determine which interpretation is best overall. First, the situation of the radical interpreter is formally modeled using the machinery of social choice theory. Second, it is argued that either Arrow's impossibility theorem or a variant of it applies to the situation of the radical interpreter. The upshot is that radical interpretation is impossible, and Lewis' argument for semantic supervenience fails.

In a recent paper, Alexander Greenberg defends a truth norm of belief according to which if one has some doxastic attitude towards p, one ought to believe that p if and only if p is true (DA). He responds, in particular, to the 'blindspot' objection to truth norms such as DA: in the face of true blindspots, such as it is raining and nobody believes that it is raining, truth norms such as DA are unsatisfiable; they entail that one ought to believe p, but if one does believe p, they entail that it is not the case that one ought to believe p. In this paper, it is argued that Greenberg's response to the blindspot objection is unsatisfactory.

In Unbelievable Errors, Bart Streumer defends the error theory by rejecting all competitors to it. My aim here is to defend one brand of realism from Streumer's objections: primitivim. The primitivist holds that there exist sui generis normative properties that do not supervene on any descriptive properties. It is argued that Streumer's objections to primitivism can be met.

This chapter investigates what we disagree about when we disagree about logic, on the assumption that judgments of logical validity are normative. If logic is normative, then the popular anti-realist thesis that there are no normative facts or properties generalizes—it entails that there are no logical facts or properties. When faced with this anti-realism, it is tempting to endorse a pluralist thesis, according to which two people who disagree about the validity of an argument can both say something true. This chapter explores the limitations of three prominent forms of pluralism: contextualism, relativism, and expressivism. It argues that none of these forms of pluralism gives an adequate account of what we disagree about when we disagree about logic.

It is widely held, even among nonnaturalists, that the moral supervenes on the natural. This is to say that for any two metaphysically possible worlds w and w′, and for any entities x in w and y in w′, any isomorphism between x and y that preserves the natural properties preserves the moral properties. In this paper, I put forward a conceivability argument against moral supervenience, assuming non-naturalism. First, I argue that though utilitarianism may be true, and the trolley driver is permitted to kill the one to save the five, there is a conceivable scenario that is just like our world in all natural respects, yet at which deontology is true, and the trolly driver is not permitted to kill the one to save the five. I then argue that in the special case of morality, it is possible to infer from the conceivability of such a scenario to its possibility. It follows that supervenience is false.