A Unified Treatment of Moore's Paradox Belief, Knowledge, Assertion and Rationality

by Williams, John N.

• ISBN13: 9780198744221
• ISBN10: 0198744226
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-07-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

A Unified Treatment of Moore's Paradox is the culmination of a decades-long engagement with Moore's paradox by the world's leading authority on the subject, the late John Williams. The book offers a comprehensive account of Moore's paradox in thought and speech, both in its comissive and omissive forms. Williams argues that Moorean absurdity comes in degrees, and shows that contrary to one tradition in the literature on Moore's Paradox, we cannot explain Moorean absurdity in speech in terms of Moorean absurdity in thought, but must account for each form of absurdity in its own terms. Williams also explores the extent to which Moore's paradox may arise for attitudes other than belief, such as desire. Written with Williams' trademark clarity and wit, the book is packed with arguments bearing on a wide range of topics in epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind.

Author Biography

John N. Williams, Professor

John Williams arrived in Singapore in the early 1980s from the University of Hull, where he obtained his Ph.D. under Alan R. White. He was thereafter largely based in Singapore, first as Lecturer at the National University of Singapore and subsequently as Associate Professor at Singapore Management University. Interspersed with these appointments were brief stints in Jamaica, as Head of Philosophy at the University of the West Indies; South Africa, as Visiting Fellow at Rhodes University; and, most recently, the Republic of Kazakhstan, as Professor at Nazarbayev University. He passed away in August 2019 in Singapore.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Foreword - Mitchell Green and Alan Hájek
1. Introducing Moore's Paradox
2. Moore on Moore's Paradox
3. Wittgenstein on Moore's Paradox
4. Some Salient Approaches to Omissive and Commissive Moore-Paradoxical Assertion
5. Expressing Belief and Knowledge, Assertion, and the Expressivist Approach
6. An Account of Belief
7. Some Salient Approaches to Moore's Paradox in Belief
8. The Knowledge Version in Belief
9. The Knowledge Version in Assertion
10. The Priority of Belief Thesis and the Incredibility of the Assertor
11. Conscious Belief
12. The Self-falsification Account in Belief and Assertion, Rationality, and Absurdity
13. Eliminativism, Dialethism and Moore's Paradox
14. Moore's Paradox and Sorensen's Iterated Cases
15. The Justification Approach to Moore-Paradoxical Belief
16. Defining Moore-paradoxicality: The Preface Paradox and Rational Inconsistent Belief
17. Moore's Paradox and Desire
18. Further Work
Bibliography