My dissertation argues that the beliefs, desires, and preferences that count as rational may change from one deliberative context to another. The argument rests on the premise that rational deliberation requires one to identify all the possibilities that are relevant to a decision problem. How does a decision maker accomplish this task? What impact does this demarcation have on the beliefs and desires that she uses to deliberate? The answers I propose suggest changes to the way we view rational agents and what they know. Appealing to empirical research and normative concerns, I argue that an agent's deliberative beliefs, desires, and preferences are "constructed'' on a case to case basis and are distinct from the agent's stable set of background attitudes. For deliberative judgments depend upon the ways one specifies what is relevant for a decision problem and this may change from one context to the next. Upon articulating a suitable context-sensitive view of rational decision making, I develop accounts of warranted assertion, rational full belief and knowledge that are similarly context-sensitive. These views criticize simple constitutive norms of assertion, like the knowledge norm, and propose a way to connect degrees of belief and full belief. In addition, the proffered account of knowledge explains how knowledge precludes epistemic luck, as required by Gettier cases, by appealing to the way the standards of knowledge vary from one deliberative context to the next.

The dissertation examines the prospects of and the relation between two types of metaethical theories, constitutivist and voluntarist ones, which in different ways place the will, or volitional attitudes, at the center of an explanation of practical reasons and practical normativity. Voluntarism explains reasons or normativity by reference to the content of an agent's will. Constitutivism does so by reference to the nature or structure of the will, understood in a certain demanding way. I argue that while these two explanatory projects are often run together, and for good reason, it is important to keep them distinct, since each is more likely to be defensible when articulated in isolation from the other. In their most prominent versions - such as the one developed by Christine Korsgaard -, both constitutivism and voluntarism depend on a particular conception of the will as self-reflexive. By considering what is involved in (first-personally) ascribing the relevant kind of self-reflexive structure to one's own will, I conclude that both types of theory are likely to succeed only in modest, first-order normative forms, not as metaethical explanations of practical normativity or practical reasons in general. I then explain the use of modest voluntarism, namely, to account for the distinctive role that certain exercises of the will could be thought to play in our practical reasoning; and I show the use of modest constitutivism by offering an explanation of structural rationality that like a particularly influential recent account of structural rationality, proposed by Niko Kolodny, is constitutivist in spirit, yet rejects the formalism that Kolodny's account inherits from the metaethically ambitious ones it is meant to replace.

Many philosophical accounts of emotions characterize them as reducible mental entities. Because of this, either they tend to fail to adequately individuate emotions from other mental states or they have very limited success in capturing the many dimensions of emotional experience. This dissertation offers a model of the emotions as processes individuated by their component affects and construed in terms of a narrativized causal history. The aim is to present a plausible statement about what emotions are and to ask how we should think about them philosophically. I also hope to give a rationale for how, in methodological terms, they can be most informatively examined if their putatively central role in human functioning is to be taken seriously. Descriptive, methodological and critical themes comprise approximately the first half of the thesis. I develop the process account, its structural requirements and advantages, and provide a theory that accounts for long- and short-term emotions that may occur with or without deliberation. The process account is compared to other prominent theories of the emotions, and the oft-conflated terms "emotion", "feeling" and "affect" are disambiguated. In the second half, implications of the process view for self-knowledge and evaluative attitudes are considered, the regulatory features of emotions are described, and conclusions are drawn regarding first- and third-person epistemic authority on emotional states. I examine how introspection can come in varying degrees of reliability, and the introspective judgements relating thereto have authority only in virtue of the reliability of the mechanism responsible for their production. What consequences, I ask, does this have for authority on emotions? What symmetries and asymmetries obtain between the first- and third-person perspectives? How are third-persons subject to errors or other biases in the assessment of a subject's emotions, and how do these distortions undermine the authority of their interpretations of the emotions of others? I find that obtaining knowledge of emotions represents, for the most part, a considerable epistemic accomplishment. As well as promoting the construal of emotions as "constructions" rather than "reductions", there is a further motivation for focusing on the processual nature of emotions, which is to clarify their roles and to relate them functionally to persons and to personal concerns. I address how philosophical conceptions of emotion connect to ideas about the "self": to self-knowledge, self-conception, self-regulation, and self-construction. I examine how an emphasis on the processual, and sometimes voluntary, character of emotion has particular implications for self-knowledge and for how we evaluate emotions. The thesis concludes with reflections on the role emotional processes play in the narrativized construction of a self.

This dissertation has three parts. The first part is an ESL textbook that is based on a grammar which I call term and predicate grammar. This name reflects the view that all simple and complex sentences of English consist of one predicate and one or more terms, or are simple transforms of such sentences. There are four predicate types and seven term types, all of which can be specified precisely. The term and predicate grammar itself is based on the syntactic component of a semiotic system I developed, which standardly includes as well a semantic component and a pragmatic component. The second part of the dissertation establishes a connection between the philosophy of language and second language acquisition research and pedagogy by presenting two cases in which an analysis of a feature of English in the one discipline is juxtaposed with an analysis of the same feature in the other discipline. On the basis of these two cases, it is proposed that a merger of interests and lines of work between the two disciplines would be mutually beneficial, and that an ESL text book that is based in the philosophy of language should foster such a merger. The third and final part of the dissertation has a general aspect and a specific aspect. On its general aspect, it is a philosophical examination of the relationship between the implicit knowledge of language vs. explicit knowledge of language distinction in second language acquisition research and pedagogy and the knowing-how vs. knowing-that distinction in the philosophy of language. The two distinctions are found to align and it is claimed on this basis that the second language acquisition distinction has an antecedent in the earlier philosophical distinction. On its specific aspect, the third part of the dissertation is an analysis of what is called the interface issue in second language acquisition research. This issue addresses the question of how implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge contribute to the acquisition of a second language. Three positions have been taken on the issue, viz. the strong position, the no position and the weak position. On the strong position the explicit knowledge of language developed by instruction and practice plays a major role in acquisition, on the no position such knowledge plays no role in acquisition while on the weak position such knowledge plays a facilitating role in acquisition. But there is a consensus in the second language acquisition research community that the strong position should be rejected and yet it is this position that accords with the views of traditional language pedagogists, and with thoughtful common sense generally. This poses a dilemma that I claim can be resolved by making a philosophical interpretation of ideas and information that can be found in recent second language acquisition theory and research.

My dissertation addresses the question "do desires provide reasons?" I present two independent lines of argument in support of the conclusion that they do not. The first line of argument emerges from the way I circumscribe the concept of a desire. Complications aside, I conceive of a desire as a member of a family of attitudes that have imperative content, understood as content that displays doability-conditions rather than truth-conditions. Moreover, I hold that an attitude may provide reasons only if it has truth-evaluable content. Insofar as desires lack truth-evaluable content, I hold that the content of a desire has the wrong kind of logical structure to provide reasons. My second line of argument claims that even if a desire did have truth-evaluable content, it would not follow that desires provide reasons. This is because a desire has no more rational significance than a guess or coin-flip. My argument relies on what I call the non-substitutability principle, the thesis that (all things being equal) one cannot substitute something that lacks rational significance, relative to some attitude, A, for something that has rational significance, relative to A, and leave the rational standing of A unchanged. For example, one cannot substitute the guess that P (i.e., something that lacks rational significance relative to the belief that P) for the perception that P (i.e., something that is rationally significant relative to the belief that P) without altering the rational standing of the belief. I argue that when the non-substitutability principle is applied to a desire that gives rise to an intention, it turns out that one can always substitute a guess or coin-flip (i.e., something that lacks rational significance relative to the intention) for the desire, without altering the rational standing of the intention. I take this to show that desires are not rationally significant relative to the intentions to which they give

The goal of my dissertation is to argue that Descartes arrives at his account of self-knowledge by grappling with skepticism about introspection. As I interpret him, Descartes has his meditator attempt to undermine introspection so that he can replace his former beliefs about his mind's nature and activities with an account of self-knowledge that is immune from doubt. Just as he must show that reason and sense perception are sources of knowledge because they can withstand his skeptical challenges, he must also show that introspection is equally indubitable. To this end, he constructs the strongest arguments he can from the perspective of a skeptic who maintains that we can be ignorant of or in error about our thought. Then he attempts to show that none of the skeptic's premises can undermine his conclusion that we have infallible knowledge of our mind's nature and activities. My dissertation reconstructs these skeptical arguments in order to clarify the role they play in motivating (and ultimately grounding) Descartes' account of self-knowledge.

According to the deliberative view of democracy, the legitimacy of democratic politics is closely tied to whether the use of political power is accompanied by a process of rational deliberation among the citizenry and their representatives. Critics have questioned whether this level of deliberative capacity is even possible among modern citizenries--due to limitations of time, energy, and differential backgrounds--which therefore calls into question the very possibility of this type of democracy. In my dissertation, I counter this line of criticism, arguing that deliberative democrats and their critics have both idealized the wrong kind of citizen deliberation. Citizen deliberation should not be concerned with the indeterminate project of "translating" abstract democratic principles and values into everyday cases of political problem-solving. Instead, deliberation should take the form of analogy, just as we already find it in everyday politics and affairs. When ordinary citizens use analogies, they do not derive decisions from general principles or values, but they still reason nonetheless. Seen from this analogical perspective, deliberative democracy is already a practical reality to a large degree. When an election is on the horizon, a campaign season arises in which debates, forums, and "barstool" dialogues exponentially increase the amount of citizen deliberation. In these settings, citizens can readily be seen to be mapping analogous past candidates, elections, issues, and problems onto those currently on the ballot so as to reason about them. Consequently, analogical reasoning allows citizens to treat the majority rule mechanisms that proliferate in real politics as "deliberative outlets," which is to say, as catalysts of deliberation akin to the "creative outlets" that catalyze self-expression in the arts. While citizens may recognize majority rule mechanisms as catalysts of deliberation, many democratic theorists will hesitate to embrace this vision of the practical reality of deliberative politics. Isn't analogical reasoning too low in rigor to be placed at the heart of the deliberative ideal? I develop two arguments to explain the foundational role analogy plays in deliberation and to counter such critics. First, I draw on the explosion of research on analogical reasoning over the past two decades to show that it is far more rigorous and systematic than many suppose. Second, I argue that to the extent that citizen deliberation is concerned with rational planning, rather than just reasoning in general, analogical reasoning is logically superior. When we reason about what to do, we make plans that incorporate predictions about what is likely to ensue when a given course of action is selected. However, as soon as predictions enter into deliberation, its underlying logic changes as well. The reason for this change in logic is that as our probabilistic reasoning expands, the probability of its conclusions degenerates. Therefore, when assessing probabilities, we no longer should seek decisions derived from long, elegant chains of reasoning that connect our various options to generalities like values and principles. Instead, what we need is "short and sweet," or terse, humble lines of reasoning, which are more congruent with this form of deliberation. Thus, to the extent that democratic deliberation is involved in rational planning, it calls not for the elegant, deductive kind of reasoning idealized by proponents and critics of deliberative democracy alike. Instead, democratic deliberation calls for the "short and sweet," analogical kind of decision-making we associate with ordinary citizens already. After all, as research has shown, analogies are a much preferred and rigorous way by which even experts engage in probabilistic reasoning. By focusing on analogical reasoning, I therefore conclude that the practical reality of deliberative democracy should be recognized in ways that might ordinarily be dismissed.

One central issue in philosophy of probability concerns the interpretation of the very notion of probability. The fruitful tradition of modern Bayesian subjectivists seeks to ground the concept of probability in a normative theory of rational decision-making. The upshot is a representation theorem, by which the agent's preferences over actions are represented by derived subjective probabilities and utilities. As the development of Bayesian subjectivism becomes increasingly involved, the corresponding representation theorem has gained considerable complexity and has itself become a subject of philosophical scrutiny. This dissertation studies systematically various aspects of Bayesian decision theory, especially its foundational role in Bayesian subjective interpretation of probability. The first two chapters provide a detailed review of classical theories that are paradigmatic of such an approach with an emphasis on the works of Leonard J. Savage. As a technical interlude, Chapter III focuses on the additivity condition of the probabilities derived in Savage's theory of personal probability, where it is pointed out that Savage's arguments for not requiring probability measures derived in his system to be countable additive is inconclusive due to an oversight of set-theoretic details. Chapter IV treats the well-known problem of constant-acts in Savage's theory, where a simplification of the system is proposed which yields the representation theorem without the constant-act assumption. Chapter V addresses a series of issues in the epistemic foundations of game theory including the problem of asymmetry of viewpoints in multi-agent systems and that of self-prediction in a Bayesian setup. These issues are further analyzed in the context of epistemic games where a unification of different models that are based on different belief-representation structures is also proposed.

My dissertation articulates and defends a vision of liberal political theory grounded in genuine value pluralism. Value pluralism, I argue, is best understood as a thesis about the nature of values, not as an observation about the diversity of evaluative beliefs that individuals hold. It should be understood as the claim that values themselves are plural and not all mutually realizable in a single life. Accepting this account of value pluralism offers significant challenges to traditional liberal political theories. However, value pluralism also has wide-ranging, and often surprising, advantages in explaining key tenets of liberal political theory. My dissertation explains the significant advantages of genuine value pluralism while responding to the most pressing challenges it poses.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Philosophy, 1974. / MIT Humanities Library copy: issued in two vols. / Leaf number 84 used twice. Also issued as a two-volume set. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 217-258). / by Thomas S. Weston. / Ph.D.