Paul Boghossian
Paul Artin Boghossian (1957) is Silver Professor at New York University, where he has been chair of the department for ten years (1994-2004). Boghossian has developed arguments in fields spanning epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language, such as, eg, the claim that cognition poses as powerful a challenge to a physicalist understanding of mind as does consciousness; that privileged self-knowledge cannot be reconciled with an externalist conception of mental content; that the notion of analyticity, correctly understood, can be used to account for a priori knowledge, including that of our knowledge of logic; that the reasoning can be considered to consist of a kind of rule-following; that relativistic views of normative domains, such as morality, can only make sense under conditions that deprive them of plausibility.
He maintains a very fruitful correspondence with Crispin Wright and has participated in an extraordinary fifteen-year debate with Timothy Williamson on analyticity and a prioricity (Debating the A Priori, Oxford, 2020).
Paul Boghossian
Presentation summary:
The epistemology of logic
This talk attempts to clarify the project of explaining the possibility of 'blind reasoning' — namely, of basic logical inferences to which we are entitled without our having an explicit justification for them. The role played by inferentialism in this project is examined and objections made to inferentialism by Paolo Casalegno and Timothy Williamson are answered. Casalegno proposes a recipe for formulating a counterexample to any proposed constitutive inferential role by imaging a subject who understands the logical constant in question but fails to have the capacity to make the inference in question; Williamson's recipe turns on imagining an expert who continues to understand the constant in question while having developed sophisticated considerations for refusing to make it. It's argued that neither recipe succeeds .