JASON DEWITT
I am a philosopher and PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at The Ohio State University.
ABOUT ME
I'm starting my 6th year in the PhD program at OSU. Before Ohio State, I got a MA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and did my undergrad at UT, Knoxville. My research lies at the intersection of the metaphysics of science and the history of 20th-century philosophy. I primarily work on the metaphysics of modality and causation, neopragmatism, naturalisms, and deflationism about truth, reference, metaontology, and rationality.
PUBLICATIONS
DOGRAMACI'S DEFLATIONISM ABOUT RATIONALITY
Synthese. January 06, 2021
Just as Quine and others have argued for a deflationism about the property of truth, Sinan Dogramaci has argued for a deflationism about rationality. Specifically, Dogramaci claims that we have no reason to think that the basic, deductive, epistemic rules we call “rational” have any sort of “unifying property.” A “unifying property” is a property that is necessary, sufficient, and explanatorily illuminating. My goal in this paper is to undermine Dogramaci’s argument for this radical position. I do this by first outlining Dogramaci’s distinctive view on the function of our epistemically evaluative terms. This view, called epistemic communism, has it that the function of terms like “rational” is to support the coordination of our community on a single set of epistemic rules. I offer a reconstruction of Dogramaci’s argument from epistemic communism to deflationism about rationality. I next raise an objection to Dogramaci’s argument: different sets of epistemic rules do not equally support the coordinative function. Dogramaci has a response to this objection, but I argue that this response is less than satisfactory. I illustrate that this response is unsatisfactory by employing work by David Enoch and Joshua Schechter. After pushing my objection to Dogramaci’s argument, I develop, on Dogramaci’s behalf, an objection to my non-deflationary attempt to undermine his argument. In the final section of the paper, I reply to this objection offered on Dogramaci’s behalf and conclude that whether we are epistemic communists or not, we need not accept deflationism.
