Abstracts to some of Jack Lyons's philosophy papers

"Representational Analyticity", in Mind and Language
The traditional understanding of analyticity in terms of concept containment is revisited, but with a concept explicitly understood as a certain kind of mental representation and containment being read correspondingly literally. The resulting conception of analyticity avoids much of the vagueness associated with attempts to explicate analyticity in terms of synonymy by moving the locus of discussion from the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. The account provided here illustrates some interesting features of representations and explains, at least in part, the special epistemic status of analytic judgments.

"General Rules and the Justification of Probable Belief in Hume's Treatise", in Hume Studies
Skeptical inclinations notwithstanding, Hume clearly thinks that some beliefs are more justified than others. I construe a general rule as a belief with general content and argue that justified beliefs, according to Hume, are those that accord with the more extensive (held on the basis of a large number of experiences) and constant (subject to few apparent counterexamples) general rules. Hume does invoke stability, utility, and the like, but these are reasons to seek epistemically justified beliefs, not part of what it is for beliefs to be epistemically justified.

"Carving the Mind at its (Not Necessarily Modular) Joints", in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
The cognitive neuropsychological understanding of a cognitive system is roughly that of a "mental organ," which is independent of other systems, specializes in some cognitive task, and exhibits a certain kind of internal cohesiveness. This is all quite vague, and I try to make it more precise. A more precise understanding of cognitive systems will make it possible to articulate in some detail an alternative to the Fodorian doctrine of modularity (since not all cognitive systems are modules), but it will also provide a better understanding of what a module is (since all modules are cognitive systems).

"In Defense of Epiphenomenalism", in preparation
Recent worries about possible epiphenomenalist consequences of nonreductive materialism are misplaced, not, as many have argued, because nonreductive materialism does not have epiphenomenalist implications but because the epiphenomenalist implications are actually virtues of the theory, rather than vices. It is only by showing how certain kinds of mental properties are causally impotent that cognitive scientific explanations of mentality as we know them are possible.

Perception and Basic Beliefs: Zombies, Modules, and the Problem of the External World, in preparation
The book manuscript offers solutions to two persistent and I believe closely related problems in epistemology. The first problem is that of drawing a principled distinction between perception and inference: what is the difference between seeing that something is the case and merely believing it on the basis of what we do see? The second problem is that of specifying which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e., directly, or noninferentially, justified) and which are not. I argue that perceptual beliefs (beliefs about external objects) are themselves basic and that what makes a belief a perceptual belief, or a basic belief, is not a matter of the subject's contemporaneous nondoxastic experiences, nor the content of the belief in question, nor the subject's auxiliary beliefs; what determines whether a belief is basic or perceptual is the nature of the cognitive system, or "module", that is causally responsible for the belief. The class of modules whose outputs are perceptual beliefs is a subset of the class of modules whose outputs are basic beliefs. Thus, even zombies, who in the philosophical literature lack conscious experiences altogether, can have basic, justified, perceptual beliefs. The theories of perceptual and basic beliefs developed in the monograph are embedded in a larger reliabilist epistemology. The resulting theory of basic beliefs actually bolsters reliabilism against a famous class of objections usually thought to argue for a kind of internalism. I develop a detailed reliabilist theory, one that draws an explicit distinction between basic and nonbasic beliefs, using the general framework of my theory of basic beliefs to sketch a reliabilist theory of inferential justification.

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