¹Debunking arguments purport to show that there is no appropriate explanatory connection between beliefs in some domain and the subject matter of those beliefs. The recognized absence of such a connection is meant to render our beliefs about those domains unjustified. In some cases, the challenges arise because the best scientific explanation of these beliefs makes no mention of the facts in those domains (e.g., evolutionary explanations of our moral beliefs). In others, the challenges arise because there looks to be no way for the abstract facts in question (e.g., mathematical facts) to cause or otherwise explain our beliefs. We will examine how these challenges arise for beliefs about (among other things) morality and mathematics.

²What is the relationship between mental capacities such as conceptual thought and the capacity for communication? Some philosophers, from Descartes to Davidson and beyond, have argued that conceptual thought requires communicative capacities that are as richly expressive as human language, but this makes it hard to understand how these capacities could have evolved. Some ethologists studying animal communication have favored a pragmatics-before-semantics account of animal communication to avoid getting into the thickets of linguistic reference and conceptual meaning. But the dominant approach to pragmatics in philosophy and linguistics is Grice's theory of non-natural meaning which requires at least third-order mental states (beliefs about beliefs about beliefs), thus again making it hard to see how meaningful communication could have evolved. In this course we will work through a manuscript of a forthcoming book by Dorit Bar-On (U. Connecticut) addressing these issues, titled Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning.