The fallacy of inscrutability

The price of inscrutability

Some philosophers offer arguments contending that ordinary names such as “London” are radically indeterminate in reference. The conclusion of such arguments is that there is no fact of the matter whether “London” refers to a city in the south of England, or whether instead it refers to Sydney, Australia. Some philosophers have even suggested that we accept the conclusion of these arguments.1 Su...

Eligibility and Inscrutability

Inscrutability arguments threaten to reduce interpretationistmetasemantic theories to absurdity. Can we find some way to block the arguments? A highly influential proposal in this regard is David Lewis’ ‘eligibility’ response: some theories are better than others, not because they fit the data better, but because they are framed in terms of more natural properties. The purposes of this paper ar...

The “banzhaf Fallacy” Fallacy

Knowledge infrastructures and the inscrutability of openness in education

Openness has a long genealogy in education. Whether through the use of post, radio, television and digital technologies, extending learning opportunities to more and a wider range of people has been a significant aspect of educational history. Transcending barriers to learning has been promoted as the means of opening educational opportunities in highly normative ways, focusing on the media thr...

The fallacy of communism.