Browsing by Subject "Certainty"

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    The normative force of certainty: a defense of realism
    (2021-01) Bölek, Sena
    Crispin Wright, in Truth and Objectivity, introduces his anti-realist paradigm, arguing that discourse about morality can be truth-apt without holding a realist stance. There, he formulates the criterion of Cognitive Command against realism by claiming that moral realism is defensible if and only if it is a priori that any moral disagreement between realists and anti-realists involves a cognitive shortcoming. In this thesis, the methodology I adopt to defend realism is to uphold Wittgenstein’s claims about certainty against Wright’s criterion of Cognitive Command. In so doing, I argue that the disagreement between realists and anti-realists is a kind of deep disagreement over basic moral certainties, which cannot be rationally resolvable. I then investigate the possibility of basic certainties in metadiscourse by referring to the claims about the existence of moral facts in contemporary metaethics. Taken together, I show that the criterion of Cognitive Command works neither in first-order normative discourse nor in second-order discourse about normativity.
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    Turkish as a grammaticalized language: the effect of factivity alternation and certainty on theory of mind understanding
    (2021-07) Balcı, Amine Serra
    The majority of studies investigating the relation between language and socio-cognitive understanding have been designed for and carried out with participants from Western cultures (Milligan et al., 2007). Recently, there is emerging interest in studying the relation between cultural-linguistic nuances and social understanding (Choi, 2006; Matsui, Yamamoto & McCagg, 2006). Many linguistic features found in languages such as Japanese, Korean, or Turkish are integral to the syntactic complexity of these languages and express epistemic stances towards reality or others’ propositions. The current thesis included two studies investigating adult native Turkish speakers’ sensitivity to the certainty of propositions based on grammatical structure and whether their sensitivity is related to their theory of mind abilities. The results showed that Turkish speakers are sensitive to (a) factivity alternation, meaning they display different levels of epistemic certainty based on the grammatical framing of the verb to know (Studies 1 & 2) (b) morphological certainty markers (Study 2). However, participants’ sensitivity to epistemic certainty was unrelated to ToM abilities as assessed by the Faux Pas task (Study 1 & 2), and epistemic bias as assessed by the Contamination Task (Study 1). The results are discussed with their implications, especially for future work with younger samples.