What do our moral experiences, our best theories of meaning, and our stubborn intuitions about Newcomb-style puzzles reveal about truth, rationality, and the limits of conceptual analysis?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Terence Horgan is Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, and his work has covered a wide range of topics, in metaphysics, epistemology, mind, metaethics, and more.
2. Interview Summary
Horgan lays out (with Mark Timmons) a picture in metaethics that tries to take moral experience seriously without rushing to heavyweight metaphysics. A central theme is the felt “authority” of moral judgment—how it can seem to bind you independently of your desires—and how that motivational grip might be explained within an expressivist-friendly framework. To make the phenomenology vivid, he discusses Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam example (set in Amsterdam) where a character feels pulled by what he takes himself to “have to do,” even when it clashes with his projects. This sets up what he calls a “neutrality” idea: introspection alone doesn’t reliably settle whether moral experience itself commits us to robust, mind-independent moral properties.
The interview then turns to philosophical method—especially conceptual analysis—and Horgan pushes back on the idea that it’s a purely armchair, a priori enterprise. He treats many disputes about “what a concept really amounts to” as closer to an empirical project: you gather intuitions and usage-patterns as data, test them against cases, and aim for a kind of reflective equilibrium with broader theoretical virtues. In that context he draws on familiar externalist pressure (e.g., Hilary Putnam-style Twin Earth lessons) to argue that competence and meaning aren’t always “in the head,” which complicates simplistic pictures of analysis. Along the way he suggests that some tempting metaphysical intuitions are better explained away than treated as decisive, and he frames that as continuous with how theorizing works in other disciplines.
A long final stretch focuses on practical rationality and Newcomb-style decision problems, where Horgan thinks the persistence of “one-boxer vs. two-boxer” camps is evidence of a deep antinomy: there are competing rational principles that each has a serious claim on us. He connects this to an older tradition of “antinomy” talk (invoking figures like Immanuel Kant and Robert Nozick) and explains why, temperamentally, he’s drawn to one-boxing even while recognizing the intellectual pull of the opposite verdict—especially when uncertainty and stakes get dialed up. The discussion then widens to metaphysics of vagueness and truth: he’s skeptical of “ontological vagueness” and is sympathetic to a looser, indirect-correspondence way of understanding many ordinary truths (about everyday objects and institutions) without treating them as fundamental ontological commitments.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:04 - Liar paradox
03:47 - Propositions
10:15 - Logic
14:43 - Truth
16:36 - Other contradictions
18:02 - Non-existent objects
20:46 - Vagueness
25:59 - Semantic uses
29:14 - External factors
31:09 - Terence Horgan
34:43 - Newcomb’s problem
37:19 - Transparent box case
39:12 - Well-wishing friend
42:32 - Simpson’s paradox
47:08 - Deference
49:32 - Valuing evidence vs. reward
56:33 - Rationality
59:18 - Predictably rewarded
1:01:41 - Preparation
1:07:54 - Perfect predictor
1:10:29 - Free will
1:11:57 - Rationality
1:17:11 - Shooting room
1:22:39 - Variations
1:27:24 - Simulation
1:28:44 - Infinite expectations
1:29:44 - Possible in some other sense
1:35:32 - Immortality
1:38:27 - Names
1:46:10 - Old evidence
1:49:17 - Meaning of names
1:52:27 - Personal identity
1:54:33 - Moral relevance
1:56:38 - Moral realism and phenomenal conservatism
2:00:08 - Stance-dependent norms
2:02:48 - Ordinary English
2:05:51 - Value of philosophy
2:09:04 - Conclusion
