This is a prepublication version of my book Objects and Attitudes (please cite the pbished version!). The book develops a novel semantics of attitude reports, modal sentences, and quotation based on the view that sentences semantically act as predicates of various attitudinal and modal objects, entities like claims, requests, promises, obligations, and permissions, rather than standing for abstract propositions playing the role of objects. The approach develops truthmaker semantics for attitudinal and modal objects and has a wide range of applications (...) to issues in philosophy of language, semantics, and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to address the problem of inconsistent models and the challenge it poses for perspectivism. I analyze the argument, draw attention to some hidden premises behind it, and deflate them. Then I introduce the notion of perspectival models as a distinctive class of modeling practices whose primary function is exploratory. I illustrate perspectival modeling with two examples taken from contemporary high-energy physics at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which are (...) designed to show how a plurality of seemingly incompatible models is methodologically crucial to advance the realist quest in cutting-edge areas of scientific inquiry. (shrink)

This paper is about the principle that success entails ability, which I call Success. I argue the status of Success is highly puzzling: when we focus on past instances of actually successful action, Success is very compelling; but it is in tension with the idea that true ability claims require an action be in the agent's control. I make the above tension precise by considering the logic of ability. I argue Success is appealing because it is classically equivalent to two (...) genuinely valid inferences, which I call Past Success and Can't-Entails-Won't; but also that Success itself has counterexamples. I show how to invalidate Success while validating Past Success and Can't-Entails-Won't by connecting the meaning of ‘can’ to facts about what is settled or open. I define an operator W with features attributed to ‘will’ in the literature on future contingents. I then give a conditional analysis of ability ascriptions stated with W-conditionals, where "S can A" says, roughly, there’s some action available to S such that if S does it, then W(S A). I show this semantics invalidates Success while still explaining its appeal. (shrink)

A groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault's history of truth. Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics of truth-telling precisely (...) in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today. (shrink)

Natural languages generally distinguishes among different existence predicates for different types of entities, such as English 'exist', 'occur', and 'obtain'. The paper gives an in-depth discussion and analysis of a range of existence predicates in natural language within the general project of descriptive metaphysics, or more specifically ‘natural language ontology’.

Narrowly speaking, the correspondence theory of truth is the view that truth is correspondence to a fact -- a view that was advocated by Russell and Moore early in the 20 th century. But the label is usually applied much more broadly to any view explicitly embracing the idea that truth consists in a relation to reality, i.e., that truth is a relational property involving a characteristic relation (to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be specified). During the (...) last 2300 years this basic idea has been expressed in many ways, resulting in a rather extended family of views, theories, and theory sketches. The members of the family employ various concepts for the relevant relation (correspondence, conformity, congruence, agreement, accordance, copying, picturing, signification, representation, reference, satisfaction) and/or various concepts for the relevant portion of reality (facts, states of affairs, situations, events, objects, sequences of objects, sets, properties, tropes). The resulting multiplicity of versions and reformulations of the theory is due to a blend of substantive and terminological differences. (shrink)

The situationist literature in psychology claims that conduct is not determined by character and reflects the operation of the agent's situation or environment. For instance, due to situational factors, compassionate behavior is much less common than we might have expected from people we believe to be compassionate. This article focuses on whether situationism should revise our beliefs about moral responsibility. It assesses the implications of situationism against the backdrop of a conception of responsibility that is grounded in norms about the (...) fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing that require that agents to be normatively competent and possess situational control. Despite the low incidence of compassionate behavior revealed in situationist studies, situationism threatens neither situational control nor normative competence. Nonetheless situationism may force revision of our views about responsibility in particular contexts, such as wartime wrongdoing. Whereas a good case can be made that the heat of battle can create situational pressures that significantly impair normative competence and thus sometimes provide a full or partial excuse, there is reason to be skeptical of attempts to generalize this excuse to other contexts of wartime wrongdoing. If so, moral responsibility can take situationism on board without capsizing the boat. (shrink)

Kant’s doctrine of the Fact of Reason is one of the most perplexing aspects of his moral philosophy. The aim of this paper is to defend Kant’s doctrine from the common charge of dogmatism. My defense turns on a previously unexplored analogy to the notion of ‘matters of fact’ popularized by members of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century. In their work, ‘facts’ were beyond doubt, often referring to experimental effects one could witness first hand. While Kant uses the (...) German equivalent in different contexts, I argue that the scientific analogy opens up a new framework for interpreting his strategy of justification in the Critique of Practical Reason. In the final section, I address a few possible objections to my reading, one of which I anticipate coming from Dieter Henrich and Ian Proops, who have argued that Kant’s Fact of Reason is best understood under a legal analogy. (shrink)

The paper is in two parts. In Part I, a semantics for embedded and query uses of interrogatives is put forward, couched within a situation semantics framework. Unlike many previous analyses,questions are not reductively analysed in terms of their answers. This enables us to provide a notion of ananswer that resolves a question which varies across contexts relative to parameters such as goals and inferential capabilities. In Part II of the paper, extensive motivation is provided for an ontology that distinguishes (...) propositions, questions, and facts, while at the same time the semantics provided captures an important commonality between questions and propositions: factsprove propositions andresolve questions. This commonality is exploited to provide an explanation for why predicates such as know carry presuppositions such as factivity and for a novel account of the behaviour of adverbially modified predicates with interrogative, declarative and fact-nominal arguments. (shrink)

Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest. Truth has been a topic of discussion in its own right for thousands of years. Moreover, a huge variety of issues in philosophy relate to truth, either by relying on theses about truth, or implying theses about truth.

We all know that being reasonable is important in daily life. Beyond daily life, major political and ethical theorists give central place to reasonableness in their accounts of just and moral behaviour. In the law, at least in the Anglo-American setting, reasonableness is the standard for a wide range of behaviour, from administrative decisions to torts. But what is it to be reasonable? In answer, I provide a genealogical account of reasonableness. The functional perspective afforded by a genealogical account has (...) numerous payoffs, explaining important features of reasonableness, and enabling us to respond to worries about vagueness or subjectivity in the meaning of ‘reasonable’. (shrink)

This paper argues that NPs with case as head noun stand for situations in their role as truthmakers within a sentential or epistemic case space. The paper develops a unified semantic analysis of case-constructions of the various sorts within a truthmaker-based version of alternative semantics.

This paper discusses three approaches to the semantics of event nominalizations and adverbial modification: the Davidsonian account, the Kimian account, and the truthmaker account. It argues that a combination of all three accounts is needed for the semantics of the full range of event, trope, and state nominalizations in English.

This paper articulates and argues for the plausibility of the Presentation View of Perceptual Knowledge, an under-discussed epistemology of perception. On this view, a central epistemological role of perception is that of making subjects aware of their surroundings. By doing so, perception affords subjects with reasons for world-directed judgments. Moreover, the very perceived concrete entities are identified as those reasons. The former claim means that the position is a reasons-based epistemology; the latter means that it endorses a radically anti-psychologist conception (...) of reasons. First, I articulate and motivate the Presentation View. Then, I defend the view from three incarnations of a major objection levelled within the ranks of reasons-based epistemologies: McDowell’s version of the accusation that a view like this falls prey to the Myth of the Given. I argue that all three incarnations fail to show the Presentation View to be inadequate. The first version holds that a general characterization of the Myth clearly shows that it is an incoherent idea. The second version holds that endorsing the Myth makes it impossible to construe non-conceptual items as items that can stand in rational relations to judgements and beliefs. The third version holds that endorsing the Myth leads to a conception where perceptual experiences merely cause, but do not warrant, our perceptual beliefs and judgements. I explain in detail how the Presentation View has the elements to respond to each of these objections. (shrink)

Nominalizations of modal predicates have received little, if any, attention in the semantic or philosophical literature. This paper will argue that nominalizations of modal predicates require recognizing a novel ontological category of modal objects and it will outline a new semantics of modals based on modal objects.

This paper concerns a controversy between two compelling and popular claims in the theory of ability. One is the claim that ability requires control. The other is the claim that success entails ability, that is, that φ-ing entails that you are able to φ. Since actually φ-ing obviously does not entail that φ is in your control, these two claims cannot both be true. I introduce a new form of evidence to help adjudicate this controversy: judgments about the possibility and (...) probability of ability ascriptions. I argue that these judgments provide evidence in favor of the thesis that success entails ability, and against the thesis that ability requires control. Moreover, I argue that these judgments support an analysis of ability in terms of conditionals. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

The article scrutinises the semantics of canonical property designators of the forms ‘the property of being F’ and ‘F-ness’. First it is argued that, as their form suggests, the former are definite definitions, albeit of a special sort. Secondly, the prima facie plausible classification of the latter as proper names (which is often met in philosophical writings) is rejected. The semantics of such terms is developed and it is shown how its proper understanding yields important consequences about the concepts expressed (...) by these terms. (shrink)

Abstract: This essay explores the relation between feminist epistemology and the problem of philosophical skepticism. Even though feminist epistemology has not typically focused on skepticism as a problem, I argue that a feminist contextualist epistemology may solve many of the difficulties facing recent contextualist responses to skepticism. Philosophical skepticism appears to succeed in casting doubt on the very possibility of knowledge by shifting our attention to abnormal contexts. I argue that this shift in context constitutes an attempt to exercise unearned (...) social and epistemic power and that it should be resisted on epistemic and pragmatic grounds. I conclude that skepticism is a problem that feminists can and should take up as they address the social aspects of traditional epistemological problems. (shrink)

In appraising human actions, an important consideration is whether they are free. If they are compelled, this may be excusatory; if controlled by someone other than the agent, this may mitigate; and if selfishly motivated, this may invalidate excuses. Moral appraisals of action by non‐philosophers do not normally consider whether it can be free under determinism. Metaphysical inquiry about action, by contrast, seems incomplete if it does not consider this. Are there two free will problems, one normative and one metaphysical? (...) If so, they share such terms as ‘could’ and ‘could not’, and thoughtful non‐philosophers question their own normative assumptions once they understand the metaphysical problem determinism poses for the philosophy of action. This paper distinguishes metaphysical from action‐theoretic elements of the free will problem but also connects the metaphysical issues with normative questions about responsibility; it critically appraises some major metaphysical arguments concerning free action; and—to the extent possible in a single paper—it provides a positive account of free action neutral toward determinism. (shrink)

The object of this paper is to throw light on the reciprocal exchanges between legal philosophy and the theory of speech acts (as developed by Austin and Searle). The first part concerns the contributions to legal philosophy made by the theory of speech acts with a view to developing new perspectives. The second part deals with the contributions of legal philosophy to speech act theory.

We present an overview of typed and untyped disquotational truth theories with the emphasis on their (non)conservativity over the base theory of syntax. Two types of conservativity are discussed: syntactic and semantic. We observe in particular that TB—one of the most basic disquotational theories—is not semantically conservative over its base; we show also that an untyped disquotational theory PTB is a syntactically conservative extension of Peano Arithmetic.

There is an obvious role for self-assertion within discourse. It is much less obvious what role self-withdrawal might play. Indeed, it is far from obvious what role it could play. For how can we enter into discourse at all if we pull ourselves from the fray? Heidegger, however, claims not only that self-withdrawal has a role to play but that reticence is the authentic mode of discourse. In this paper, I develop an account of reticence that explains its importance to (...) Being and Time. I argue that Heidegger's conception of reticence is central to his explanation of how the understanding can be developed in terms of the things themselves, rather than in terms of what one says about things. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between various different conceptions of behaviour and action before exploring an accompanying variety of distinct things that ‘action explanation’ may plausibly amount to viz. different objectives of action explanation. I argue that a large majority of philosophers are guilty of conflating many of these, consequently offering inadequate accounts of the relation between actions and our reasons for performing them. The paper ends with the suggestion that we would do well to opt for a pluralistic understanding of action (...) and its explanations. (shrink)

Correspondence theories are frequently either too vaguely expressed – “true statements correspond to the way things are in the world,” or implausible – “true statements mirror raw, mind-independent reality.” I address this problem by developing features and roles that ought to characterize what I call ldquo;modest” correspondence theories. Of special importance is the role of correspondence in directing our responses to cases of suspected non-factuality; lack of straightforward correspondence shows the need for, and guides us in our choice of, various (...) kinds of reconstrual projects. This, I argue, is in contrast to the approaches suggested by deflationism and coherence, and thus modest correspondence theories are appropriately distinct from rivals. (shrink)

In this paper, we explain why the antecedent of a biscuit conditional is relevant to its consequent by extending Douvenʼs evidential support theory of conditionals making use of utilities. By this extension, we can also explain why a biscuit conditional gives rise to the inference that the consequence is (most likely) true. Finally, we account for the intuition that (indicative) biscuit sentences are false when the antecedent is false and allow for counterfactual biscuits.

Building on the limitations-owning view of intellectual humility, this essay argues that performing acts of humility in carrying out practices of transitional justice requires the owning of grave wrongs and limitations. It contends that acknowledgements and apologies can pay lip service to grave wrongs and limitations without owning them, and without performing acts of humility. The opening section explains the limitations-owning analysis of humility. Section 2 argues that one can perform illocutionary acts of acknowledging and apologizing for grave wrongs and (...) limitations without owning them. Section 3 contends that even those whose acknowledgements and apologies succeed in owning grave wrongs, and who thereby succeed in performing acts of humility, might still fall short of performing acts of virtuous humility, and of appropriately recognizing the agency of survivors. The closing section raises the worry that in contexts of grave wrongs and limitations, rival incentives — (i) to apologize to others and (ii) to be in denial about the grave wrongs one has committed — may increase the likelihood of lip service without owning. If recognizing the agency of survivors requires the virtuous owning of grave wrongs and limitations, and if contexts of grave wrongs incentivize lip service that does not own, then we have a serious problem. (shrink)

Fodor argued that learning a concept by hypothesis testing would involve an impossible circularity. I show that Fodor's argument implicitly relies on the assumption that actually φ-ing entails an ability to φ. But this assumption is false in cases of φ-ing by luck, and just such luck is involved in testing hypotheses with the kinds of generative random sampling methods that many cognitive scientists take our minds to use. Concepts thus can be learned by hypothesis testing without circularity, and it (...) is plausible that this is how humans in fact acquire at least some of their concepts. (shrink)

Performative Utterances: Seven Puzzles It was John Austin who introduced the word "performative" into the philosophy of language and linguistics. His original idea was that there are utterances which are more correctly characterized as doing something rather than stating something. Austin wrote: "when I say ‘I do’, I am not reporting on a marriage, I am indulging in it." As is well known, Austin went on to work out this notion of a performative utterance in a number of directions, but (...) in the end the attempt to isolate performatives from constatives failed dramatically, and the idea of viewing language use in terms of the performative-constative dichotomy gave way to the study of speech acts: "The total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomena which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating." But giving up the performative-constative distinction does not mean giving up theorizing about performatives, and there is a cottage industry in the theory of language devoted to them. We identify seven puzzles for theorizing about performatives. We consider how Austin might have dealt with some of them. Finding his answers problematic, we then survey recent theories of performatives and zoom in on the major contenders, identifying one theory in particular for scrutiny and seeing how it fares with the seven puzzles. The upshot is that there is still work to be done understanding performatives. (shrink)

This article critiques Stephen Mulhall's reading of Cavell's response to skepticism. In the first half of the article, I argue that Mulhall is mistaken in two respects: he elides differences Cavell notes between external world and other minds skepticism as well as conflates empathetic projection and acknowledgment. In the second half of the article, I argue for a novel reading of Cavell's account of acknowledgment, which addresses the concerns I raise for Mulhall. The paper closes by considering and responding to (...) a worry that one's efforts at acknowledgment are more complicated projections of one's self onto the other. (shrink)

According to the received opinion there is a theoretical incompatibility between Herbert Hart's The Concept of Law and Alf Ross's On Law and Justice, and, according to the received opinion, it stems above all from Hart's emphasis on the internal point of view. The present paper argues that this reading is mistaken. The Concept of Law does not go beyond On Law and Justice in so far as both present arguments to the effect that law is based on a shared (...) understanding between participants in a project perceived by every participant to be a project in common. The paper demonstrates that there are substantive parallels between Hart's combination of “acceptance” or “acknowledgement” and a “critical reflective attitude” and Ross's combination of “motivation” or “feeling” and a “coherent whole of meaning and motivation.” The main conclusion is that the views of norms and normativity put forward in The Concept of Law and On Law and Justice are very close in essential respects, and, more specifically, that the two works are at root identical in their representation of the basis of normativity in reality. (shrink)

The present paper probes the relation between the metaphysics of human freedom and the Rothbardian branch of Austrian economics. It transpires that Rothbard and his followers embrace metaphysical libertarianism, which holds that free will is incompatible with determinism and that the thesis of determinism is false as pertaining to human action. However, as we demonstrate, their economics with its reliance on value scales requires for its tenability compatibilist freedom. Moreover, we attempt to show that the notion of value scales (or (...) preferences) postulated by them implies that value scales are determinative of choices people make. We contend that it is for this reason that the said Austrians should jettison their metaphysical libertarianism. (shrink)

In this note, I clarify the point of my paper “The Nature of Semantics: On Jackendoff’s Arguments” (NS) in light of Ray Jackendoff’s comments in his “Linguistics in Cognitive Science: The State of the Art.” Along the way, I amplify my remarks on unification.

This anthology of the very latest research on truth features the work of recognized luminaries in the field, put together following a rigorous refereeing process. Along with an introduction outlining the central issues in the field, it provides a unique and unrivaled view of contemporary work on the nature of truth, with papers selected from key conferences in 2011 such as Truth Be Told, Truth at Work, Paradoxes of Truth and Denotation and Axiomatic Theories of Truth. Studying the nature of (...) the concept of ‘truth’ has always been a core role of philosophy, but recent years have been a boom time in the topic. With a wealth of recent conferences examining the subject from various angles, this collection of essays recognizes the pressing need for a volume that brings scholars up to date on the arguments. Offering academics and graduate students alike a much-needed repository of today’s cutting-edge work in this vital topic of philosophy, the volume is required reading for anyone needing to keep abreast of developments, and is certain to act as a catalyst for further innovation and research. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is one more alluded to than actually studied, both in current philosophy of art and in the theory of criticism. There is a reason for this, which both clarifies the issue and suggests how it is to be approached. To suppose that the person responsible for a work of art has at least something interesting to say about it is only natural, and even commonplace. But granted this, the qualifications to be put on that assumption (...) in individual and particular cases become of much greater interest. The major question would not then be whether or not, in an absolute sense, the artist is in a position to talk definitively about his own work, but rather on what basis or criteria a claim to that effect can be made to rest, and how far it extends in its implications. (shrink)

In this paper we explain our pretense account of truth-talk and apply it in a diagnosis and treatment of the Liar Paradox. We begin by assuming that some form of deflationism is the correct approach to the topic of truth. We then briefly motivate the idea that all T-deflationists should endorse a fictionalist view of truth-talk, and, after distinguishing pretense-involving fictionalism (PIF) from error- theoretic fictionalism (ETF), explain the merits of the former over the latter. After presenting the basic framework (...) of our PIF account of truth-talk, we demonstrate a few advantages it offers over T-deflationist accounts that do not explicitly acknowledge pretense at work in the discourse. In turning to the Liar Paradox, we explain how the quasi-anaphoric functioning that our account attributes to truth-talk provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox (and other instances of semantic pathology) as having no content—in the sense of not specifying any of what we call M-conditions. At the same time, however, we vindicate the intuition that we can understand liar sentences, thereby avoiding one standard objection to “meaningless strategy” responses to the Liar Paradox. With this diagnosis in place, we then, by way of treatment, introduce a new predicate, ‘semantically defective’, and show how the explanation we give for its application allows for a consistent, yet revenge-immune, (dis)solution of the Liar Paradox, and semantic pathology generally. (shrink)

An examination of late Rorty shows that he does not abandon belief in an external world about which we can, and indeed must, acquire knowledge. His disapproval of the correspondence theory of truth does not involve the idea that anything other than local weather, for example, could falsify remarks about local weather. It is just that once we get done looking out the window or, if we are outside, feeling the right kind of drops make contact with our skin, there (...) is nothing else we can do, nothing better, to make ourselves more certain, more cognitively secure. One can see this in the detailed work that enables scientific progress. Science improves itself by doing more of the same. G. E. Moore's famous open question stays open only as a reminder that our fallibility never disappears and that our cognitive security is never better than pro tem. Rorty, as a faithful pragmatist and undogmatic meliorist, thinks this is perfectly O.K. (shrink)

In the final chapter of his recent book, <it>The Construction of Social Reality</it> (1995), John Searle denies that the minimalist theory, as elaborated for example by Paul Horwich 1990, gives the entire content of the truth predicate, and vigorously defends the correspondence theory against it. He stigmatises minimalism as "wildly counterintuitive' and believes it is unsustainable. Although he agrees that, when a statement S means that P, S corresponds to the facts iff P, and that once we have established that (...) P we have thereby established that S corresponds to the fact that P, he maintains that the truth predicate is not redundant, even with the qualifications incorported in the minimalist account. We shall see that his argument fails. (shrink)

This paper is part of a series of interdisciplinary investigations in literary fiction and aims to identify the illocutionary force of the so-called “non-serious utterance” of fiction makers on the theoretical assumption that the primary unit of an utterance’s meaning are complete speech acts, composed of an illocutionary force and a propositional content. Based on philosophical analysis of non-serious and performative utterances of descriptive sentences, I formulate the fundamental hypothesis that the primary unit of non-serious utterances’ meaning is a complete (...) declaration of the form F, whose illocutionary point is to create the extra-linguistic event represented in the propositional content of this speech act, in virtue of the linguistic meaning determined by the social conventions of fiction. (shrink)

Habermas' nicht ausreichend begründeter Versuch, über Referenz und Prädikation hinaus die Erhebung von Geltungsansprüchen auf der Ebene von Sprechakten zur Bedingung von Wahrheitsfähigkeit zu machen und Wahrheit mit der Einlösbarkeit dieser Ansprüche zu identifizieren, führt mit der Kritik der Korrespondenztheorie, für die unerfüllbare Sinnbedingungen gefordert werden, zu einem 'sprachlogischen' Tatsachenbegriff. Habermas glaubt damit das Wahrheitsproblem auf der sprachimmanenten Ebene konsensfähiger, rational motivierender Argumentationsregeln und den 'kategorialen Sinn' von Begriffssystemen konstituierender sowie deren Angemessenheit begründender praktischer Interessen lösen zu können. Das Ergebnis (...) ist ein semiotisch-pragmatischer Idealismus, der die außersprachliche Realität und die Begründungsfunktion von Erfahrungsevidenzen nicht mehr angemessen berücksichtigt. (shrink)

Los experimentos mentales son dispositivos epistémicos de la imaginación, o de análisis de problemas filosóficos, que recorren las fronteras de aquella, desde el sillón. Dichas fronteras tocan dilemas perennes de la filosofía: cuestiones de la metafísica, como el tiempo, el espacio y la realidad, el problema de la libertad y el determinismo, la naturaleza de la mente, la identidad personal, los argumentos acerca del significado, las posibilidades, fuentes y condiciones del conocimiento, las relaciones entre discurso y lógica, la ética, cuestiones (...) de la filosofía social y política, y la estética. Muchos problemas de la filosofía han sido abordados mediante experimentos mentales, una herramienta útil de la caja de herramientas del filósofo. No todas las herramientas son populares, no obstante. Los experimentos mentales son, pese a sus defensores, falibles, incluso si son argumentos bien planteados. Justamente, este libro recopila artículos con las principales defensas y ataques a los experimentos mentales, especialmente en términos de su confiabilidad para llegar a conclusiones, o bien de su relevancia en términos de su origen: el sillón de la filosofía. Este ha sido vapuleado por los nuevos aires de la filosofía analítica, que trata al sillón como un viejo artefacto del análisis a priori. De hecho, hay posturas que critican a los experimentos mentales por constituir bombas de intuiciones no confiables. Por supuesto, no hay razón irrefutable para aceptar los experimentos mentales y las filosofías de sillón. Pero ¿hay alguna en la filosofía? El libro no pretende convencer al lector del valor de los experimentos mentales y las filosofías de sillón. Por el contrario, su objetivo es formar una imagen propia de estos dispositivos epistémicos, tanto en relación con sus virtudes y limitaciones. Si ello se logra, habrá valido el esfuerzo llevado a cabo en esta compilación de artículos, los que muestran los límites, desafíos y críticas de la experimentación mental desde el sillón. (shrink)

A principal challenge for a deflationary theory is to explain the value of truth: why we aim for true beliefs, abhor dishonesty, and so on. The problem arises because deflationism sees truth as a mere logical property and the truth predicate as serving primarily as a device of generalization. Paul Horwich, attempts to show how deflationism can account for the value of truth. Drawing on the work of J. L. Austin, I argue that his account, which focuses on belief, cannot (...) adequately accommodate the complex role that truth plays in the norms governing assertion and similar speech acts. (shrink)