A singular thought can intuitively be understood as a thought that is directly about a particular thing, e.g., a non-conceptual thought about B.B. King, Mont Blanc, or your most beloved pet. The consensus within the singular thought literature has been that Gareth Evans (1982) develops a theory of singular thought throughout his posthumously published work The Varieties of Reference. However, Evans never claims to be developing a theory of singular thought, nor does the locution ‘singular thought’ appear more than a (...) handful of times throughout the work. The singular thought literature lacks any substantial exegetical engagement with the theory of singular thought that Evans argues for — including an account as to why Evans should be interpreted as offering a theory of singular thought, as well as how he should be so interpreted. The interpretation of Evans that I wish to argue for is one according to which a singular thought (for Evans) is an object-dependent thought, the thinking of which requires the satisfaction of Russell’s Principle. Liberalism is the thesis that there is no general acquaintance constraint on singular thought. Many contemporary Liberalists, including semantic instrumentalists and cognitivists, are quick to argue that Evans’ theory of singular thought is incorrect. What I seek to demonstrate is that, armed with a proper understanding of Evans’ theory of singular thought, most recent Liberalist critiques of Evans are unsuccessful because they either misevaluate or misidentify the explicandum with which Evans was concerned. (shrink)

In this review, I discuss recent advances in philosophical and psychological approaches to self-control. The review is divided in 4 parts, in which I discuss: a) different conceptions of self-control; b) standard methods for studying it; c) some models of how self-control is exercised; and d) the connections between self-control and other relevant psychological constructs. The review was originally commissioned by the John Templeton Foundation to provide an informative overview that would knit together different strands of current debates in the (...) field. It is meant to be useful to well-informed audiences, as well as new-comers to the discussion. (shrink)

Consider the Unshareability View, namely, the view that first person thought or self-thought—thought as typically expressed via the first person pronoun—is not shareable from subject to subject. In this article, I show that a significant number of Fregean and non-Fregean commentators of Frege have taken the Unshareability View to be the default Fregean position, rehearse Frege’s chief claims about self-thought and suggest that their combination entails the Unshareability View only on the assumption that there is a one-to-one correspondence between way (...) of thinking and thought-individuating cognitive value, outline an account of self-thought that rejects the assumption and keeps intact all of Frege’s chief claims, and respond to a number of worries to the effect that this proposal yields undesirable results from the point of view of the individuation of self-thought at the level of cognitive value. (shrink)

The article provides a summary of the author's book Understanding People: Normativity and Rationalizing Explanation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). It details three areas in which the notion of a normative commitment is made central. These are (1) believing and intending, (2) practices conceived as essentially rule-governed activities, and (3) meaning and concepts. An account is given of how we may best explain the commitments incurred by beliefs and intentions. It is held that those states are themselves essentially normative. A problem (...) of the relevance of rationalizing to rationalizing explanation is explored and the relation between normative commitments and normative reasons is discussed. (shrink)