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  1. The Riddle of Understanding Nonsense.Krystian Bogucki - 2023 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 30 (4):372–411.
    Typically, if I understand a sentence, then it expresses a proposition that I entertain. Nonsensical sentences don’t express propositions, but there are contexts in which we talk about understanding nonsensical sentences. For example, we accept various kinds of semantically defective sentences in fiction, philosophy, and everyday life. Furthermore, it is a standard assumption that if a sentence is nonsensical, then it makes no sense to say that it implies anything or is implied by other sentences. Semantically uninterpreted sentences don’t have (...)
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  • The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need.Matthieu Queloz - forthcoming - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...)
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  • A Defence of the Austere View of Nonsense.Krystian Bogucki - 2023 - Synthese 201 (5):1-30.
    The austere view of nonsense says that the source of nonsense is not a violation of the rules of logical syntax, but nonsense is always due to a lack of meaning in one of the components of a sentence. In other words, the necessary and sufficient condition for nonsensicality is that no meaning has been assigned to a constituent in a sentence. The austere conception is the key ingredient of the resolute reading of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that presents a therapeutical interpretation (...)
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  • Conceptual Ethics and The Categories of “Ideal Theory” and “Non-Ideal Theory” in Political Philosophy: A Proposal for Abandonment.Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett - forthcoming - New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering.
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  • Nonsense: a user's guide.Manish Oza - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Many philosophers suppose that sometimes we think we are saying or thinking something meaningful when in fact we’re not saying or thinking anything at all: we are producing nonsense. But what is nonsense? An account of nonsense must, I argue, meet two constraints. The first constraint requires that nonsense can be rationally engaged with, not just mentioned. In particular, we can reason with nonsense and use it within that-clauses. An account which fails to meet this constraint cannot explain why nonsense (...)
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  • Nietzsche’s Conceptual Ethics.Matthieu Queloz - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (7):1335-1364.
    If ethical reflection on which concepts to use has an avatar, it must be Nietzsche, who took more seriously than most the question of what concepts one should live by, and regarded many of our inherited concepts as deeply problematic. Moreover, his eschewal of traditional attempts to derive the one right set of concepts from timeless rational foundations renders his conceptual ethics strikingly modern, raising the prospect of a Nietzschean alternative to Wittgensteinian non-foundationalism. Yet Nietzsche appears to engage in two (...)
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  • Conceptual Ethics and The Methodology of Normative Inquiry.Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett - 2019 - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 274-303.
    This chapter explores two central questions in the conceptual ethics of normative inquiry. The first is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around folk normative concepts (like KNOWLEDGE or IMMORAL) or around theoretical normative concepts (like ADEQUATE EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION or PRO TANTO PRACTICAL REASON). The second is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around concepts whose normative authority is especially accessible to us (such as OUGHT ALL THINGS CONSIDERED), or around concepts whose extension is especially accessible to us (such as (...)
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  • Resenha crítica de CAPPELEN, Herman. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. [REVIEW]Samuel Maia - 2021 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 25 (3):565-575.
    This is a critical review of Herman Cappelen’s Fixing Language (2018), an excellent and thought-provoking introduction to a hot topic in metaphilosophy: conceptual engineering, which defines the process of evaluating and improving/revising our representational devices (popularly known as concepts). Here, I first present an overview of the book, summarizing his General Theory of conceptual engineering. Second, I point out some limits of the General Theory, in particular the putative consequence of his semantic externalism, the Lack of Control thesis. According to (...)
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  • Logical Form and the Limits of Thought.Manish Oza - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Toronto
    What is the relation of logic to thinking? My dissertation offers a new argument for the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking in the following sense: representational activity counts as thinking only if it manifests sensitivity to logical rules. In short, thinking has to be minimally logical. An account of thinking has to allow for our freedom to question or revise our commitments – even seemingly obvious conceptual connections – without loss of understanding. This freedom, I argue, requires that (...)
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  • Conceptual analysis without concepts.Max Deutsch - 2020 - Synthese 198 (11):11125-11157.
    “Conceptual analysis” is a misnomer—it refers, but it does not refer to a method or practice that involves the analysis of concepts. Once this is recognized, many of the main arguments for skepticism about conceptual analysis can be answered, since many of these arguments falsely assume that conceptual analyses target concepts. The present paper defends conceptual analysis from skepticism about its viability and, positively, presents an argument for viewing conceptual analyses as targeting philosophical phenomena, not our concepts of these phenomena.
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  • Fake news, conceptual engineering, and linguistic resistance: reply to Pepp, Michaelson and Sterken, and Brown.Joshua Habgood-Coote - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (4):488-516.
    ABSTRACT In Habgood-Coote : 1033–1065) I argued that we should abandon ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, on the grounds that these terms do not have stable public meanings, are unnecessary, and function as vehicles for propaganda. Jessica Pepp, Eliot Michaelson, and Rachel Sterken and Étienne Brown : 144–154) have raised worries about my case for abandonment, recommending that we continue using ‘fake news’. In this paper, I respond to these worries. I distinguish more clearly between theoretical and political reasons for abandoning (...)
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  • Stop Talking about Fake News!Joshua Habgood-Coote - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (9-10):1033-1065.
    Since 2016, there has been an explosion of academic work and journalism that fixes its subject matter using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. In this paper, I argue that this terminology is not up to scratch, and that academics and journalists ought to completely stop using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. I set out three arguments for abandonment. First, that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ do not have stable public meanings, entailing that they are either nonsense, context-sensitive, or contested. (...)
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  • Revisionary Epistemology.Davide Fassio & Robin McKenna - 2015 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (7-8):755-779.
    What is knowledge? What should knowledge be like? Call an epistemological project that sets out to answer the first question ‘descriptive’ and a project that sets out to answer the second question ‘normative’. If the answers to these two questions don’t coincide—if what knowledge should be like differs from what knowledge is like—there is room for a third project we call ‘revisionary’. A revisionary project starts by arguing that what knowledge should be differs from what knowledge is. It then proposes (...)
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  • Deference and Stereotypes.Andrei Moldovan - 2016 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 12 (2):55-72.
    In this paper I discuss Hilary Putnam’s view of the conditions that need to be fulfilled for a speaker to successfully defer to a linguistic community for the meaning of a word she uses. In the first part of the paper I defend Putnam’s claim that knowledge of what he calls “stereotypes” is a requirement on linguistic competence. In the second part of the paper I look at two consequences that this thesis has. One of them concerns the choice between (...)
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  • Disagreement and Conceptual Understanding.Gurpreet Rattan - 2018 - Theoria 84 (2):179-210.
    Does the epistemology of disagreement have significant consequences for theories of conceptual understanding? I argue that it does. I argue that the epistemology of disagreement manifests the existence of a special kind of concept, perspectival modes of metarepresentation, a kind of concept instances of which figure in the thinking about thoughts that occurs in deep disagreement. These perspectival modes of metarepresentation are de re modes of presentation of thoughts themselves – hence de re modes of metarepresentation – in which one (...)
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  • Recent Attempts to Defend the Philosophical Method of Cases and the Linguistic (Re)turn.Avner Baz - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (1):105-130.
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  • How to understand ‘nonsense’: do not ask what nonsense is, but rather how we show that something is nonsense!Jan Wawrzyniak - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This article considers the problem of how to elucidate the concept of nonsense. Viewed from a general philosophical standpoint this matters because the concept is used by certain philosophers in their criticism of philosophical questions and theses. I start with a presentation of examples of utterances considered nonsense, along with Baier's classification of kinds of nonsense. I then present various approaches, pointing out that none of them are completely satisfactory. I subsequently propose an approach that is a modification of the (...)
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  • Replies to Weatherson, Chalmers, Weinberg, and Bengson.Herman Cappelen - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 171 (3):577-600.
    Reply to criticsThe replies in this symposium are some of the most insightful contributions to contemporary metaphilosophy I have read. I wish I had seen them before I wrote Philosophy without Intuitions . It would have made it a better book. I also wish I had space to explore all the important issues raised, but unfortunately, the focus here will have to be on points of disagreement. The replies build on each other—I draw on material from the earlier replies in (...)
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  • When clarity and consistency conflicts with empirical adequacy: conceptual engineering, anthropology, and Evans-Pritchard’s ethnography.C. M. Djordjevic - 2020 - Synthese 198 (10):9611-9637.
    In recent analytic philosophy, there is a growing interest in the project of conceptual engineering. This paper examines two ways this project might be applied to scientific research, specifically anthropological research. It argues that both of them are harmful to this research. Specifically, it argues that a reliance on the axiological standards of analytic philosophy conflicts with the goal of empirical adequacy. Section one proffers two forms that the engineering project might take when applied to the science. Section two proffers (...)
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  • On Appeals to Nature and their Use in the Public Controversy over Genetically Modified Organisms.Andrei Moldovan - 2018 - Informal Logic 38 (3):409-437.
    In this paper I discuss appeals to nature, a particular kind of argument that has received little attention in argumentation theory. After a quick review of the existing literature, I focus on the use of such arguments in the public controversy over the acceptabil-ity of genetically-modified organisms in the food industry. Those who reject this biotechnology invoke its unnatural character. Such arguments have re-ceived attention in bioethics, where they have been analyzed by distinguishing different meanings that “nature” and “natural” might (...)
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  • Carnap's External Questions and Semantic Externalism.Andrei Moldovan - 2014 - Prolegomena 13 (2):253-268.
    What is it for an utterance of an expression to lack meaning? In this paper I address the issue along the lines of Carnap’s seminal article “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology”. Carnap provides there an answer to the above question, which he then uses to argue that certain claims of metaphysics are meaningless. In the first section of the paper I present Carnap’s argument for the meaninglessness of certain metaphysical claims. In the second section I argue that, although the argument is (...)
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  • Technology, Dwelling, and Nature as “Resource”: A Reading of (and Some Reflections on) Themes from the Later Heidegger.David Plunkett - 2024 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (10):3657-3727.
    In his later work, such as “The Question Concerning Technology”, Martin Heidegger puts forward a critique of modern technology. Alongside this critique, Heidegger presents a kind of positive alternative through his discussion of “dwelling”. I put forward a reading of Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and his embrace of “dwelling”. On my reading, Heidegger’s thinking centers on the idea that modern technology’s form of “world-disclosure” prevents human beings from encountering (and then living in light of) our own essence. In contrast, (...)
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