This paper argues that relativity of truth to a world plays no significant role in empirical semantic theory, even as it is done in the model-theoretic tradition relying on intensional type theory. Some philosophical views of content provide an important notion of truth at a world, but they do not constrain the empirical domain of semantic theory in a way that makes this notion empirically significant. As an application of this conclusion, this paper shows that a potential motivation for relativism (...) based on the relativity of truth to a world fails. (shrink)

One central but unrecognized strand of the complex debate between W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson over the status of psychology as a science turns on their disagreement concerning the compatibility of strict psychophysical, semantic-determining laws with the possibility of error. That disagreement in turn underlies their opposing views on the location of semantic determinants: proximal (on bodily surfaces) or distal (in the external world). This paper articulates these two disputes, their wider context, and argues that both are fundamentally misconceived. (...) There is no special tension between error and strict semantic-determining laws; moreover, the purported bearing of that issue on the dispute over the location of semantic determinants depends upon a mistaken conception of the relation between the nomic status of generalizations and degree of distance between explanans and it explananda. Finally, the wider significance of these conclusions for related contemporary debates is noted. And independent considerations about the possibility of communication, also present in Quine's and Davidson's thinking, are brought to bear on the question of the location of semantic determinants. (shrink)

This paper argues for the thesis that, roughly put, it is impossible to talk about absolutely everything. To put the thesis more precisely, there is a particular sense in which, as a matter of semantics, quantifiers always range over domains that are in principle extensible, and so cannot count as really being ‘absolutely everything’. The paper presents an argument for this thesis, and considers some important objections to the argument and to the formulation of the thesis. The paper also offers (...) an assessment of just how implausible the thesis really is. It argues that the intuitions against the thesis come down to a few special cases, which can be given special treatment. Finally, the paper considers some metaphysical ideas that might surround the thesis. Particularly, it might be maintained that an important variety of realism is incompatible with the thesis. The paper argues that this is not the case. (shrink)

Concepts are basic elements of thought. Piaget has a conception of the nature of concepts as informational or computational operations performed in an inner milieu and enabling the child to understand the world in which it lives and acts. Concepts are, however, not merely logico?mathematical but are also conceptually linked to the mastery of language which itself involves the appropriate use of words in social and interpersonal settings. In the light of Vygotsky's work on the social and interactive nature of (...) children's thinking and the nature of language as an essentially public currency of rule?governed signs, we are led to reconstrue conceptual mastery as the acquisition of an interactive and interpersonal repertoire of tools which introduces the child to the world of those who educate it. In this way we come to see the elements of mind as constitutively involving that activity in which the determinants of meaning constrain and direct the child's linguistic development. (shrink)

This paper argues that morality is objective in a specific sense that accords with a broadly expressivist stance in metaethics. The paper also explains that although there is a kind of subjectivity in moral inquiry, the same holds for other kinds of normative inquiry, including epistemic and even scientific inquiry, and moreover that this kind of subjectivity is no threat to morality’s objectivity. The argument for the objectivity of morality draws strong parallels between ethics, epistemology, and science, but does not (...) depend on equally strong parallels between ethics and mathematics. I argue that there is more to learn from a comparison between ethics and mathematics than I used to think, but the difference between the issues that come up in thinking about objectivity in ethics and those that come up in thinking about objectivity in mathematics is substantial, and we cannot carry over results from the philosophy of mathematics to the case of morality. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze the concept of ineffability: what does it mean to say that something cannot be said? I begin by distinguishing ineffability from paradox: if something cannot be said truly or without contradiction, this is not an instance of ineffability. Next, I distinguish two different meanings of ‘saying something’ which result from a fundamental ambiguity in the term ‘language’, viz. language as a system of symbols and language as a medium of communication. Accordingly, ‘ineffability’ is ambiguous, too, (...) and we should make a distinction between weak and strong ineffability. Weak ineffability is rooted in the deficiencies of a particular language while strong ineffability stems from the structure of a particular cognitive system and its capacities for conceptual mental representation. Mental contents are only sayable if we are able to conceptualize them and then create signs to represent them in communication. (shrink)

We analyse Reach's puzzle, according to which it is impossible to be told anyone's name, because the statement conveying it can be understood only by someone who already knows what it says. We argue that the puzzle can be solved by adverting to the systematic nature of mention when it involves the use of standard quotation marks or similar devices. We then discuss mention more generally and outline an account according to which any mentioning expressions that are competent to solve (...) Reach's puzzle – and in particular those consisting of standard quotation marks and their fillings – have a descriptive analysis: we rebut the usual objections to this account, and show how it is superior to some of the alternatives in the literature. We conclude by briefly connecting the foregoing discussions with semantic theory. (shrink)

The paper contains a general argument for linguistic idealism, which it approaches by way of some considerations relating to the unity of the proposition and Tractarian metaphysics. Language exhibits a function–argument structure, but does it do so because it is reflecting how things are in the world, or does the relation of dependence run in the other direction? The paper argues that the general structure of the world is asymmetrically dependent on a metaphysically prior fact about language, namely that it (...) exhibits subject–predicate structure. (shrink)

This article argues that — despite the value of distinguishing between insiders and outsiders in a contingent and relative sense — there is no fundamental insider—outsider problem. We distinguish weak and strong versions of 'insiderism' (privileged versus monopolistic access to knowledge) and then sociological and religious versions of the latter. After reviewing critiques of the sociological version, we offer a holistic semantic critique of the religious version (i.e. the view that religious experience and/or language offers sui generis access to knowledge). (...) We argue that all evidence for mental states is overt, public, and observable, and, hence, that there can be no significant difference in the access to knowledge of insiders and outsiders. (shrink)

The methodology implicit in empirically grounded social scientific studies of religion naturally allies with forms of semantic holism. However, a well known argument which questions whether holism in general is consistent with the fact that languages are learnable can be extended into an epistemological one which questions whether holism is consistent with an empirical methodology. In other words, there is question whether holism, in fact, makes social science possible. I diagnose the assumptions on which that objection rests, pointing out that (...) they are not necessary for semantic holism per se. I argue that a form of semantic holism along the lines advocated by W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson can avoid the objection. Moreover, when seen in this light, it has the resources to withstand an even deeper methodological problem. In so doing, though, several important but overlooked implications for the study of religion emerge. (shrink)

Research on quotation has mostly focussed in the past years on mixed or open quotation. In a recent book-length discussion of the topic, Cappelen and Lepore have abandon their previous Davidsonian allegiances, proposing a new view that they describe as minimalist, to a good extend on the basis of facts concerning mixed quotation. In this paper I critically review Cappelen and Lepore’s new minimalist proposals, briefly outlining my preferred Davidsonian view as a useful foil. I explore first their allegedly non-Davidsonian, (...) anti-contextualist views about pure quotation, and then their new views on mixed quotation. I have complained in the first place that their proposals are not presented as perspicuously as they should be; and in the second place that, when we have a clearer picture of what appears to be the favoured account, the differences with their previous proposals and others already in the literature are not as great as they claim. (shrink)

Descriptive semantic theories purport to characterize the meanings of the expressions of languages in whatever complexity they might have. Foundational semantics purports to identify the kind of considerations relevant to establish that a given descriptive semantics accurately characterizes the language used by a given individual or community. Foundational Semantics I presents three contrasting approaches to the foundational matters, and the main considerations relevant to appraise their merits. These approaches contend that we should look at the contents of speakers’ intuitions; at (...) the deep psychology of users and its evolutionary history, as revealed by our best empirical theories; or at the personal‐level rational psychology of those subjects. Foundational Semantics II examines a fourth view, according to which we should look instead at norms enforced among speakers. The two papers aim to determine in addition the extent to which the approaches are really rival, or rather complementary. (shrink)

Descriptive semantic theories purport to characterize the meanings of the expressions of languages in whatever complexity they might have. Foundational semantics purports to identify the kind of considerations relevant to establish that a given descriptive semantics accurately characterizes the language used by a given individual or community. Foundational Semantics I presents three contrasting approaches to the foundational matters, and the main considerations relevant to appraise their merits. These approaches contend that we should look at the contents of speakers’ intuitions; at (...) the deep psychology of users and its evolutionary history, as revealed by our best empirical theories; or at the personal-level rational psychology of those subjects. Foundational Semantics II examines a fourth view, according to which we should look instead at norms enforced among speakers. The two papers aim to determine in addition the extent to which the approaches are really rival, or rather complementary. (shrink)

If it is possible to think that human life is temporal as a whole, and we can make sense of Wittgenstein’s claim that the psychological phenomena called ‘dispositions’ do not have genuine temporal duration on the basis of a distinction between dispositions and other mental processes, we need a compelling account of how time applies to these dispositions. I undertake this here by examining the concept of expectation, a disposition with a clear nexus to time by the temporal point at (...) which the expectation is satisfied. However, it seems that we cannot always identify the beginning of an expectation, and in a few cases, its end. If so, the reduction of expectations to neural events or accompanying feelings which spread over time in the usual way seems a hard enterprise, because these processes, much as other physical processes, have a definite and largely measurable time span. Only at a higher level, that is, as part of human life, expectation can be said to be temporal. (shrink)

Since the publication of Premack and Woodruff’s classic paper introducing the notion of a ‘theory of mind’ :515–526, 1978), interdisciplinary research in social cognition has witnessed the development of theory–theory, simulation theory, hybrid approaches, and most recently interactionist and perceptual accounts of other minds. The challenges that these various approaches present for each other and for research in social cognition range from adequately defining central concepts to designing experimental paradigms for testing empirical hypotheses. But is there any approach that promises (...) to dominate future interdisciplinary research in social cognition? Is social cognition witnessing a gradual paradigm shift where hitherto grounding notions such as theory of mind are no longer viewed as explanatorily necessary? Or have we simply lost our way in attempting to devise adequate experimental setups that could sway the debate in favour of one of the contending accounts? This special issue addresses these questions in an attempt to discover what the future holds for interdisciplinary research in social cognition. (shrink)

Many of our beliefs behave irrationally: this is hardly news to anyone. Although beliefs’ irrational tendencies need to be taken into account, this paper argues that beliefs necessarily preserve at least a minimal level of rationality. This view offers a plausible picture of what makes belief unique and will help us to set beliefs apart from other cognitive attitudes.

In the last twenty-five years, several authors have raised problems to the thesis that privileged self-knowledge is compatible with content externalism. In particular, the 'slow-switching' argument, which was originally put forth by Paul Boghossian (1989), aims to show that there is no satisfactory account of how we can have privileged knowledge about our own thoughts given content externalism. Though many philosophers have found ways to block the argument, no one has worried to address a major worry that Boghossian had when (...) he presented the argument, which is to understand under which conditions privileged self-knowledge is possible given content externalism. In this paper, I offer a diagnosis of why the slow-switching argument fails and I show how the diagnosis enables us to provide a partial response to Boghossian's worry. (shrink)

Recent work in the cognitive sciences has argued that beliefs sometimes acquire signaling functions in virtue of their ability to reveal information that manipulates “mindreaders.” This paper sketches some of the evolutionary and design considerations that could take agents from solipsistic goal pursuit to beliefs that serve as social signals. Such beliefs will be governed by norms besides just the traditional norms of epistemology. As agents become better at detecting the agency of others, either through evolutionary history or individual learning, (...) the candidate pool for signaling expands. This logic holds for natural and artificial agents that find themselves in recurring social situations that reward the sharing of one’s thoughts. (shrink)

After arguing that truth-making is properly construed as a partnership between truth bearers and truth-makers, I focus on two prominent arguments against the category of fact as one of the key relata in the truth-making relation. After rejecting those arguments, I go on to examine a more difficult issue, one that might force us to appreciate more fully the robust role that thought has in “creating” truth.

David GormanNorthern Illinois UniversityThe official topic of Steve Fuller’s editorial is aphorisms, but I think that it is early days in his thinking about this interesting genre. He mentions them...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of values in strategic management. We discuss recent criticisms of the concept of strategy and argue that the concept of value helps reconcile these criticisms with traditional models of strategy. We show that Andrews' model of corporate strategy rightly takes morally significant values to be essential to effective management. We show how the notion of value can be clarified and used in research into various conceptions of corporate morality.

We shall distinguish between sortal predication and standard predication. The former kind of predication necessarily involves sortal concepts but the latter, as it is customarily viewed, does not. It is generally thought that the only essential occurrence of a concept in a standard predication is the concept being predicated. In this paper, we shall put forward an alternative view. We shall propose to understand standard predication as a cognitive act essentially requiring sortal concepts. We shall call this view conceptual predication (...) sortalism and ground it on the basis of epistemic-semantic reasons. Concepts are understood as intersubjectively realizable capacities or abilities that fulfill particular cognitive roles, such as those of classification, categorization, individuation, and referring. (shrink)

In this article, I am intent on rehabilitating Strawson's overall anti-sceptical strategy. First, I focus on his earlier attempt, which ignited the debate about the adequacy of transcendental arguments against the sceptic. I present Stroud's main reservation that Strawson's viewpoint is unworkable because it does not take into consideration the view of the external world upon which the sceptic is based in order to challenge our knowledge claims. I then focus on Strawson's later attempt, which is based upon a Humean-like (...) naturalistic strategy. I show that his naturalism is intractable for two reasons: first because it reproduces the proof structure of transcendental arguments and ends up employing a rational proof to counter rational proofs; and second, because it matches the sceptic's advice that we should live according to our natural inclinations without ever trying to justify our beliefs. In the last section, I claim that it is possible to rehabilitate transcendental arguments as sound anti-sceptical proofs if we argue for the senselessness of the idea of thing in itself completely apart from our powers of conceptualisation. (shrink)

This paper takes another look at Davidson's paratactic theory of indirect discourse and evaluates some revisions to it, proposed recently by Ian Rumfitt (Mind, 1993). Davidson's original version of the theory – according to which indirect speech reports refer to token utterances – has a problem dealing with ambiguity. Rumfitt suggests that we can solve this problem by supposing that the immediate objects of verbs in indirect speech are token representations of disambiguated LF tree-structures. I argue that this proposal is (...) inadequate and suggest that it is better to think of indirect speech as relating speakers to utterance types. (shrink)

The concept of second nature plays a central role in McDowell's project of reconciling thought's external constraint with its spontaneity or autonomy: our conceptual capacities are natural in the sense that they are fully integrated into the natural world, but they are a second nature to us since they are not reducible to elements that are intelligible apart from those conceptual capacities. Rather than offering a theory of second nature and an account of how we acquire one, McDowell suggests that (...) Aristotle's account of ethical character formation as the acquisition of a second nature serves as a model that can reassure us that thought's autonomy does not threaten its naturalness. However, far from providing such reassurance, the Aristotelian model of second nature actually generates an anxiety about how the acquisition of such autonomous conceptual abilities could be possible. (shrink)

We present two eye-tracking experiments on the interpretation of sentences like “The tall girl is the only one that …,” which are ambiguous between the anaphoric and the exophoric interpretation. These interpretations differ in informativeness: in a positive context, the exophoric reading entails the anaphoric, while in a negative context the entailment pattern is reversed and the anaphoric reading is the strongest one. We tested whether adults rely on considerations about informativeness in solving the ambiguity. The results show that participants (...) interpreted one exophorically in both positive and negative contexts. Given these findings, we cast doubts on the idea that Informativeness plays a role in ambiguity resolution and proposes a Principle of Maximal Exploitation: When a context is provided, adults extend their domain of evaluation to include the whole scenario, independently from truth-conditional considerations about informativity and strength. (shrink)

I apply the notion of truthmaking to the topic of fundamentality by articulating a truthmaker theory of fundamentality according to which some truths are truth-grounded in certain entities while the ones that don't stand in a metaphysical-semantic relation to the truths that do. I motivate this view by critically discussing two problems with Ross Cameron's truthmaker theory of fundamentality. I then defend this view against Theodore Sider's objection that the truthmaking approach to fundamentality violates the purity constraint. Truthmaker theorists can (...) have a trouble-free theory of fundamentality. (shrink)

Some common conceptions of Buddhist meditative practice emphasize the elimination of emotion and desire in the interest of attaining tranquility and spiritual perfection. But to place too strong an emphasis on this is to miss an important social element emphasized by major figures in the Mahāyāna and Chan/Zen Buddhist traditions who are critical of these quietistic elements and who stress instead an understanding of an enlightenment that emphasizes enriched sociality and flexible readiness to engage, and not avoid, life's fluctuations in (...) fortune and essential impermanence. It is argued here that these criticisms of quietism are bolstered by recent advances in the philosophy and psychology of the emotions that highlight the role of emotions in framing the context of decision making—that is, in sorting out the relevant from the irrelevant, identifying salience, and directing decisions when uncertainty prevents definitive judgment. This research makes clearer why self-liberation is fundamentally a matter of liberation from judgmental habit and inflexibility, and lends support to a view of enlightenment that emphasizes compassionate engagement with others. It also provides for a more plausible picture of the cognitive transformation involved in liberation and sheds light on the rationale for certain traditional Chan and Zen teaching tactics, such as those involving koan introspection. (shrink)

In the last decade, some feminist epistemologists have suggested that the global scepticism which results from the Cartesian dream argument is the product of a self‐consciously masculine modern era, whose philosophy gave pride of place to the individual cognizer, disconnected from the object of knowledge, from other knowers, indeed from his own body. Lorraine Code claims that under a conception of a cognizer as an essentially social being, Cartesian scepticism would not arise. I argue that this is false: an argument (...) parallel in structure, and as well supported as the first‐person Cartesian dream argument, could arise in an epistemology which recognizes the social nature of human life and knowledge. Against Code, it is not the first‐personhood of Cartesianism which generates scepticism. A second‐person scepticism could emerge in a socially conscious epistemology. (shrink)

According to neo-Russellianism, in a sentence such as John believes that Mont Blanc is 4000 m high, any other proper name co-referring with Mont Blanc can be substituted for it without any change in the proposition expressed. Prima facie, our practice of translation shows that this cannot be correct. We will then show that neo-Russellians have a way out of this problem, which consists in holding that actual translations are not a matter of semantics, but also make an attempt at (...) preserving some pragmatic features of the sentences to be translated. We then turn to translations that only preserve the semantic characteristics of the sentences and we argue that, although these translations are unable to show that neo-Russellianism is incorrect, they still show that it relies on some theses that seem to have no justification, apart from saving neo-Russellianism itself. (shrink)

Dispositionalist accounts of belief define beliefs in terms of specific sets of dispositions. In this article, I provide a blind-spot argument against these accounts. The core idea of the argument is that beliefs having the form [p and it is not manifestly believed that p] cannot be manifestly believed. This means that one cannot manifest such beliefs in one’s assertions, conscious thoughts, actions, behaviours, or any other type of activity. However, if beliefs are sets of dispositions, they must be manifestable (...) in some way. Therefore, according to my argument, beliefs are not sets of dispositions. The argument is defended against some possible objections. (shrink)

Donald Davidson once suggested that a liar ?must intend to represent himself as believing what he does not?. In this paper I argue that, while Davidson was mistaken about lying in a few important respects, his main insight yields a very attractive definition of lying. Namely, you lie if and only if you say something that you do not believe and you intend to represent yourself as believing what you say. Moreover, I show that this Davidsonian definition can handle counter-examples (...) that undercut four prominent definitions of lying: viz., the traditional intend-to-deceive definition, Thomas Carson's definition, Don Fallis's definition, and Andreas Stokke's definition. (shrink)

John McDowell argued that the virtuous person (VP) knows no temptation: her perception of a situation silences all competing motivations – be it fear in the face of danger or a strong desire. The VP cannot recognize any reason to act non-virtuously as a reason, and is never inclined to act non-virtuously. This view rests on the requirement that the VP rationally respond, and not merely react, to the environment – it rests on the requirement that the relation between the (...) VP and the world (ethical requirements) must rule out the possibility that the VP is a brain in a vat. I will argue that the opposite is true: virtue requires a sensitivity to temptation. The VP, as such, must be able to recognize reasons for performing non-virtuous actions as reasons, and be inclined to perform them. She must find nothing human alien. This is so because the VP must possess the ability to understand non-virtuous agents, and understanding necessarily involves vulnerability to temptation. Otherwise, it will be argued, the VP views the actions of others as determined from outside the space of reasons. But the VP, like any other person, must have the ability to view the actions of others as rational responses to the environment, not only as reactions to it. Put differently, the VP’s view of others must rule out the possibility that they are brains in a vat – the possibility that their actions are merely caused, rather than justified, by the facts. Finally, it will be suggested that an amended conception of the VP can meet both requirements: view others as rationally responsive to the world, without relinquishing its relation to the facts. (shrink)

I argue that it is rational for a person to believe the conjunction of her beliefs. This involves responding to the Lottery and Preface Paradoxes. In addition, I suggest that in normal circumstances, what it is to believe a conjunction just is to believe its conjuncts.

This paper considers the prospects for objectivity in reasoning strategies in response to empirical studies that apparently show systematic culture‐based differences in patterns of reasoning. I argue that there is at least one modest class of exceptions to the claim that there are alternative, equally warranted standards of good reasoning: the class that entails the solution of certain well‐structured problems which, suitably chosen, are common, or touchstone, to the sorts of culturally different viewpoints discussed. There is evidence that some cognitive (...) tasks are seen in much the same way across cultures, not least by virtue of the common run of experiences with the world of material objects in early childhood by creatures with similar cognitive endowments. These tasks thus present as similarly structured sets of claims that have similar priority: what is framed, and what is bracketed, or held constant in the background, is shown to be naturally common across cultures. As a consequence, a normative view of reasoning and, by implication, critical thinking can be defended. While this might be a modest sense of objectivity, the high level of intercultural articulation that is able to occur among people of different backgrounds suggests that it provides cognitive scaffolding for a lot of other reasoning tasks as well. (shrink)

Two well-recognised, but inherently reductionist, relations between medicine and music are the attempted neuro-scientific understanding of responses to music and interest in music’s contributions to clinical therapy. This paper proposes a third relation whereby music is seen as an organising metaphor for clinical medicine as a practice. Both music and clinical medicine affirm human well-being, and both do this inter alia through varieties of skilful, crafted yet spontaneous mutual engagement between a ‘performer’ and an ‘audience’. I argue that this organising (...) metaphor offers a corrective to the reductionist influences of the first two relations, illuminates a number of medicine’s important features, and reaffirms the existential as being at the core of medicine’s telos. (shrink)

The paper spells out an argument to the effect that rejecting what Sellars denounces as the “myth of the given” has a bearing not only on epistemology, but also on ontology: we get to recognizing persons as ontologically primitive. We spell that argument out by drawing on what is known as left-wing Sellarsianism, although our aim is not the exegesis of Sellars’s texts. Our aim is to show how one can get from this argument to a social ontology in the (...) guise of a synoptic view that recognizes both persons and matter in motion as ontologically primitive and that employs the conceptual tools of ontic structural realism. (shrink)

According to expressivism, moral judgments are desire-like states of mind. It is often argued that this view is made implausible because it isn’t consistent with the conceivability of amoralists, i.e., agents who make moral judgments yet lack motivation. In response, expressivists can invoke the distinction between dispositional and occurrent desires. Strandberg (Am Philos Quart 49:81–91, 2012) has recently argued that this distinction does not save expressivism. Indeed, it can be used to argue that expressivism is false. In this paper I (...) argue that expressivism is a much more complex thesis than Strandberg assumes. Once these complexities are acknowledged, Strandberg’s arguments are rendered ineffective and expressivism rendered more plausible. (shrink)

En este ensayo exploramos una perspectiva epistemológica en la que el elemento social y colectivo del conocimiento juega un papel fundamental en la explicación de su producción y transmisión. Primero presentamos y criticamos una posición individualista que ha sido dominante en la epistemología contemporánea y cuyas raíces pueden trazarse, al menos, hasta Descartes. Posteriormente introducimos y defendemos nuestra propia mirada, una en la que el conocimiento es un proceso constituido por un conjunto de actividades y prácticas que tiene un carácter (...) material. (shrink)