In this paper, I examine the relationship between physicalism and property dualism in the light of the dialectic between anti-physicalist arguments and physicalist responses. Upon rehearsing the moves of each side, it is hard not to notice that there is a puzzling symmetry between dualist attacks on physicalism and physicalist replies. Each position can be developed in a way to defend itself from attacks from the other position, and it seems that there are neither a priori nor a posteriori grounds (...) to choose between the two. I suggest that the reason for the intractability of the disagreement, perhaps surprisingly, is they are both true: physicalism and dualism are formulated in terms of different conceptual schemes, each involving basic metaphysical concepts such as possibility, necessity, law and property. My proposal is that this means that there is no real disagreement in fact; both schemes get at the same reality, in different ways. -/- . (shrink)

El holismo semántico es una teoría que está relacionada con los significados que se atribuyen a las palabras y sus relaciones con otras palabras en una lengua. En este trabajo se propone rehabilitar el holismo semántico como una posición filosófica razonable y presentar una versión del holismo semántico desarrollada por Henry Jackman – llamada “holismo semántico moderado”. Esta teoría es capaz de explicar algunos fenómenos lingüísticos, como la vaguedad, polisemia y ambigüedad, haciendo del holismo moderado una teoría útil no sólo (...) para la filosofía del lenguaje, sino también para los estudios de semántica lingüística. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an account of linguistic content based on the active inference framework. While ecological and enactive theorists have rightly rejected the notion of content as a basis for cognitive processes, they must recognize the important role that it plays in the social regulation of linguistic interaction. According to an influential theory in philosophy of language, normative inferentialism, an utterance has the content that it has in virtue of its normative status, that is, in virtue of the (...) set of commitments and entitlements that the speaker undertakes by producing this utterance. This normative status is determined by the normative attitudes shared by members of the utterer’s linguistic community. I propose here an account of such normative attitudes based on the ecological interpretation of the active inference framework. I explain how social normativity can be understood in that framework as the way in which members of a group shape their social niche to make it more predictable. Finally, I apply this account of social normativity to basic communicative practices, thereby explaining how social normative expectations can emerge to regulate these communicative practices, eventually leading to the institution of the sort of normative statuses constitutive of linguistic content. (shrink)

The intentional stance is the strategy of prediction and explanation that attributes beliefs, desires, and other states to systems and predicts future behavior from what it would be rational for an agent to do, given those beliefs and desires. Any system whose performance can be thus predicted and explained is an intentional system, whatever its innards. The strategy of treating parts of the world as intentional systems is the foundation of but is also exploited in artificial intelligence and cognitive science (...) more generally, as well as in evolutionary theory. An analysis of the role of the intentional stance and its presuppositions supports a naturalistic theory of mental states and events, their content or intentionality, and the relation between levels of explanation and neurophysiological or mechanistic levels of explanation. As such, the analysis of the intentional stance grounds a theory of the mind and its relation to the body. (shrink)

This paper has a twofold aim. On the one hand, we will discuss the much debated question of the source of normativity (which traditionally has nature and practical reason as the two main contenders to this role) and propose a new answer to it. Second, in answering this question, we will present a new account of practical wisdom, which conceives of the ethical virtues as ultimately unified in the chief virtue of phronesis, understood as ethical expertise. To do so, we (...) will first criticize the main current view of phronesis and its bearer (the phronimos), then offer another view of the nature of phronesis and of its relation to the other ethical virtues. Our proposal should not be intended as an interpretation of Aristotle’s own view; rather, it should be seen as a broadly Aristotelian theoretical proposal, which we believe can satisfyingly address most of the problems that afflict the more traditional accounts of practical wisdom. In section 2 of this paper, after criticizing first-nature naturalistic views of moral virtue, we take practical reason to be the cornerstone of second-nature naturalistic views; in section 3, we will outline criticisms to which, in our view, the traditional views of phronesis are ill-suited to respond, and, in section 4, we will outline our view of phronesis as ethical expertise – a view which in our view is immune to the above-mentioned criticisms – by spelling out the three main tenets of phronesis as ethical expertise: a conceptual thesis, an epistemic thesis, and the educational implications of the two. Finally, we will support our proposal with some empirical evidence taken from cognitive science. (shrink)

The recent discussions on the unity of virtue suffer from a lack of reference to the processes through which we interpret each other as moral agents. In the present paper it is argued that much light can be thrown on that crucial issue by appealing to a version of Donald Davidson’s Principle of Charity, which we call “Principle of Phronetic Charity”. The idea is that in order to treat somebody as a moral agent, one has first to attribute to them, (...) at least pro tempore, a significant degree of practical wisdom and, then, to assess and rationally adjust such attribution of competence via actual engagement with them – a process that may lead to different responses on the part of the interpreter. After expounding and defending the Principle of Phronetic Charity and the interpretive practices connected with it, we discuss the repercussions of our account on the issue of the epistemic access to virtue. We will show, in particular, that some important components of both disunitarianism and unitarianism have to be retained: in accordance with the former, we stress the role of concrete experience over pure speculation and, up to a point, the idea that virtues tend to form variegated ensembles; in accordance with the latter, we accept the claim that virtues are not attributed to moral agents in isolation. Ultimately, however, the account developed here rejects both the atomism of the disunitarian view and the holism of the “Unity of the Virtues”, since it is in fact a form of molecularism, according to which virtues come neither individually nor as a whole, but rather as clusters. (shrink)

Summary Pluralism and monism are the two current views concerning scientific research and language understanding. Between them there is a third, intermediate, view. We take a procedural methodology of science as exemplified in the work of L. Tondl, and procedural linguistics , as exemplified in the work of B. Harrison, to be representative of this third possibility. Procedures are cognitive, linguistic, and physical processes which, through their hierarchical interconnections can generate fruitful mechanisms . These mechanisms are sensitive to context and (...) operate in heuristic and algorithmic ways. Their similar logical structure points towards a profound unified basis for scientific and linguistic activities, thus providing an interesting bridge between what is achieved by a little child talking to his parents, and a creative scientist struggling to interpret the results of his experiments. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that it’s impossible for there to be a single universal theory of meaning for a language. First, I will consider some minimal expressiveness requirements a language must meet to be able to express semantic claims. Then I will argue that in order to have a single unified theory of meaning, these expressiveness requirements must be satisfied by a language which the semantic theory itself applies to. That is, we would need a language which can express (...) its own meaning. It has been well-known since Tarski that theories of meaning whose central notion is truth can’t be expressed in a language which they apply to. Here, I develop Quine’s formulation of the Liar Paradox in grammatical terms and use this to extend Tarski’s result to all theories of meaning. This general version of the paradox can be formalised as a special case of the Lawvere Fixed-Point Theorem applied to a categorial grammar. Taken together with the initial arguments, I infer that a universal theory of meaning is impossible and conclude the paper with a brief discussion on what alternatives are available. (shrink)

In order to evaluate the validity and implications of Donald Davidson’s arguments against the need for conventions in order for linguistic communication, the theoretical considerations behind his conclusions are traced through several of his essays. Once Davidson’s ideas on communication, radical interpretation, and the lack of strict nomological connections between physical and mental events have been pointed out as necessary for his argument, it will be seen that these imply the need for something very close to linguistic conventions. The article (...) closes by considering a few possible counterarguments this last conclusion. (shrink)

There is an incompatibility between the deflationist approach to truth, which makes truth transparent on the basis of an antecedent grasp of meaning, and the traditional endeavour, exemplified by Davidson, to explicate meaning through of truth. I suggest that both parties are in the explanatory red: deflationist lack a non-truth-involving theory of meaning and Davidsonians lack a non-deflationary account of truth. My focus is on the attempts of the latter party to resolve their problem. I look in detail at Davidson's (...) more recent work and suggest that it seeks to articulate a primitive notion of truth that may balance between a notion that collapses into deflationism and one that is wholly subsumed under a general theory of interpretation. I conclude that this tightrope walk is ultimately unsuccessful. Equally, however, some reasons are provided for thinking that deflationism might be equally unsuccessful with its problem. 'Truth or meaning?' remains an open question. (shrink)

The semantic inferentialist account of the social institution of semantic meaning can be naturally extended to account for social ontology. I argue here that semantic inferentialism provides a framework within which mathematical ontology can be understood as social ontology, and mathematical facts as socially instituted facts. I argue further that the semantic inferentialist framework provides resources to underpin at least some aspects of the objectivity of mathematics, even when the truth of mathematical claims is understood as socially instituted.

A criticism is offered of the chief argument employed by Davidson to debunk the notion of “metaphorical meaning”, which exploits the static nature of standard truth-conditional semantics. We argue, first, that Davidson's argument fails, and go on to suggest, secondly, that truth-conditional semantics would profit if the static feature were abandoned and were replaced by a processual, dynamic conception of meaning. We try to show that this processual aspect can be captured without making the ensuing semantic theory open to the (...) charge of psychologism. (shrink)

The notion of folk‐psychology as a primitive speculative theory of the mental is called into question. There is cause to believe that folk‐psychology has more in common with a naive physics than with early speculative physical theorising. The distinction between these is elaborated. The conclusion drawn is that commonsense ascription of psychological content, though not a suitable finishing point for cognitive science, should still provide a more reliable source of data than some contemporary theorists are willing to admit.

A new strategy in philosophy of law appeals to explanatory gap arguments to attack legal positivism. We argue that the strategy faces a dilemma, which derives from there being two available readings of the constraint it places on legal grounding. To this end, we elaborate the most promising ways of spelling out the epistemic constraints governing law-determination, and show that each of the arguments based on them has problems. Throughout the paper, we evaluate a number of explanatory requirements, ultimately with (...) a view to shedding light on the explanatory nature of both grounding in general, and legal grounding in particular. (shrink)

Richard Nisbett's The Geography of Thought is one of several recent works that have highlighted purported differences in thinking patterns between East Asians and Westerners on the basis of empirical research. This has implications for teaching and for other issues such as cultural integration. Based on a framework consisting of three distinct notions of rationality, this paper argues that some of the differences alleged by Nisbett are either not real or exaggerated, and that his geography of thought fails to provide (...) an adequate account of thinking styles across cultures. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for teaching and learning critical thinking that can be drawn from the framework developed. (shrink)

The symmetries of a physical theory are often associated with two things: conservation laws and representational redundancies. But how can a physical theory's symmetries give rise to interesting conservation laws, if symmetries are transformations that correspond to no genuine physical difference? In this article, I argue for a disambiguation in the notion of symmetry. The central distinction is between what I call "analytic" and "synthetic" symmetries, so called because of an analogy with analytic and synthetic propositions. "Analytic" symmetries are the (...) turning of idle wheels in a theory's formalism, and correspond to no physical change; "synthetic" symmetries cover all the rest. I argue that analytic symmetries are distinguished because they act as fixed points or constraints in any interpretation of a theory, and as such are akin to Poincaré's conventions or Reichenbach's 'axioms of co-ordination', or 'relativized constitutive a priori principles'. (shrink)

It is argued that expressivists can solve their problems in accounting for the unity and autonomy of logic – logic is topic independent and does not derive from a general ‘logic’ of mental states – by adopting an analysis of the logical connectives that takes logically complex sentences to express complex combinations of simple attitudes like belief and disapproval and dispositions to form such simple attitudes upon performing suppositional acts, and taking acceptance and rejection of sentences to be the common (...) mental denominator in descriptive and evaluative discourse, and structural requirements governing these to be the basis for logic. Such an account requires that attitudes like belief, intention and disapproval can come in hypothetical mode – plausibly linked to the capacity to mentally simulate or emulate one's own attitudes – and, if correct, suggests that these form the basic building blocks for our capacity to understand logically complex sentences. (shrink)

Davidson approaches the notions of meaning and interpretation with the aim of characterizing semantic competence in the syntactically characterized natural language. The objective is to provide a truth-theory for a language, generating T-sentences expressed in the semantic metalanguage, so that each sentence of the object language receives an appropriate interpretation. Proceeding within the constraints of referential semantics, I will argue for the viability of reconstructing the notion of linguistic meaning within the Tarskian theory of reference. However, the view proposed here (...) involves a revision of Davidson’s con-ception of the object of semantic investigation. Taking (idealized) language-theories as the proper object of semantic characterization, provides solutions to outstanding problems in Davidson’s views, better approximates the practice in standard model-theoretic semantics, and incorporates the elements of semantic competence sought for in tradi¬tional theories of lexical analysis. Sources of evidence beyond those emphasized by Davidson will be invoked in order to allow for the selection of interpre¬tive T-sentences. In the final section, possible Quinean objections will be considered. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper argues that the influence of language on science, philosophy and other field is mediated by communicative practices. Where communications is more restrictive, established linguistic structures exercise a tighter control over innovations and scientifically motivated reforms of language. The viewpoint here centers on the thesis that argumentation is crucial in the understanding and evaluation of proposed reforms and that social practices which limit argumentation serve to erode scientific objectivity. Thus, a plea is made for a sociology of scientific belief (...) designed to understand and insure social‐institutional conditions of the possibility of knowledge and its growth. A chief argument draws on work of Axelrod concerning the evolution of cooperation. (shrink)

I here present and defend what I call the Triviality Theory of Truth, to be understood in analogy with Matti Eklund’s Inconsistency Theory of Truth. A specific formulation of is defended and compared with alternatives found in the literature. A number of objections against the proposed notion of meaning-constitutivity are discussed and held inconclusive. The main focus, however, is on the problem, discussed at length by Gupta and Belnap, that speakers do not accept epistemically neutral conclusions of Curry derivations. I (...) first argue that the facts about speakers’ reactions to such Curry derivations do not constitute a problem for the Triviality Theory specifically. Rather, they follow from independent, uncontroversial facts. I then propose a solution which coheres with the theory as I understand it. Finally, I consider a normative reading of their objection and offer a response. (shrink)

Traditional logical reconstruction of arguments aims at assessing the validity of ordinary language arguments. It involves several tasks: extracting argumentations from texts, breaking up complex argumentations into individual arguments, framing arguments in standard form, as well as formalizing arguments and showing their validity with the help of a logical formalism. These tasks are guided by a multitude of partly antagonistic goals, they interact in various feedback loops, and they are intertwined with the development of theories of valid inference and adequate (...) formalization. This paper explores how the method of reflective equilibrium can be used for modelling the complexity of such reconstructions and for justifying the various steps involved. The proposed approach is illustrated and tested in a detailed reconstruction of the beginning of Anselm’s De casu diaboli. (shrink)

This paper is about the situation in which an author (writer or speaker) presents a deductively invalid argument, but the addressee aims at a charitable interpretation and has reason to assume that the author intends to present a valid argument. How can he go about interpreting the author’s reasoning as enthymematically valid? We suggest replacing the usual find-the-missing-premise approaches by an approach based on systematic efforts to ascribe a belief state to the author against the background of which the argument (...) has to be evaluated. The suggested procedure includes rules for recording whether the author in fact accepts or denies the premises and the conclusion, as well as tests for enthymematic validity and strategies for revising belief state ascriptions. Different degrees of interpretive charity can be exercised. This is one reason why the interpretation or reconstruction of an enthymematic argument typically does not result in a unique outcome. (shrink)

The paper presents a number of empirical arguments for the perceptual view of speech comprehension. It then argues that a particular version of phenomenal dogmatism can confer immediate justification upon belief. In combination, these two views can bypass Davidsonian skepticism toward knowledge of meanings. The perceptual view alone, however, can bypass a variation on the Davidsonian argument. One reason Davidson thought meanings were not truly graspable was that he believed meanings were private (unlike behavior). But if the perceptual view of (...) speech comprehension is correct, then meanings (or at least conveyed meanings) are public objects like other perceivable entities. Hence, there is no particular problem of language comprehension, even if meanings originate in “private” mental states. (shrink)

According to the inferential view of language comprehension, we hear a speaker’s utterance and infer what was said, drawing on our competence in the syntax and semantics of the language together with background information. On the alternative perceptual view, fluent speakers have a non-inferential capacity to perceive the content of speech. On this view, when we hear a speaker’s utterance, the experience confers some degree of justification on our beliefs about what was said in the absence of defeaters. So, in (...) the absence of defeaters, we can come to know what was said merely on the basis of hearing the utterance. Several arguments have been offered against a pure perceptual view of language comprehension, among others, arguments pointing to its alleged difficulties accounting for homophones and the context-sensitivity of ordinary language. After responding to the arguments against the perceptual view of language comprehension, I provide a new argument in favor of the perceptual view by looking closer at the dependence of the justificatory qualities of experience on the notion of a defeater as well as the perceptual nature of language learning and language processing. (shrink)

At Abhidharmakośa VI .3, Vasubandhu analyses the phrase sandhāya ... bha $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{s} $$ ita $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{m} $$ as used in the sūtras. Here bhā $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{s} $$ ita $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{m} $$ mentions an utterance, to which a figurative sense is ascribed by the gerundive (not noun) sandhāya. The audience is split: some are intended to understand the literal, others the figurative sense. Vasubandhu's analysis works well for sandhābhā $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{s} $$ a etc. in the Saddharmapu $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{n}$$ $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{d}$$ arīka and the Guhyasamājatantra. (The Hevajratantra is (...) different and we consider it separately). Poussin's “arrière-pensée”, Edgerton's “real meaning” and “esoteric meaning”, and Wayman's “twilight language” are attractive in some cases but not all. Vasubandhu's analysis combined with Edgerton's “specially intended” (for ābhiprāyika) is much better; compare V. S. Bhattacharya's old paraphrase of this word “intended to imply or suggest something different from what is expressed by the words”. But Bhattacharya's widely accepted translation “intentional” for ābhiprāyika is misleading and misrepresents Vasubandhu, and we suggest ways of improving it in the light of the need for coherent translation, with the help of some considerations from Pā $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{n}$$ ini and from Montague semantics. (shrink)

By describing the aim of triangulation as locating the objects of thoughts and utterances, Davidson has given in the double role of accounting for both the individuation of content and the sense in which content necessarily is public. The focus of this article is on how triangulation may contribute to the individuation of content. I maintain that triangulation, interpreted in terms of joint attention, may serve to break into the intentional circle of meaning and belief, yet without forcing us to (...) renounce the claims concerning the interdependence of meaning and belief and the irreducibility of meaning. (shrink)

Monothematic delusions are delusions whose contents pertain to a single subject matter. Examples include Capgras delusion, the delusion that a loved one has been replaced by an impostor, and Cotard delusion, the delusion that one is dead or does not exist. Two-factor accounts of such delusions hold that they are the result of both an experiential deficit, for instance flattened affect, coupled with an aberrant cognitive response to that deficit. In this paper we develop a new expressivist two-factor account of (...) delusion. In contrast to existing endorsement and explanationist accounts, which treat delusions as either explanations or endorsements of the contents of these disordered experiences, we hold that delusional beliefs have an expressive function: they characterize, in impressionistic terms, what the subject’s experience is like for them. We show how our account improves upon existing two-factor views in explaining the central features of monothematic delusions, in particular the way in which delusional subjects fall short of the ideal of rationality. (shrink)

Several themes treated in chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition are addressed at greater length in The Logic of Sense, published one year later. In particular, Deleuze's critique of ‘the privilege of designation’ and ‘the modality of solutions’, along with his positive claims about the relation between sense and problems, arguably summarise a number of analyses found in The Logic of Sense. However, despite the convergence between Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense as regards the sense–problem relation, The (...) Logic of Sense does not explicitly address the other aspects of thought that Difference and Repetition considers inseparable from the sense–problem relation. In particular, the notion of ‘transcendental empiricism’ – that is, the idea that the conditions of experience themselves emerge from experience – is not explicitly mentioned in The Logic of Sense. There is no explicit discussion in The Logic of Sense of ‘encounters’ or ‘shocks’ and their role in the genesis of thought. And there is no explicit discussion in The Logic of Sense of the discordant relations between the different faculties of thought as they provoke and constrain one another in the elaboration of differential problems. This essay intends to argue that, despite the lack of explicit discussion, The Logic of Sense does advance an account of the differential genesis of thought, and along the same general lines as chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition. (shrink)

Donald Davidson argues in "Thought and Talk" that all speakers must be interpreters of other speakers: linguistic competence requires the possession of intentional concepts and the ability to attribute intentional states to other people. Kristin Andrews (in Philosophical Psychology, 15) has argued that empirical evidence about autism undermines this theoretical claim, for some individuals with autism lack the requisite "theory of mind" skills to be able to interpret, yet are competent speakers. In this paper, Davidson is defended on the grounds (...) that the high-functioning autistic individuals in question have a more robust theory of mind than has been acknowledged, and that this is sufficient for them to be interpreters of other speakers. It is argued, further, that Davidson's theory would remain intact even if one or more autistic speakers lacking a theory of mind were to exist, as he makes conceptual claims about thought and language that are not vulnerable to empirical counterexamples. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide further support for my earlier claim that the existence of high-functioning autistic speakers does not undermine Davidson's theory of radical interpretation. Andrews and Radenovic, in criticizing my arguments for this position, have presented fresh evidence from the clinical literature on autism for the existence of an individual who speaks but does not interpret, and maintain that the existence of such an individual seriously challenges Davidson's theory. I counter this claim by showing that the evidence they (...) point to in fact better supports the conclusion that this autistic speaker, and others like him, are Davidsonian interpreters. (shrink)

Davidson (in: LePore (ed), pp 433–46, 1986) uses the existence of malapropisms to motivate a model of linguistic communication where communication succeeds between conversational partners without their having to rely on conventional meanings. Davidson uses this model to then claim that there is no such thing as a conventional language shared by a linguistic community which must be known in advance for linguistic communication to succeed. However, for many cases, Davidson relies on there being standard lines of interpretation for communication (...) to be successful according to his model. Dummett (in: LePore (ed), pp 459–76, 1986) calls out Davidson on his reliance on the notion of standard lines, but does not clearly spell out why that is a problem for Davidson’s claim. I, taking cue from Dummett’s complaint, argue that the reliance on standard lines of interpretation is unavoidable for Davidson’s model and yet detrimental for Davidson’s claim. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that public linguistic norms are implicated in the epistemology of testimony by way of underwriting the reliability of language comprehension. This paper argues that linguistic normativity, as such, makes no explanatory contribution to the epistemology of testimony, but instead emerges naturally out of a collective effort to maintain language as a reliable medium for the dissemination of knowledge. Consequently, the epistemologies of testimony and language comprehension are deeply intertwined from the start, and there is no (...) room for grounding the one in terms of the other. (shrink)

We argue that explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), specifically reason-giving XAI, often constitutes the most suitable way of ensuring that someone can properly be held responsible for decisions that are based on the outputs of artificial intelligent (AI) systems. We first show that, to close moral responsibility gaps (Matthias 2004), often a human in the loop is needed who is directly responsible for particular AI-supported decisions. Second, we appeal to the epistemic condition on moral responsibility to argue that, in order to (...) be responsible for her decision, the human in the loop has to have an explanation available of the system’s recommendation. Reason explanations are especially well-suited to this end and we examine whether – and how – it might be possible to make such explanations fit with AI systems. We support our claims by focusing on a case of disagreement between human in the loop and AI system. (shrink)

The assessment of patients' decision-making capacity (DMC) has become an important area of clinical practice, and since it provides the gateway for a consideration of non-consensual treatment, has major ethical implications. Tests of DMC such as under the Mental Capacity Act (2005) for England and Wales aim at supporting autonomy and reducing unwarranted paternalism by being ‘procedural’, focusing on how the person arrived at a treatment decision. In practice, it is difficult, especially in problematic or borderline cases, to avoid a (...) consideration of beliefs and values; that is, of the substantive content of ideas rather than simple ‘cognitive’ or procedural abilities. However, little attention has been paid to how beliefs and values might be assessed in the clinical context and what kind of ‘objectivity’ is possible. We argue that key aspects of Donald Davidson's ideas of ‘Radical Interpretation’ and the ‘Principle of Charity’ provide useful guidance as to how clinicians might approach the question of whether an apparent disturbance in a person's thinking about beliefs or values undermines their DMC. A case example is provided, and a number of implications for clinical practice are discussed. (shrink)

A number of `no-proposition' approaches to the liar paradox find themselves implicitly committed to a moderate disquotational principle: the principle that if an utterance of the sentence `$P$' says anything at all, it says that $P$ (with suitable restrictions). I show that this principle alone is responsible for the revenge paradoxes that plague this view. I instead propose a view in which there are several closely related language-world relations playing the `semantic expressing' role, none of which is more central to (...) semantic theorizing than any other. I use this thesis about language and the negative result about disquotation to motivate the view that people do say things with utterances of paradoxical sentences, although they do not say the proposition you'd always expect, as articulated with a disquotational principle. (shrink)

Reid's principle of credulity may be interpreted as equivalent to a principle of charity, due to the nature of three beliefs it implies concerning the interlocutors, which are held by the person who attempts to acquire their language: They are telling truth in the sense that they are saying what they really think, perceive, feel, believe; they are veracious in the sense that what they say is objectively true; they use language consistently. This interpretation relies on Reid's straightforward remarks on (...) his principle of credulity and on his view of two related correspondences: One correspondence is between the principle of credulity and the principle of veracity. The other is between these two principles and the principles that create the ‘language of nature’ and guide us in our efforts to unravel it. (shrink)