An epistemological interpretation of quantum mechanics hinges on the claim that the distinctive features of quantum mechanics can be derived from some distinctive features of an observational basis. Old and new variations of this theme are listed. The program has a limited success in non-relativistic quantum mechanics. The crucial issue is how far it can be extended to quantum field theory without introducing significant ontological postulates. A C*-formulation covers algebraic quantum field theory, but not the standard model. Julian Schwinger’s anabatic (...) methodology extended a strict measurement-based formulation of quantum mechanics through field theory. His extension also excluded the quark hypothesis and the standard model. Quarks and local gauge invariance are postulates that go beyond the limits of an epistemological interpretation of quantum mechanics. The ontological significance ascribed to these advances depends on the role accorded ontology. (shrink)

Many recent discussions of self-consciousness and self-knowledge assume that there are only two kinds of accounts available to be taken on the relation between the so-called first-order (conscious) states and subjects' awareness or knowledge of them: a same-order, or reflexive view, on the one hand, or a higher-order one, on the other. I maintain that there is a third kind of view that is distinctively different from these two options. The view is important because it can accommodate and make intelligible (...) certain cases of authoritative self-knowledge that cannot easily be made intelligible, if at all, by these other two types of accounts. My aim in this paper is to defend this view against those who maintain that a same-order view is sufficient to account for authoritative self-knowledge. (shrink)

This is a review of Kathrin Gluer's Donald Davidson: A Short Introduction. A dispute about the grounding of the Principle of Charity is discussed, and some resources Davidson has for responding to a criticism of his theory of action.

In recent years, several systematic theories of linguistic meaning have been offered that give pride of place to linguistic practice, or the process of linguistic communication. Often these theories are referred to as neo-pragmatist or new pragmatist; I call them 'practice-based'. According to practice-based theories of meaning, the process of linguistic communication is somehow constitutive of, or otherwise essential for the existence of, propositional linguistic meaning. Moreover, these theories disavow, or downplay, the semantic importance of inflationary notions of representation. I (...) introduce the basic ideas and motives behind some practice-based theories of meaning, and offer some reasons why an eliminativist, non-quietist, epistemic practice-based approach to meaning that 1) disavows any explanatory role for the linguistic community as such, 2) prioritizes sentence meaning over word meaning, and 3) may , in the end, be naturalistic, should be favored over its practice-based competitors. (shrink)

If evidence is propositional, is one’s evidence limited to true propositions or might false propositions constitute evidence? In this paper, I consider three recent attempts to show that there can be ‘false evidence,’ and argue that each of these attempts fails. The evidence for the thesis that evidence consists of truths is much stronger than the evidence offered in support of the theoretical assumptions that people have relied on to argue against this thesis. While I shall not defend the view (...) that evidence is propositional, I shall defend the view that any propositional evidence must be true. (shrink)

In his book Tales of the Mighty Dead Brandom engages Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of interpretation in order to show that his inferentialist approach to understanding conceptual content can explain and underwrite the main theses of Gadamer’s hermeneutics which he calls “the gadamerian hermeneutic platitudes”. In order to assess whether this claim is sound, I analyze the three types of philosophical interpretations that Brandom discusses: de re, de dicto and de traditione, and argue that they commit him to an “ecumenical historicism” (...) that is directly at odds with the hermeneutic approach. Although the variety of de re interpretation that Brandom denominates de traditione comes indeed very close to the Gadamerian approach, I conclude that if Brandomian scorekeepers were to adopt it, they could become Gadamerian hermeneuts, but once they did, they would not be able to go back to their scorekeeping practices as described by Brandom. (shrink)

One might take the significance of Davidson’s indeterminacy thesis to be that the question as to which language we can take another to be speaking can only be settled relative to our choice of an acceptable theory for interpreting the speaker. This, in turn, could be taken to show that none of us is ever speaking a determinate language. I argue that this result is self-defeating and cannot avoid collapse into a troubling skepticism about meaning. I then offer a way (...) of trying to make sense of the idea that some utterances do belong to determinate languages even though there is no determinate language one can take another to be speaking. This, however, results in an uninviting picture of communication in which no speaker is really in a position to say what another’s words mean. (shrink)

The topics of social ontology, culture, and institutions constitute a problem complex that involves a broad range of human social and cultural cognitive capacities. We-mode social cognition and shared intentionality appear to be crucial in the formation of social ontology and social institutions, which, in turn, provide the bases for the social manifestation of collective and shared psychological attitudes. Humans have ‘hybrid minds’ that inhabit cultural–cognitive ecosystems. Essentially, these consist of social institutions and distributed cognition that afford the common grounds (...) for the objectives of we-mode shared intentionality. As such, they stabilize social cognition normatively and offer predictive power in social interaction. Full-blown we-mode shared intentionality fundamentally depends on the functions of social institutions. (shrink)

Donald Davidson's explanation of first-person authority turns on an ingenious account of speakers' knowledge of meaning. It nonetheless suffers from a structural defect and yields, at best, expressive know-how for speakers. I argue that an expressivist strand already latent in Davidson's paratactic treatment of the semantics of belief attribution can be exploited to repair the defect, and so to yield a plausible account of first-person authority.

I defend the view that we should not overintellectualize the mind. Nonhuman animals can occupy islands of practical rationality: they can have contextbound reasons for action even though they lack full conceptual abilities. Holism and the possibility of mistake are required for such reasons to be the agent's reasons, but these requirements can be met in the absence of inferential promiscuity. Empirical work with animals is used to illustrate the possibility that reasons for action could be bound to symbolic or (...) social contexts, and connections are made to simulationist accounts of cognitive skills. (shrink)

This paper examines learning as a capability, taking as its starting point the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. The paper is concerned to highlight the relation between learning and truth, and it does so by examining the idea of a genealogy of truth and also Donald Davidson’s coherence theory. Thus the notion of truth is understood to be not only built into the capability of learning but also translated across into other capabilities.

The starting-point is the distinction between concept and conception. Our conceptions of gold, for instance, are the different understandings we get when we hear the word ‘gold’ whereas the concept of gold consists in the scientific determination of what gold is. It depends on the context whether it is more reasonable to claim a concept or to look for fitting conceptions. By arguing against metaphysical realism and for non-metaphysical realism, I will elaborate on some philosophical reasons for dealing with conceptions (...) instead of concepts of God, and secondly, I will discuss how such conceptions should be critically assessed. (shrink)

Owing in part to Rorty’s energetic promotional efforts, Davidson’s philosophy of language has received much attention in recent decades from quarters most diverse, creating at times a sense of an almost protean versatility. Conspicuously missing from the rapidly growing literature on the subject is a sustained discussion of the relationship between Davidson’s interpretive theory and history: an omission all the more surprising since a comparison between Davidson and Gadamer has been pursued at some length and now, it seems,abandoned—all without as (...) much as a mention of history, which does, of course,play a prominent role in Gadamer’s thought. The issue, moreover, is hardly negligible. Davidson understood his work as an attempt to reconcile the demands of rigorous naturalism with the Kantian picture of human rationality,thereby salvaging what he considered to be important and interesting features of the human world from mechanistic reduction. For many thinkers of the 20th century, including Dewey and Gadamer, the irreducibly human had to do with the historical being of mankind, with historicity as the unique mark of our species. Yet, Davidson has virtually nothing to say about history and, in fact, a recent study by Giuseppina D’Oro (2004b), comparing Collingwood and Davidson, concludes that Davidson’s model of interpretation results in a distorted picture of understanding, as judged by the standards of a historically informed interpretive practice. Examining the causes of their disagreement, then,should help us make some headway towards a clearer sense of what it means to understand historically, by gleaning some additional constraints that the requirement of historicity imposes upon an interpretive theory. We start with D’Oro’s criticism of Davidson and discuss the alternative account of interpretation she proposes. Afterwards, we turn to Collingwood to see if either account does justice to his central insights, ending with some suggestions about the conceptual adjustments required to accommodate them. (shrink)

Saul Kripke's influential ‘sceptical paradox’ of semantic rule-following alleges that speakers cannot have any justification for using a word one way rather than another. If it is correct, there can be no such thing as meaning anything by a word. I argue that the paradox fails to undermine meaning. Kripke never adequately motivates its excessively strict standard for the justified use of words. The paradox lacks the resources to show that its standard is truly mandatory or that speakers do not (...) frequently satisfy the well-motivated competitor I offer. So the paradox fails. (shrink)

RésuméLa parution récente du troisième recueil d'articles de Donald Davidson, lequel devrait être suivi de deux autres, incite à examiner les thèmes qui traversent tousses travaux. Parmices thèmes se trouve leprincipe de charité. Considerant tout le parti que Davidson a tiré du PC, je me propose d'en faire un examen attentif. Dans la première partie, j'examine diverses formulations du PC par Davidson. Dans la seconde partie, je montre que la formulation qu'exigent ses travaux d'epistémologie est intenable étant donné ce qu'il (...) en dit dans ses travaux de sémantique. De là, je conclus que Davidson ne peut se servir du PC que dans ses travaux de sémantique ou pas du tout. (shrink)

The publication of Davidson 2001, anthologizing articles from the 1980s and 1990s, encourages reconsidering arguments contained in them. One such argument is Davidson's omniscient-interpreter argument ('€˜OIA'€™) in Davidson 1983. The OIA allegedly establishes that it is necessary that most beliefs are true. Thus the omniscient interpreter, revived in 2001 and now 20 years old, was born to answer the skeptic. In Part I of this paper, I consider charges that the OIA establishes only that it is possible that most beliefs (...) are true; if correct, then it is also possibly the case that most beliefs are false—the skeptic’s very position. Next, I consider two responses on Davidson'€™s behalf, showing that each fails. In Part II, I show that the OIA establishes neither that it is necessarily merely possibly but actually the case that most beliefs are true. I then conclude that this is enough to answer the skeptic. (shrink)

The idea that there are conceptual schemes, relative to which we conceptualize experience, and empirical content, the “raw” data of experience that get conceptualized through our conceptual schemes into beliefs or sentences, is not new. The idea that there are neither conceptual schemes nor empirical content, however, is. Moreover, it is so new, that only four arguments have so far been given against this dualism, with Donald Davidson himself presenting versions of all four. In this paper, I show that in (...) both the general and Davidson’s specific form the first three arguments against scheme-content dualism rely on the fourth. From many there is just one. Then I show that the fate of the first three arguments against scheme-content dualism hangs on that of the fourth. Finally I present four reasons why the fourth argument fails. For the sake of the dualism’s detractors, therefore, one can only hope that forthcoming arguments against scheme-content dualism fare better than those given so far. (shrink)

According to Donald Davidson, linguistic meaning is determined by the principle of charity. Because of Davidson's semantic behaviourism, charity's significance is both epistemic and metaphysical: charity not only provides the radical interpreter with a method for constructing a semantic theory on the basis of his data, but it does so because it is the principle metaphysically determining meaning. In this paper, I assume that charity does determine meaning. On this assumption, I investigate both its epistemic and metaphysical status: is charity (...) a priori or a posteriori? And what kind of necessity does it have? According to Davidson himself, charity is an a priori truth and its necessity is conceptual: it is essential to, or constitutive of, our common concepts of meaning and belief. Not only does this generate tension within Davidson's own, Quine-inspired epistemology, but there is independent reason to think of charity as an empirical truth. Even so, charity might be essential to belief and meaning in the sense of being an a posteriori necessity. I conclude that our ordinary modal intuitions might well support charity's psychological-nomological necessity, but that they do not reach all the way to metaphysical necessity. (shrink)

Truth and knowledge are conceptually related and there is a way of construing both that implies that they cannot be solely derived from a description that restricts itself to a set of scientific facts. In the first section of this essay, I analyse truth as a relation between a praxis, ways of knowing, and the world. In the second section, I invoke the third thing—the objective reality on which we triangulate as knowing subjects for the purpose of complex scientific endeavours (...) like medical science and clinical care. Such praxes develop robust methods of “keeping in touch” with disease and illness. An analysis drawing on philosophical semantics motivates the needed account of meaning and truth and underpins the following argument: the formulation and dissemination of knowledge rests on language; language is selective in what it represents in any given situation; the praxes of a given culture are based on this selectivity; but human health and illness involve whole human beings in a human life-world; therefore, medical knowledge should reflectively transcend, where required, biomedical science towards a more inclusive view. Parts three and four argue that a post-structuralist account of the human subject can avoid both scientism and idealism or unconstrained relativism. (shrink)

A certain ‘pragmatist’ view of concept possession has defined the mainstream of Anglophone philosophy of language/mind for decades: namely, that to have the concept C is to be able to distinguish Cs from non‐Cs, and/or to recognize the validity of certain C‐involving inferences. The present paper offers three arguments why no such account could be viable. An alternative ‘Cartesian’ view is outlined, according to which having C is being able to think about Cs ‘as such’. Some consequences of the proposed (...) paradigm shift are briefly considered. (shrink)

In the first section of this paper I review the notion of Radical Interpretation, introduced by Donald Davidson in order to account for linguistic meaning and propositional thought. It is then argued that this concept, as embedded in Davidson's whole philosophical system, gives rise to a view of communication as a key explanatory concept in the social sciences. In the second section of the paper it is shown how this view bears upon the question as to what the bounds of (...) linguistic behaviour are. As opposed to major psychological and sociological perspectives on language, Davidson's communication-centred position gives rise to an inclusive, context-dependent answer to this question. (shrink)

How should the policies of search engines and other information intermediaries be ethically evaluated? It is argued that Kant’s principles for the public use of reason are useful starting points for the formulation of criteria for such an evaluation. The suggestion is, furthermore, that a search engine can be seen to provide a testimony to the user concerning what information that is most relevant to her query. This suggestion is used as the basis for the development of a broadly Kantian (...) account of a rational searcher. It is argued that the search engine companies are morally required to publish their information policies and act in accordance with them but given the threat of search engine spam they can have no obligation to publish the details of their algorithms. (shrink)

Abstract: In Mind and World, McDowell conceives of the content of perceptual experiences as conceptual. This picture is supposed to provide a therapy for skepticism, by showing that empirical thinking is objectively and normatively constrained. The paper offers a reconstruction of McDowell's view and shows that the therapy fails. This claim is based on three arguments: 1) the identity conception of truth he exploits is unable to sustain the idea that perception-judgment transitions are normally truth conducing; 2) it could be (...) plausible only from an externalist point of view that is in tension with the view of normativity that motivates conceptualism; 3) the identity conception of truth is incompatible with McDowell's recent version of conceptualism in terms of ‘non-propositional intuitive contents’. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize theory-biased and overly individualist approaches to understanding others and introduce the PAIR account of joint attention as a pragmatic, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that this relation obtains in virtue of intentional contents in the minds of the co-attenders, and – against the received understanding of intentional states as propositional attitudes – that we should recognize what I call “subject mode” and “position mode” intentional content. Based on findings from developmental psychology, I propose that (...) subject mode content represents the co-attenders as co-subjects, who are like them and who are at least disposed to act jointly with them. I conclude by arguing that in joint attention we experience and understand affective, actional and perceptual relations at a non-conceptual level prior to the differentiation of mind and body. (shrink)