I provide an explanation of moral understanding. I begin by describing decisions, es- pecially moral ones. I detail ways in which deviations from an ideal of decision-making occur. I link deviations to characteristic critical judgments, e.g. being cavalier, banal, coura- geous, etc. Moral judgments are among these and carry a particular personal gravity. The question I entertain in following chapters is: how do they carry this gravity? In answering the question, I try “external” accounts of moral understanding. I distin- guish (...) between the ideas of a person and a life. The idea of a life essayed is of a network of relations to others. The character of those relations, e.g. friendship, is the object of our understanding of ourselves and our lives. I argue that one’s understanding of oneself conditions the context of decision-making. I elaborate one way of making moral under- standing answerable to truth using Plato’s metaphysics in the Philebus. Truth is valued and truth is essential to the independence of the moral such that seeming right and being right are distinct. However, truth is neither primary nor exhaustive of morality, because we have additional distinct resources for morally judging others. I turn instead to an “internal” account of moral understanding to answer the question regarding the personal gravity of moral criticism. Using Winch’s work on universalizabil- ity and fellowship, I argue that our conception of others must be sufficient to reflect their individuality within our moral understanding. Second, using Gaita’s work on remorse and the lucidity of self-reflection, I argue that the truth about ourselves and the wrong we do others can arrest and constrain our moral understanding and our authority. Moral understanding operates in a social milieu: argument, conversation and rational- ity. Arguments are grounded in meanings with primary (shared) sense, but solicit agree- ment in secondary sense—of what is similar, of what follows. Meaning in the secondary sense can be necessarily practical, creating practical necessities within points of view. Accounting for the consequences and understanding of disagreement is identified as pressing. An original contribution is the idea of critical authority. One’s articulation of moral meaning is controlled via the critical authority expressed using critical vocabulary. Accepting another’s critical authority is based, in differing domains, on our relation to them, e.g. friendship, trust, fellowship. The nature of inter-personal relations are delim- ited by the critical authority characteristic of those relations. Critical authority explains the independent and personal force of moral criticism. To be intelligible depends on accepting some critical authorities, though I allow for the intelligible repudiation of morality in some circumstances. Wronging someone is ex- plained as denying his critical authority, thus denying his relation to oneself, and thereby undermining his place in the moral world. The consequence of wrongdoing is the disinte- gration of the moral world. I defend against Nagel’s realism and Korsgaard’s constructivism. Both are committed to judging individuals but their accounts of morality undermine the intelligibility of the personal gravity of moral criticism. Developing the idea of Moral Consensus, I defend myself against the related charge of relativism. (shrink)

There has frequently been taken to be a tension, if not an incompatibility, between "externalist" theories of content (which allow the make-up of one's physical environment and the linguistic usage of one's community to contribute to the contents of one's thoughts and utterances) and the "methodologically individualist" intuition that whatever contributes to the content of one's thoughts and utterances must ultimately be grounded in facts about one's own attitudes and behavior. In this dissertation I argue that one can underwrite such (...) externalist theories within a methodologically individualistic framework by understanding semantic norms in terms of the need to reach, for each of one's terms, a type of "equilibrium." Each speaker's commitment to making her _own_ beliefs and applications consistent allows one to incorporate these 'external' factors into the contents of their thoughts and utterances in a way that remains methodologically individualistic. Methodologically individualistic accounts are typically taken to be unable to incorporate 'external' factors such as the world's physical make-up or communal usage because of arguments suggesting that the individual's own beliefs and usage underdetermine or even misidentify what, according to externalist accounts, they mean by their terms. These arguments, however, only seem plausible if one presupposes a comparatively impoverished conception of the individual's beliefs. The beliefs a speaker associates with a given term extend far beyond the handful of sentences they would produce if asked to list such beliefs. In particular, speakers have an implicit, but rich, understanding of their language, their world, and the relation between them. Speakers typically understand languages as shared temporally extended practices about which they can be, both individually and collectively, mistaken. Once this conception of language is taken into account, the ascriptions which purportedly forced 'non-individualistic' conceptions of content upon us (particularly ascriptions which seemed to tie what we meant to social use rather than our own beliefs) turn out to be ultimately grounded in the individual's own beliefs. Indeed, our self-conception does much more than merely underwrite 'non-individualistic' ascriptions.. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Christopher Peacocke defends a sophisticated version of Conceptual Role Theory. For him, the nature of a concept is completely determined by an account of what it is to possess that concept. The possession conditions he puts forward rest on the notion of primitively compelling transitions or, more recently, on the idea of implicit conceptions. I show that his account is circular and appeals to a dubious distinction between constitutive transitions and transitions that depend on factual beliefs. I also point (...) out that his possession conditions violate the Publicity Constraint; and, finally, I raise doubts about the psychological reality of primitively compelling transitions and implicit conceptions. (shrink)

Alfred Tarski's work on truth has become a touchstone for a great deal of philosophical work on truth. A good grasp of it is critical for understanding the contemporary literature on truth and semantics. In this paper, I present a fresh interpretation of Tarski's view, one which aims to draw it out more fully in areas of philosophical interest.

I happen to believe that though human experiences are to be characterized as pluralistic they are all rooted in the one reality. I would assume the thesis of pluralism but how could I maintain my belief in the realism? There are various discussions in favor of realism but they appear to stay within a particular paradigm so to be called “internal realism”. In this paper I would try to justify my belief in the reality by discussing a special use of (...) indexicals. I will argue for my indexical realism by advancing the thesis that indexicals can be used as an inter-agentic referential term. Three arguments for the thesis will be presented. The first argument derives from a revision of Kaplan-Kvart’s notion of exportation. Their notions of exportation of singular terms can be analyzed as intra-agentic exportation in the context of a single speaker and theirs may be revised so as to be an inter-agentic exportation in the context of two speakers who use the same indexicals. The second is an argument from the notion of causation which is specifically characterized in the context of inter-theoretic reference. I will argue that any two theories may each say “this” in order to refer what is beyond its own theory. Two theories address themselves to ‘this’ same thing though what ‘this’ represents in each theory turn out to be different objects all together. The third argument is an argument which is based on a possibility of natural reference. Reference is used to be taken mostly as a 3-place predicate: Abe refers an object oi with an expression ej. The traditional notion of reference is constructive and anthropocentric. But I would argue that natural reference is a reference that we humans come to recognize among denumerably many objects in natural states: at a moment mi in a natural state there is a referential relation among objects o1, o2, o3, . . , oj, o j+1, . . which interact to each other as agents of information processors. Natural reference is an original reference which is naturally given and to which humans are passive as we derivatively refer it by using ‘this’. (shrink)

This paper offers both exegetical and systematic reconsiderations of Donald Davidson’s view on metaphor. In his essay What Metaphors Mean, Davidson argued against the idea that metaphors have any kind of propositional content beyond the literal meaning of the relevant sentence. Apart from this negative claim, Davidson also made a constructive proposal by suggesting that metaphor’s distinctive effect is to prompt a mental state of seeing-as. These two points seem connected insofar as Davidson makes the following assumptions. First, metaphors cause (...) their distinctive effects in an a-rational way. Second, seeing-as is a nonpropositional mental state. If we side with Davidson in thinking of meaning as rational and propositional, then it follows that metaphors’ distinctive effects cannot be an instance of meaning. They have the wrong format and are brought about in the wrong way. Against this background, I distinguish a strong reading and a modest reading of Davidson’s wrong-kind objection to metaphorical meaning. By taking into account some of Davidson’s later pronouncements on the matter, this paper aims to show that Davidson did not hold on to the strong version of the wrong-kind objection. This would open up the way to conceiving of metaphorical meaning in terms of speaker’s meaning, were it not for the fact that Davidson sticks to the wrong-way objection. The two concluding sections examine the cogency of the wrong-way objection as applied to metaphorical speaker’s meaning, and offer a model for thinking about the a-rational mental causation Davidson thought metaphors exhibit. (shrink)

∗Thanks to J. C. Beall, Alex Byrne, Jason Decker, Tyler Doggett, Paul Elbourne, Adam Elga, Warren Goldfarb, Delia Graff, Richard Heck, Charles Parsons, Mark Richard, Susanna Siegel, Jason Stanley, Judith Thomson, Carol Voeller, Brian Weatherson, Ralph Wedgwood, Steve Yablo, Cheryl Zoll, and an anonymous referee for valuable comments and discussions. Versions of this material were presented in my seminar at MIT in the Fall of 2000, and at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Parts of this paper also derive from (...) my comments on a paper of Scott Soames at the ‘Liars and Heaps’ conference at the University of Connecticut in the Fall of 2002. I am grateful for the help of these audiences, and especially to Prof. Soames. (shrink)

When I talk about the objects of belief I do not mean, e.g., the sun to which my thought that the sun will rise tomorrow refers; I do not mean the objects we think about. I take objects rather in a general philosophical sense; they simply are the bearers of properties and the relata of relations. I am thus concerned with the objects that are related by the belief relation „_a_ believes that _p_“. In this scheme „ _a _“ represents (...) a person or an epistemic subject; but I am not going to discuss what a person is. „ _p _“ or „that _p _“ represents an object, namely the object of belief; and I am going to discuss what this is. In other words, I am interested in belief contents – to use a less neutral, narrower and equally unclear term. (shrink)

Tarski’s pioneering work on truth has been thought by some to motivate a robust, correspondence-style theory of truth, and by others to motivate a deflationary attitude toward truth. I argue that Tarski’s work suggests neither; if it motivates any contemporary theory of truth, it motivates conceptual primitivism, the view that truth is a fundamental, indefinable concept. After outlining conceptual primitivism and Tarski’s theory of truth, I show how the two approaches to truth share much in common. While Tarski does not (...) explicitly accept primitivism, the view is open to him, and fits better with his formal work on truth than do correspondence or deflationary theories. Primitivists, in turn, may rely on Tarski’s insights in motivating their own perspective on truth. I conclude by showing how viewing Tarski through the primitivist lens provides a fresh response to some familiar charges from Putnam and Etchemendy. (shrink)

I investigate the consequences for semantics, and in particular for the semantics of tense, if time is assumed to have a branching structure not out of metaphysical necessity (to solve some philosophical problem) but just as a contingent physical fact, as is suggested by a currently-popular approach to the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

My paper reflects on the debate about reasons for action and action explanations between Wittgensteinian teleological approaches and causalist theories inspired by Davidson. After a brief discussion of similarities and differences in the philosophy of language, I sketch the prehistory and history of the controversy. I show that the conflict between Wittgenstein and Davidson revolves neither around revisionism nor around naturalism. Even in the philosophy of mind and action, Davidson is not as remote from Wittgenstein and his followers as is (...) commonly assumed: there are numerous points of contact of both a biographical and a substantive kind. The real conflict concerns the difference between Davidson’s official subjectivist approach to reasons for action, according to which they are mental states of believing and desiring (or their onsets) on the one hand, and an objectivist approach, according to which reasons for action are what is believed or desired, non-mental facts or states of affairs. (shrink)

The following essay begins by outlining the pragmatist link between truth claims and democratic deliberations. To this end, special attention will be paid to Jeffrey Stout’s pragmatist enfranchisement of religious citizens. Stout defends a deliberative notion of democracy that fulfills stringent criteria of inclusion and security against domination. While mitigating secular exclusivity, Stout nonetheless acknowledges the new visibility of religion in populist attempts to dominate political life through mass rule and charismatic authorities. In response, I evaluate recent innovations in deliberative (...) democratic systems theory (DDST). By adding a pragmatist inflection to DDST, I aim to apprehend the complex religious interactions between partisan interest groups as well as the trust-building capacities of minipublics. (shrink)

This paper tries to say in what sense truth is a norm, a thesis that Donald Davidson, whose view are examined, denies. After skteching his conception of rationality, it is argued that truth is a norm in only the sense that we ought to believe what we believe is true, not that we all to believe everything which is true. This minimal norm of truth is isolated and defended.

Teresa believes in God. Maggie’s wife believes that the Earth is flat, and also that Maggie should be home from work by now. Anouk—a cat—believes it is dinner time. This dissertation is about what believing is: it concerns what, exactly, ordinary people are attributing to Teresa, Maggie’s wife, and Anouk when affirming that they are believers. Part I distinguishes the attitudes of belief that people attribute to each other (and other animals) in ordinary life from the cognitive states of belief (...) theoretically posited by (some) cognitive scientists. Part II defends the view that to have an attitude of belief is to live—to be disposed to act, react, think, and feel—in a pattern that an actual belief attributor identifies with taking the world to be some way. Drawing on scientific, scholarly, and literary sources of evidence, How Beliefs are like Colors provides a framework for research on belief across the humanities and sciences of the mind. (shrink)

I argue that there are two ways of construing Wittgenstein’s slogan that meaning is use. One accepts the view that the notion of meaning must be explained in terms of truth-theoretic notions and is committed to the epistemic conception of truth. The other keeps the notion of meaning and the truth-theoretic notions apart and is not committed to the epistemic conception of truth. I argue that Dummett endorses the first way of construing Wittgenstein’s slogan. I address the issue by discussing (...) two of Dummett’s arguments against the realist truth-theoretic conception of meaning: the manifestation argument and the argument for the unintelligibility of classical logic. I examine the dialectic of those arguments and show that they rest on the assumption that meaning needs to be explained in terms of truth-theoretic notions.Tvrdim da postoje dva načina shvaćanja Wittgensteinova slogana da je značenje upotreba. Jedno prihvaća gledište da se pojam značenja mora objasniti na osnovi istinitosnoteoretskih pojmova te je obvezano na epistemičku koncepciju istine. Drugo pojam značenja i istinitosnoteoretske pojmove drži odvojenima te nije obvezano na epistemičku koncepciju istine. Tvrdim da Dummett prihvaća prvo shvaćanje Wittgensteinova slogana. Problemu pristupam tako što raspravljam o dvama Dummettovim argumentima protiv realističke istinitosnoteoretske koncepcije značenja: o argumentu iz manifestacije i argumentu za neshvatljivost klasične logike. Ispitujem dijalektiku tih argumenata i pokazujem da počivaju na pretpostavci da se značenje mora objasniti na osnovi istinitosnoteoretskih pojmova. (shrink)

This thesis engages with three topics and the relationships between them: (i) the phenomenon of disagreement (paradigmatically, where one person makes a claim and another denies it); (ii) the normative character of disagreements (the issue of whether, and in what sense, one of the parties is “at fault” for believing something that’s untrue); (iii) the issue of which theory of what truth is can best accommodate the norms relating belief and truth. People disagree about all sorts of things: about whether (...) climate is changing, death penalty is wrong, sushi is delicious, or Louis C.K. is funny. However, even focusing on disagreements in the evaluative domain (e.g., taste, moral and comedic), where people have the intuition that there is ‘no fact of the matter’ about who is right, there are significant differences that require explanation. For instance, disagreement about taste is generally perceived as shallow. People accept to disagree and live comfortably with that fact. By contrast, moral disagreement is perceived as deep and sometimes hard to tolerate. Comedic disagreement is similar to taste. However, it may involve an element of ‘intellectual snobbery’ that is absent in taste disagreement. The immediate questions are whether these contrasts allow of precise characterization and what is responsible for them. I argue that, once a case is made for the truth-aptness of judgments in these areas, the contrast can be explained in terms of variable normative function of truth – as exerting a lightweight normative constraint in the domain of taste and a stricter constraint in the moral domain. In particular I claim that while truth in the moral domain exerts a sui generis deontic control, this normative feature of truth is silent in both the taste and the comedic domains. This leads me to investigate how to conceive of truth in the light of normative variability. I argue that an amended version of deflationism – minimally inflated deflationism – can account for the normative variability of truth. (shrink)

In Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams sought to defend the value of truth by giving a vindicatory genealogy revealing its instrumental value. But what separates Williams’s instrumental vindication from the indirect utilitarianism of which he was a critic? And how can genealogy vindicate anything, let alone something which, as Williams says of the concept of truth, does not have a history? In this paper, I propose to resolve these puzzles by reading Williams as a type of pragmatist and his genealogy (...) as a pragmatic genealogy. On this basis, I show just in what sense Williams’s genealogy can by itself yield reasons to cultivate a sense of the value of truth. Using various criticisms of Williams’s genealogical method as a foil, I then develop an understanding of pragmatic genealogy which reveals it to be uniquely suited to dealing with practices exhibiting what I call self-effacing functionality—practices that are functional only insofar as and because we do not engage in them for their functionality. I conclude with an assessment of the wider significance of Williams’s genealogy for his own oeuvre and for further genealogical inquiry. (shrink)

What is the best way to understand 'applies to' when it is said of a linguistic theory that it applies to a particular language-user? We can answer by saying that a linguistic theory is applicable to an individual language-user just in case that individual tacitly-knows the theory. But this is an uninformative answer until we are told how to understand 'tacit-knowledge'. The end goal of this thesis is to defend the claim that we should take tacit-knowledge to be, simply, knowledge. (...) Towards this end I argue against the satisfactoriness of competing ways of understanding 'tacit-knowledge'. For example, the instrumentalist position is neutral on whether linguistic theories are actually known by the ordinary language-users who tacitly-know them; instead, linguistic theories are to be such that knowing them would enable someone to do whatever it is that the tacit-knower can do. Other competing positions hold that, though tacit-knowledge is a psychological relation of some sort, it is not genuine knowledge. I also attempt to meet specific objections to the claim that a typical language-user could plausibly be said to know a linguistic theory. An objection on which I focus is based on the claim that typical language-users do not possess the requisite concepts for having genuine knowledge of a linguistic theory. The aim in attempting to meet these objections is to open up the way for the linguistic theorist to exploit a paradigm of explanation: explanation of behaviour by knowledge attribution. Attributing knowledge of linguistic theories would be potentially explanatory of linguistic behaviour in exactly the same way that attributions of knowledge in non-linguistic spheres are potentially explanatory of behaviour. Finally, because my emphasis is specifically on semantic theories, I attempt to explicate and defend the claim that a semantic theory could and should have the form of a theory of truth. (shrink)

In the early 20th century, scepticism was common among philosophers about the very meaningfulness of the notion of truth – and of the related notions of denotation, definition etc. (i.e., what Tarski called semantical concepts). Awareness was growing of the various logical paradoxes and anomalies arising from these concepts. In addition, more philosophical reasons were being given for this aversion.1 The atmosphere changed dramatically with Alfred Tarski’s path-breaking contribution. What Tarski did was to show that, assuming that the syntax of (...) the object language is specified exactly enough, and that the metatheory has a certain amount of set theoretic power,2 one can explicitly define truth in the object language. And what can be explicitly defined can be eliminated. It follows that the defined concept cannot give rise to any inconsistencies (that is, paradoxes). This gave new respectability to the concept of truth and related notions. Nevertheless, philosophers’ judgements on the nature and philosophical relevance of Tarski’s work have varied. It is my aim here to review and evaluate some threads in this debate. (shrink)

Metaphysics has had a long history of debate over its viability, and substantivity. This thesis explores issues connected to the realism question within the domain of metaphysics, ultimately aiming to defend a realist, substantive metaphysics by responding to so-called deflationary approaches, which have become prominent, and well supported within the recent metametaphysical and metaontological literature. To this end, I begin by examining the changing nature of the realism question. I argue that characterising realism and anti-realism through theories of truth unduly (...) places epistemology prior to ontology, and is unwarranted in assuming a non-neutrality between theories of truth and positions within the realism debate. I therefore propose a characterisation of realism and anti-realism understood through truthmaking. This produces a suitable working characterisation of realism that will be used within the remainder of this project. In the second section, I trace the historical influences upon current deflationary approaches to metaphysics, most prominently those of Carnap, and Putnam. I argue that Quine’s supposed attack on Carnap’s anti-metaphysical thought fails, and show how current deflationary thought, most prominently exhibited by Hirsch, came to focus on linguistically derived concerns over the substantivity of metaphysics. In the third section, I outline a number of issues for the deflationist, and defend the coherency and legitimacy of the unrestricted existential quantifier. Focusing on the linguistic aspect of deflationism, I argue that the conception of language that the deflationist relies upon lacks suitable empirical and theoretical support within linguistics and other related domains. Furthermore, I suggest that linguistic analysis in fact supports the claim that the quantifier carries no inherent restrictions. This restores our ability to suitably posit the unrestricted existential quantifier, as a quantifier wherein the domain is only restricted by metaphysically substantive restrictions. Through this, I argue that metaphysics is a substantive domain of discourse. Lastly, I sketch a positive account of how, under an empirically and theoretically justified conception of language, metaphysics can be coherently held to be a realist, substantive enterprise, contra claims that hold that the nature of language inherently prevents metaphysics being considered to be a substantive domain of discourse. (shrink)

The paper presents an argument against a "metaphysical'* conception of logic according to which logic spells out a specific kind of mathematical structure that is somehow inherently related to our factual reasoning. In contrast, it is argued that it is always an empirical question as to whether a given mathematical structure really does captures a principle of reasoning. lMore generally, it is argued that it is not meaningful to replace an empirical investigation of a thing by an investigation of its (...) a priori analyzable structure without paying due attention to the question of whether it really is the structure of the thing in question.) It is proposed to elucidate the situation by distinguishing two essentially different realms with which our reason must deal: "the realm of the natural'*, constituted by the things of our empirical world, and "the realm of the formal'*, constituted by the structures that we use as "prisms'* to view, to make sense of, and to reconstruct the world. It is suggested that this vantage point may throw light on many foundational problems of logic. (shrink)

Jaspers’s binary distinction between understanding and explanation has given way first to a proliferation of explanatory levels and now, in John Campbell’s recent work, to a conception of explanation with no distinct levels of explanation and no inbuilt rationality requirement. I argue that there is still a role for understanding in psychiatry and that is to demystify the assumption that the states it concerns are mental. This role can be fulfilled by placing rationality at the heart of understanding without a (...) commitment to the attempt to use rationality to shed light on interpretation and mindedness as though from outside those notions. Delusions still present a significant challenge to philosophical attempts at understanding, but this merely reflects the genuine clinical difficulties such states present. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a brief, critical survey of contemporary work on truth. We begin by reflecting on the distinction between substantivist and deflationary truth theories. We then turn to three new kinds of truth theory—Kevin Scharp's replacement theory, John MacFarlane's relativism, and the alethic pluralism pioneered by Michael Lynch and Crispin Wright. We argue that despite their considerable differences, these theories exhibit a common "pluralizing tendency" with respect to truth. In the final section, we look at the underinvestigated (...) interface between metaphysical and formal truth theories, pointing to several promising questions that arise here. (shrink)

Od radykalnego przekładu do radykalnej interpretacji – Quine, Davidson i coś jeszcze Ponad trzydzieści lat począwszy od roku 1970 filozofia Willarda Van Ormana Quine'a i Donalda Davidsona stanowiła dominujący nurt w teorii interpretacji, epistemologii i ontologii. Rekonstruując i analizując tę tradycję w pierwszym kroku zarysowuję zwrot Quine'a od teorii znaczenia ku teorii przekładu. Jest to jednocześnie zwrot w stronę naturalizacji epistemologii, post-empiryzmu w teorii znaczenia i radykalnego przekładu oraz jego teorii bazowej. Post-empiryzm w teorii znaczenia głosi, że przekonania i inne (...) postawy propozycjonalne są nierozerwalnie połączone ze znaczeniem. Epistemologia znaturalizowana twierdzi natomiast, że owo połączenie pęka, jeśli wprowadzi się koncepcję znaczenia jako bodźca. Jednak, jak będę argumentował kolejnym kroku, znaczenie jako bodziec nie wyjaśnia epistemicznych warunków radykalnego przekładu. Następnie, po analizie koncepcji radykalnego przekładu Quine'a przejdę do koncepcji radykalnej interpretacji Davidsona. Przeprowadzę analizę przebudowy modelu radyklanego przekładu na model radykalnej interpretacji, przy jednoczesnym odrzuceniu jego teorii bazowe. W koncepcji Davidsona szczególnie interesujące jest to, czy teoria znaczenia oparta na warunkach prawdziwości oraz zastosowanie zasady życzliwości jako warunków każdej interpretacji mogą załatać epistemiczną przepaść. Zostanie tu wykazane, że wypowiedzi nadawcy nie mogą być rozumiane przez zastosowanie zasady życzliwości jako ogólnego warunku radykalnej interpretacji. Na końcu swoich rozważań zaproponuję alternatywne ramy dla modelu radykalnej interpretacji. (shrink)

Brandom's book Making It Explicit defends Davidson's claim that conceptual thought can arise only on the background of a practice of mutual interpretation, without endorsing the further view that one can be a thinker only if one has the concept of a concept. This involves giving an account of conceptual content in terms of what Brandom calls practical deontic attitudes. In this paper, I make a plea for the conclusion that these practical attitudes are best seen as intentional, but non-conceptually (...) contentful. In particular, I argue that the hypothesis that Brandom's practical deontic attitudes are non-conceptually contentful wouldn't conflict with his view that non-conceptual intentionality is merely derivative. I then explore some of the implications which this hypothesis might have with respect to various forms of «intentional ascent». (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that we should be pluralists about truth and in turn, eliminativists about the property Truth. Traditional deflationists were right to suspect that there is no such property as Truth. Yet there is a plurality of pluralities of properties which enjoy defining features that Truth would have, were it to exist. So although, in this sense, truth is plural, Truth is non-existent. The resulting account of truth is indebted to deflationism as the provenance of the suspicion (...) that Truth doesn't exist. But it would be hasty to simply classify the account as deflationary. Each of the 'truth-like' properties that it recognizes is highly substantive--that is, complex and explanatorily potent. So we should deflate Truth by recognizing that it doesn't exist, but we should also recognize that one of the most vital tasks in truth theory is to discover the essences of the many truth-like properties. My aim here is to do precisely this. (shrink)

A significant and interesting part of the post-Gettier literature regarding the analysis of propositional knowledge is the attempt to supplement the traditional tripartite analysis by employing a fourth condition regarding the defeasibility of evidence and thus to preclude the counterexamples displayed in Gettier’s original article. My aim in this paper is to critically examine the sort of externalism that accompanies the most promising of the proposed fourth conditions, due to Pollock, in order to offer some fresh insights on this old (...) epistemological issue. I argue that Pollock’s paradigmatic treatment of the matter gives rise to a critical problem with regard to the exact role of the fourth condition and its relation with the onto-semantic or alethic condition of propositional knowledge, to wit, truth. In the light of this discussion, I draw certain conclusions about epistemic externalism and point out some of its theoretical shortcomings. (shrink)

This work explores the hypothesis that natural language is a tool for changing a language user's state of mind and, more specifically, the hypothesis that a sentence's meaning is constituted by its characteristic role in fulfilling this purpose. This view contrasts with the dominant approach to semantics due to Frege, Tarski and others' work on artificial languages: language is first and foremost a tool for representing the world. Adapted to natural language by Davidson, Lewis, Montague, et. al. this dominant approach (...) has crystalized as truth-conditional semantics: to know the meaning of a sentence is to know the conditions under which that sentence is true. Chapter 1 details the animating ideas of my alternative approach and shows that the representational function of language can be understood in terms of the more general function of changing representational mental states. Chapters 2-4 argue that the additional resources of this more general conception of meaning allow us to explain certain phenomena involving conditionals and grammatical mood that truth-conditional semantics does not. In the analysis of these specific phenomena and the articulation of the general approach on offer, it emerges that this approach combines insights and benefits from both use-theoretic and truth-theoretic work on meaning. (shrink)

I discuss the propositional knowledge of an omniscient being, knowledge of facts that can be represented by that-clauses in sentences such as ‘John knows that the world is round.’ I shall focus upon questions about a supposedly omniscient being who propositionally knows the truth about all current states of affairs. I shall argue that there is no such being.

Hilary Putnam has famously undergone some radical changes of mind with regard to the issue of scientific realism and its wider epistemological bearings. In this paper I defend the arguments put forward by early Putnam in his essays on the causal theory of reference as applied to natural-kind terms, despite his own later view that those arguments amounted to a form of 'metaphysical' realism which could not be sustained against various lines of sceptical attack. I discuss some of the reasons (...) for Putnam's retreat, first to the theory of 'internal (or framework-relative) realism proposed in his middle-period writings, and then to a commonsensepragmatist stance which claims to resituate this whole discussion on ground that has not been trorldden into ruts by the contending philosophical schools. In particular I examine his protracted engagement with various forms of anti-realist doctrine (Michael Dummett's most prominent among them), with Wittgenstein's thinking about language-games or meaning-as-use, and with a range of sceptical- relativist positions adopted in the wake of Quine's influential attack on the two last 'dogmas' of logical empiricism. My paper seeks to show that Putnam has been over-impressed by some of the arguments — from these and other sources — which he takes to constitute a knock-down case against the kind of extemalist and causal-realist approach developed in his early essays. It concludes by re-stating that position in summary form and relating it to other, more recent defences of causal realism in epistemology and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Existen tres grandes estrategias para intentar combinar realismo y antirrealismo: una distinción de niveles, una distinción de aspectos y una distinción de partes. En el trabajo se analizan estas tres estrategias. La primera de ellas ha sido desarrollada por numerosos autores. Comentamos en detalle los planteamientos recientes de José Zalabardo a propósito de ciertas tesis de John McDowell, Crispin Wright y Wittgenstein. Esta estrategia plantea graves dificultades. la segunda estrategia parece poder escapar a ellas. Sin embargo, no puede ser adoptada (...) en un sentido máximamente general. Proponemos una combinación basada en la tercera estrategia. Realismo y antirrealismo podrían combinarse de una manera muy natural cuando son adoptados en un sentido local. There are three main strategies to try to combine realism and anti-realism: a distinction of levels, a distinction of aspects, and a distinction of parts. In the paper, these strategies are analysed. The first one has been elaborated by many authors. We discuss in detail the approach of José Zalabardo concerning some theses of John McDowell, Crispin Wright and Wittgenstein. This strategy entails important problems. The second strategy seems to be capable of offering a way out of them. However, it cannot be adopted in a maximally general sense. We argue for a combination based on the third strategy. Realism and anti-realism can be combined in a very natural way when they are adopted in a local sense. (shrink)

It is argued that the slingshot argument does not soundly challenge the truth-maker correspondence theory of truth, by which at least some distinct true propositions are expected to have distinct truth- makers. Objections are presented to possible exact interpretations of the essential slingshot assumption, in which no fully acceptable reconstruction is discovered. A streamlined version of the slingshot is evaluated, in which explicit contradiction results, on the assumption that identity and nonidentity contexts are purely extensional relations, effectively establishing the intensionality (...) of identity. (shrink)