We initially characterize what we’ll call existence problems as problems where there is evidence that a putative entity exists and this evidence is not easily dismissed; however, the evidence is not adequate to justify the claim that the entity exists, and in particular the entity hasn’t been detected. The putative entity is elusive. We then offer a strategy for determining whether an existence problem is philosophical or scientific. According to this strategy (1) existence problems are characterized in terms of causal (...) roles, and (2) these problems are categorized as scientific or philosophical on the basis of the epistemic context of putative realizers. We argue that the first step of the strategy is necessary to avoid begging the question with regard to categorization of existence problems, and the second step categorizes existence problems on the basis of a distinction between two ways in which an entity can be elusive. This distinction between kinds of elusiveness takes as background a standard account of inference to the best explanation. Applying this strategy, we argue that the existence of a multiverse is a scientific problem. (shrink)

Externalism holds that the content of our utterances and thoughts are determined partly by the environment. Here, I offer an argument which suggests that externalism is incompatible with a natural view about ontological commitment--namely, the Quinean view that such commitments are fixed by the range of the variables in your theory. The idea in brief is that if Oscar mistakenly believes that water = XYZ, the externalist ontologically commits Oscar to two waterish kinds, whereas the Quinean commits him to one (...) such kind (albeit a metaphysically impossible kind). The penultimate section addresses a variety of objections to the argument. (shrink)

A contribution to a symposium on Herman Cappelen's Philosophy without Intuitions.

We distinguish and discuss two different accounts of the subject matter of theories of reference, meta-externalism and meta-internalism. We argue that a form of the meta- internalist view, “moderate meta-internalism”, is the most plausible account of the subject matter of theories of reference. In the second part of the paper we explain how this account also helps to answer the questions of what kind of concept reference is, and what role intuitions have in the study of the reference relation.

A survey of innateness in cognitive science, focusing on (1) what innateness might be, and (2) whether concepts might be innate.

The ‘Ordinary Language’ philosophy of the early 20th century is widely thought to have failed. It is identified with the broader so-called ‘linguistic turn’, a common criticism of which is captured by Devitt and Sterelny (1999), who quip: “When the naturalistic philosopher points his finger at reality, the linguistic philosopher discusses the finger.” (p 280) The implication is that according to ‘linguistic’ philosophy, we are not to study reality or truth or morality etc, but the meaning of the words ‘reality’, (...) ‘truth’, ‘morality’ etc. Ordinary Language philosophy has fallen so thoroughly into disrepute because it is supposed to advocate that not only are we to study words and meanings rather than the phenomena themselves (which is apparently bad enough), but we must restrict that study to words and meanings as they occur in the language used by the ordinary speaker. A number of preposterous corollaries have been taken to follow from this view. Most seriously, perhaps, and irritatingly, is that any theory which contains ‘non-ordinary’ uses of expressions is thereby ‘meaningless’ or simply false – which is clearly absurd. In this paper I show that this is a completely inaccurate picture of Ordinary Language philosophy. My aim is to correct these persistent misinterpretations, and make possible a more sensible reassessment of the philosophy. (shrink)

Given the fundamental role that concepts play in theories of cognition, philosophers and cognitive scientists have a common interest in concepts. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of controversy regarding what kinds of things concepts are, how they are structured, and how they are acquired. This chapter offers a detailed high-level overview and critical evaluation of the main theories of concepts and their motivations. Taking into account the various challenges that each theory faces, the chapter also presents a novel approach (...) to concepts that is organized around two ideas. The first is a pluralistic view of differing types of conceptual structure. The second is a model that treats concepts as atomic representations that are linked to various types of conceptual structures. (shrink)

Most contemporary philosophers of mind claim to be in search of a 'naturalistic' theory. However, when we look more closely, we find that there are a number of different and even conflicting ideas of what would count as a 'naturalization' of the mind. This article attempts to show what various naturalistic philosophies of mind have in common, and also how they differ from one another. Additionally, it explores the differences between naturalistic philosophies of mind and naturalisms found in ethics, epistemology, (...) and philosophy of science. Section 1 introduces a distinction between two types of project that have been styled 'naturalistic', which I call philosophical naturalism and empirical naturalism . Sections 2 to 6 canvass different strands of philosophical naturalism concerning the mind, followed by a much briefer discussion of attempts to provide empirical naturalizations of the mind in Section 7 . Section 8 concludes the essay with a consideration of the relations between philosophical and empirical naturalism in philosophy of mind, arguing that at least some types of philosophical naturalism are incompatible with empirical naturalism. (shrink)

Frege's theory of indirect contexts and the shift of sense and reference in these contexts has puzzled many. What can the hierarchy of indirect senses, doubly indirect senses, and so on, be? Donald Davidson gave a well-known 'unlearnability' argument against Frege's theory. The present paper argues that the key to Frege's theory lies in the fact that whenever a reference is specified (even though many senses determine a single reference), it is specified in a particular way, so that giving a (...) reference implies giving a sense; and that one must be 'acquainted' with the sense. It is argued that an indirect sense must be 'immediately revelatory' of its reference. General principles for Frege's doctrine of sense and reference are sated, for both direct and indirect quotation, to be understood iteratively. I also discuss Frege's doctrine of tensed and first person statements in the light of my analysis. The views of various other authors are examined. The conclusion is to ascribe to Frege an implicit doctrine of acquaintance similar to that of Russell. (shrink)

It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such 'arguments from reference.' Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross-cultural work suggests that intuitions about reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture (Machery et al. 2004). We argue that accommodating this variation within a theory of reference undermines arguments from reference.

The thesis that the necessary and the a priori are extensionally equivalent consists of two independent claims: 1) All a priori truths are necessary and 2) all necessary truths are a priori. In Naming and Necessity1 Saul A. Kripke gives examples of necessary but a posteriori truths, so he disagrees with the second leg of the thesis.2 His examples are of two types; on the one hand statements involving essential properties and on the other hand true identity statements. My concern (...) will be with examples of the second type and whether they refute (2). (2), however, is ambiguous and can mean one of three things. (shrink)

Minimal entities are, roughly, those that fall under notions defined by only deflationary principles. In this paper I provide an accurate characterization of two types of minimal entities: minimal properties and minimal facts. This characterization is inspired by both Schiffer's notion of a pleonastic entity and Horwich's notion of minimal truth. I argue that we are committed to the existence of minimal properties and minimal facts according to a deflationary notion of existence, and that the appeal to the inferential role (...) reading of the quantifiers does not dismiss this commitment. I also argue that deflationary existence is language-dependent existence—this clarifies why minimalists about properties and facts are not realists about these entities though their language may appear indistinguishable from the language of realists. (shrink)

I offer an explication of the notion of computer, grounded in the practices of computability theorists and computer scientists. I begin by explaining what distinguishes computers from calculators. Then, I offer a systematic taxonomy of kinds of computer, including hard-wired versus programmable, general-purpose versus special-purpose, analog versus digital, and serial versus parallel, giving explicit criteria for each kind. My account is mechanistic: which class a system belongs in, and which functions are computable by which system, depends on the system's mechanistic (...) properties. Finally, I briefly illustrate how my account sheds light on some issues in the history and philosophy of computing as well as the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The general tendency or attitude that Dreier 2004 calls creeping minimalism is ramping up in contemporary analytic philosophy. Those who entertain this attitude will take for granted a framework of deflationary or minimal notions – principally semantical1 and ontological – by means of which to analyse problems in different philosophical fields – e.g. theory of truth, metaethics, philosophy of language, the debate on realism and antirealism, etc. Let us call sweeping minimalist the philosopher affected by creeping minimalism. The framework of (...) minimal notions that the sweeping minimalist takes for granted encompasses, for instance, the concept of truth, reference, proposition, fact, individual, and property. Minimal notions are characterized in terms of general platitudinous principles expressed by schemata like the following (cf.: 26): ‘S’ is true if and only if S; ‘S’ is true if and only if ‘S’ corresponds to the facts; a has the property of being P if and only if a is P. Where ‘S’ and ‘a is P’ stand for sentences satisfying superficial constraints of truth-aptitude (i.e. sentences in declarative form subject to communally acknowledged standards of proper use), and.. (shrink)

forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

A long-standing debate has dominated systematic biology and the ontological commitments made by its theories. The debate has contrasted individuals and the part – whole relationship with classes and the membership relation. This essay proposes to conceptualize the hierarchy of higher taxa is terms of a hierarchy of homeostatic property cluster natural kinds (biological species remain largely excluded from the present discussion). The reference of natural kind terms that apply to supraspecific taxa is initially fixed descriptively; the extension of those (...) natural kind terms is subsequently established by empirical investigation. In that sense, classification precedes generalization, and description provides guidance to empirical investigation. The reconstruction of a hierarchy of (homeostatic property cluster) natural kinds is discussed in the light of cladistic methods of phylogeny reconstruction. (shrink)

I defend a theory of mental representation that satisfies naturalistic constraints. Briefly, we begin by distinguishing (i) what makes something a representation from (ii) given that a thing is a representation, what determines what it represents. Representations are states of biological organisms, so we should expect a unified theoretical framework for explaining both what it is to be a representation as well as what it is to be a heart or a kidney. I follow Millikan in explaining (i) in terms (...) of teleofunction, explicated in terms of natural selection. -/- To explain (ii), we begin by recognizing that representational states do not have content, that is, they are neither true nor false except insofar as they both “point to” or “refer” to something, as well as “say” something regarding whatever it is they are about. To distinguish veridical from false representations, there must be a way for these separate aspects to come apart; hence, we explain (ii) by providing independent theories of what I call f-reference and f-predication (the ‘f’ simply connotes ‘fundamental’, to distinguish these things from their natural language counterparts). -/- Causal theories of representation typically founder on error, or on what Fodor has called the disjunction problem. Resemblance or isomorphism theories typically founder on what I’ve called the non-uniqueness problem, which is that isomorphisms and resemblance are practically unconstrained and so representational content cannot be uniquely determined. These traditional problems provide the motivation for my theory, the structural preservation theory, as follows. F-reference, like reference, is a specific, asymmetric relation, as is causation. F-predication, like predication, is a non-specific relation, as predicates typically apply to many things, just as many relational systems can be isomorphic to any given relational system. Putting these observations together, a promising strategy is to explain f-reference via causal history and f-predication via something like isomorphism between relational systems. -/- This dissertation should be conceptualized as having three parts. After motivating and characterizing the problem in chapter 1, the first part is the negative project, where I review and critique Dretske’s, Fodor’s, and Millikan’s theories in chapters 2-4. Second, I construct my theory about the nature of representation in chapter 5 and defend it from objections in chapter 6. In chapters 7-8, which constitute the third and final part, I address the question of how representation is implemented in biological systems. In chapter 7 I argue that single-cell intracortical recordings taken from awake Macaque monkeys performing a cognitive task provide empirical evidence for structural preservation theory, and in chapter 8 I use the empirical results to illustrate, clarify, and refine the theory. (shrink)

Many psychologists think that concepts should be understood on analogy with the terms of scientific theories, yet the significance of this claim has always been obscure. In this paper, I clarify the psychological content of the theory analogy, focusing on influential pieces by Susan Carey. Once plainly put, the analogy amounts to the view that a mental representation has its semantic properties by virtue of its role in a restricted knowledge structure. One of the commendable things about Carey's work is (...) that, unlike many other psychologists who appeal to the theory analogy, she takes seriously the need to specify how these structures are constrained. At the same time, the constraints she offers are insufficient. Her account also faces challenges from work in the semantics of natural kind terms. (shrink)

Conceptual analysis is undergoing a revival in philosophy, and much of the credit goes to Frank Jackson. Jackson argues that conceptual analysis is needed as an integral component of so-called serious metaphysics and that it also does explanatory work in accounting for such phenomena as categorization, meaning change, communication, and linguistic understanding. He even goes so far as to argue that opponents of conceptual analysis are implicitly committed to it in practice. We show that he is wrong on all of (...) these points and that his case for conceptual analysis doesn't succeed. At the same time, we argue that the sorts of intuitions that figure in conceptual analysis may still have a significant role to play in philosophy. So naturalists needn't disregard intuitions altogether. (shrink)

Language of thought theories fall primarily into two views. The first view sees the language of thought as an innate language known as mentalese, which is hypothesized to operate at a level below conscious awareness while at the same time operating at a higher level than the neural events in the brain. The second view supposes that the language of thought is not innate. Rather, the language of thought is natural language. So, as an English speaker, my language of thought (...) would be English. -/- My goal is to defend the second view. My methodology will see the project broken down into three major areas. First I will show that human thinking requires a language of thought, after which I will highlight some problems with assuming that this language is innate and hidden. Included in this section will be a small introduction to the compatibility problem. The compatibility problem offers some obvious difficulties for mentalese theories and these will be discussed. The next stage of the project will focus on evidence that can be put forward in support of the claim that natural language is the language of thought. Our most direct source of evidence comes from introspection, and this will play a dominant role in the discussion. The final part of the thesis will involve an examination of the principle arguments that have been put forward against the idea that natural language is the language of thought. My goal will be to show that these arguments do not entail the existence of mentalese, nor do they show that natural language is not the language of thought. I will provide answers to the arguments, and will explain the phenomena they point to in terms of natural language being the language of thought. (shrink)

Una Stojnić urges the radical view that the meaning of context-sensitive language is not “partially determined by non-linguistic features of utterance situation”, as traditionally thought, but rather “is determined entirely by grammar—by rules of language that have largely been missed”. The missed rules are ones of discourse coherence. The paper argues against this radical view as it applies to demonstrations, demonstratives, and the indexical ‘I’. Stojnić’s theories of demon-strations and demonstratives are found to be seriously incomplete, failing to meet the (...) demands on any theory of reference. Furthermore, the paper argues that, so far as Stojnić’s theories of these terms go, they are false. This argument appeals to perception-based theories of demonstratives, a part of the tradition that Stojnić strangely overlooks. The paper ends by arguing briefly that though coherence has a place in a theory of understanding, it has no place in a theory of meaning. (shrink)

Beauvoir’s The Second Sex stands out as a master class in the accommodation of conceptual and inferential practices to real, objective gender kinds. Or so I will argue. To establish this framing, we will first need in hand the kind of scientific epistemology that correctly reconciles epistemic progress and error, particularly as pertains to the unruly social sciences. An important goal of the paper is to develop that epistemological framework and unlock its ontological implications for the domain of gender. As (...) we will see, the real gender kinds that contemporary social scientists successfully identify and track are very much the same kinds to which Beauvoir was coordinating reference in The Second Sex. The correct identification of those kinds endures as a moral and political priority, regardless of one’s other gender-related normative agenda. (shrink)

This paper is partly exegetical, partly systematic. I argue that Frege's account of what he called “colouring” contains some important insights on how communication is related to mental states such as mental images or emotions. I also show that the Fregean perspective is supported by current research in psycholinguistics and that a full understanding of some linguistic phenomena that scholars have accounted for in terms of either semantics or pragmatics need involve psycholinguistic elements.

This volume draws connections between Wittgenstein's philosophy and the work of Saul Kripke, especially his Naming and Necessity. Saul Kripke is regarded as one of the foremost representatives of contemporary analytic philosophy. His most important contributions include the strict distinction between metaphysical and epistemological questions, the introduction of the notions of contingent a priori truth and necessary a posteriori truth and original accounts of names, descriptions, identity, necessity and realism. The chapters in this book elucidate the relevant connections between Kripke's (...) work and Wittgenstein, specifically concerning the standard meter, contingent apriori and rule-following. The contributions shed light on how Kripke's philosophical outlook was influenced by Wittgenstein, and how mainstream analytic philosophy and Wittgensteinian philosophy can fruitfully engage with one another. Kripke and Wittgenstein will be of interest to philosophers working on Wittgenstein, Kripke, and the history of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I revisit an important response to the Moral Twin Earth (MTE) challenge: The Common Functional Role strategy (CFR). I argue that CFR is open to a revenge problem. MTE-cases allegedly show that two linguistic communities can be in genuine disagreement even when they are regulated by distinct families of properties. CFR provides a way to reconcile the intuition that the two communities are in genuine disagreement with the claim that the use of moral terms by both communities (...) is causally regulated by different families of properties. This is done by identifying a functional role that those families of properties both fulfill. Still, even if CFR is successful, its proponents need to face a serious revenge problem. Roughly, it could be that the families of properties that regulate each community are equally perfect realizers of the relevant higher-order functional state. I suggest that the proponent of CFR faces a dilemma: either CFR has controversial implications about first-order moral theory, or CFR needs to be coupled with substantive and parochial empirical/metaphysical assumptions to avoid those implications. (shrink)

In this article, I defend an account of linguistic comprehension on which meaning is not cognized, or on which we do not tacitly know our language's semantics. On this view, sentence comprehension is explained instead by our capacity to translate sentences into the language of thought. I explain how this view can explain our capacity to correctly interpret novel utterances, and then I defend it against several standing objections.

This extended abstract summarises some of the basic points of AI ethics and policy as they present themselves now. We explain the notion of AI, the main ethical issues in AI and the main policy aims and means.

The rejection of behaviorism in the 1950s and 1960s led to the view, due mainly to Noam Chomsky, that language must be studied by looking at the mind and not just at behavior. It is an understatement to say that Chomskyan linguistics dominates the field. Despite being the overwhelming majority view, it has not gone unchallenged, and the challenges have focused on different aspects of the theory. What is almost universally accepted, however, is Chomsky’s view that understanding language demands a (...) theory that posits mental states that represent rules of language. Call this claim, following Cowie (1999), Representationalism or (R). According to (R), ‘‘[e]xplaining language mastery and acquisition requires the postulation of contentful mental states and processes involving their manipulation’’ (Cowie, 1999, p. 154). Although (R) is nothing more than the general assumption on which cognitive psychology is founded applied to the case of language, even it has had its detractors. Critics have argued that linguistic competence should not in fact be thought of as based on the possession of a body of linguistic knowledge but should be thought of, rather, as a kind of skill. This is an important challenge because one might be inclined to think that no recognizable form of Chomskyan linguistics could withstand the falsification of (R). In this paper we attempt to show that in fact (R) could be false without doing much damage to Chomskyan linguistics at all. Indeed, it is possible that the Chomskyan position could be made more coherent by adopting the view we will sketch. Our claim, therefore, is that critics of (R) might be right, but that this does not obviously make them serious critics of the Chomskyan program. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 2, Page 406-433, April 2022.

The book presents a thoroughly elaborated logical theory of generalized truth-values understood as subsets of some established set of truth values. After elucidating the importance of the very notion of a truth value in logic and philosophy, we examine some possible ways of generalizing this notion. The useful four-valued logic of first-degree entailment by Nuel Belnap and the notion of a bilattice constitute the basis for further generalizations. By doing so we elaborate the idea of a multilattice, and most notably, (...) a trilattice of truth values – a specific algebraic structure with information ordering and two distinct logical orderings, one for truth and another for falsity. Each logical order not only induces its own logical vocabulary, but determines also its own entailment relation. We consider both semantic and syntactic ways of formalizing these relations and construct various logical calculi. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a novel defense of descriptivism about reference. Our argument is based on principles about the relevance of speaker intentions to reference that are shared by many opponents of descriptivism, including Saul Kripke. We first show that two such principles that are plausibly endorsed by Kripke and other prominent externalists in fact entail descriptivism. The first principle states that when certain kinds of speaker intentions are present, they suffice to determine and explain reference. According to the (...) second principle, certain speaker intentions must be present whenever something determines or explains reference. We then go on to make these principles more precise and argue that it would be costly to deny either of them. Since on the more precise understanding we suggest, the conjunction of these principles still entails descriptivism, we conclude that opponents of descriptivism have to give up some highly plausible assumption about the relation between speaker intentions and reference. (shrink)

This paper argues against Boydian synthetic moral naturalism by way of a critical examination at metasemantic issues. I first show that the Boydian metasemantics delivers determinate but wrong reference, building on an analysis by Schroeter and Schroeter. I then propose a diagnosis which says that the problem occurs due to an overly simple way of understanding externalist metasemantics, and that a proper understanding requires us to pay heed to the higher-level constraints set by the speakers’ deferring pattern. That in turn (...) is restricted by what I call reference defeaters, which are essentially some central beliefs held by the speakers and are so called because they have the power to defeat reference of a term to certain things. Applying the notion to moral discourse, I argue that the entrenched is/ought distinction held by the ordinary speakers defeats the reference of the moral predicates to natural properties, that is, synthetic moral naturalism is not true. (shrink)

The notion of rigidity looms large in philosophy of language, but is beset by difficulties. This paper proposes a simple theory of rigidity, according to which an expression has a world-relative semantic property rigidly when it has that property at, or with respect to, all worlds. Just as names, and certain descriptions like The square root of 4, rigidly designate their referents, so too are necessary truths rigidly true, and so too does cat rigidly have only animals in its extension. (...) After spelling out the theory, I argue that it enables us to avoid the headaches that attend the misbegotten desire to have a simple rigid/non-rigid distinction that applies to expressions, giving us a simple solution to the problem of generalizing the notion of rigidity beyond singular terms. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind and language who advance causal theories face a sort of conjunction problem. When we say that the thing had in mind or the thing referred to is a matter of what causally impacted the thinker or speaker, we must somehow narrow down the long conjunction of items in a causal chain, all of which contributed to the having in mind, but only one of which becomes the object of thought or the linguistic referent. Here, I sketch a (...) notion of cognitive focus intended to do this narrowing. The notion borrows three key aspects from visual focus and some technological aides—causation, amplification, and suppression. I suggest a broader application of this framework to address the conjunction problem not only in ordinary contexts of perceptual focus but also in evidence cases involving non-perceptual cognitive focus. I further suggest cognitive focus is helpful in distinguishing referential vs. attributive thought. (shrink)

The paper urges that polysemous phenomena are typically semantic not pragmatic. The part of a message sent by a polysemous expression is typically one of its meanings encoded in the speaker's language and not the result of pragmatic modification. The hearer receives that part of the message by a process of disambiguation, by detecting which item in the lexicon the speaker has selected. This is the best explanation of observed regularities. The paper argues that the experimental evidence from psycholinguistics, particularly (...) that produced in discussions of “underspecification” and “overspecification,” does not undermine this view nor support the pragmatic alternative. (shrink)

According to a thesis I call thelinguistic assumption, the structure of language is a guide to the fundamental nature of reality. It is deployed in the metaphysical debate over the nature of time. In that debate, it is more radical than the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and should be rejected. A weak interpretation of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis makes the empirical claim that speakers of different languages experience, perceive, or think about aspects of the world differently. I survey recent experimental evidence that supports (...) this hypothesis which, I argue, gives us further reason to reject the linguistic assumption. (shrink)

The most popular and influential strategies used against semantic externalism and the causal theory of reference are critically examined. It is argued that upon closer scrutiny, none of them emerges as truly convincing.

The new externalist picture of natural kind terms due to Kripke, Putnam, and others has become quite popular in philosophy. Many philosophers of science have remained sceptical. Häggqvist and Wikforss have recently criticised this view severely. They contend it depends essentially on a micro-essentialist view of natural kinds that is widely rejected among philosophers of science, and that a scientifically reasonable metaphysics entails the resurrection of some version of descriptivism. It is argued in this paper that the situation is not (...) quite as dark for the new theory of reference as many critics suggest. There are several distinct questions here which should not be conflated and ought to be dealt with one by one. Descriptivism remains arguably problematic. (shrink)

In this paper, we present and discuss the findings of two experiments about reference change. Cases of reference change have sometimes been invoked to challenge traditional versions of semantic externalism, but the relevant cases have never been tested empirically. The experiments we have conducted use variants of the famous Twin Earth scenario to test folk intuitions about whether natural kind terms such as ‘water’ or ‘salt’ switch reference after being constantly (mis)applied to different kinds. Our results indicate that this is (...) indeed so. We argue that this finding is evidence against Saul Kripke’s causal-historical view of reference, and at least provisional evidence in favor of the causal source view of reference as suggested by Gareth Evans and Michael Devitt. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Amie Thomasson’s Easy Ontology rests on a vicious circularity that is highly damaging. Easy Ontology invokes the idea of application conditions that give rise to analytic entailments. Such entailments can be used to answer ontological questions easily. I argue that the application conditions for basic terms are only circularly specifiable showing that Thomasson misses her self-set goal of preventing such a circularity. Using this circularity, I go on to show that Easy Ontology as a (...) whole collapses. (shrink)

It is a widely accepted thesis in the cognitive sciences and in naturalistic philosophy of mind that the contents of at least some mental representations are innate. A question that has popped up in discussions concerning innate mental representations is this. Are externalist theories of mental content applicable to the content of innate representations? Views on the matter vary and sometimes conflict. To date, there has been no comprehensive assessment of the relationship between content externalism and content innateness. The aim (...) of this paper is to provide such an assessment. I focus on the notions of innateness that are employed in innateness hypotheses within the cognitive sciences and adjacent fields of philosophy, and on causal externalist theories of content. I distinguish between three accounts of what being innate might amount to in innateness hypotheses within the cognitive sciences, and between three types of causal externalism. I explain what the possibility of innate externalistically individuated representations depends upon given all nine combinations. I explain why causal externalism can be true of innate mental representations, given but one of these combinations. (shrink)

Michael Devitt develops a hybrid causal theory of non-empty proper names and certain singular terms that semantically resemble them. He considers that the use of a name designates an object not by virtue of the different information we know about it, but by a causal network that starts from the first uses of the name to designate the object, through a "reference borrowing" from the previous uses. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.35828.50564.

Presentation and comparison of the main causal theories of reference for proper names, and a proposal of a new approach based on the analogy of the causal chain of reference with the block chain from blockchain technology and Paul Ricœur's narrative theory. After a brief Introduction in which the types of sentences from the concept of possible worlds are reviewed, and an overview of the theory in the Causal Theory of Reference, I present the causal theory of the reference proposed (...) by Saul Kripke, then two hybrid causal theories developed by Gareth Evans and Michael Devitt. In the section Blockchain and the causal tree of reference I present my idea of developing a new causal theory of reference for proper names through a causal tree of reference. In the Conclusions I talk about the further development of the ways in which the terms of reference could refer to certain objects and individuals, the main criticisms of the causal theories, and suggestions for future development. -/- CONTENTS: -/- Abstract Introduction 1. The causal theory of reference 2. Saul Kripke 3. Gareth Evans 4. Michael Devitt 5. Blockchain and the causal tree of reference Conclusions Bibliografie -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.26330.90562 . (shrink)

Unlike conceptual analysis, conceptual engineering does not aim to identify the content that our current concepts do have, but the content which these concepts should have. For this method to show the results that its practitioners typically aim for, being able to change meanings seems to be a crucial presupposition. However, certain branches of semantic externalism raise doubts about whether this presupposition can be met. To the extent that meanings are determined by external factors such as causal histories or microphysical (...) structures, it seems that they cannot be changed intentionally. This paper gives an extended discussion of this ‘externalist challenge’. Pace Herman Cappelen’s recent take on this issue, it argues that the viability of conceptual engineering crucially depends on our ability to bring about meaning change. Furthermore, it argues that, contrary to first appearance, causal theories of reference do allow for a sufficient degree of meaning control. To this purpose, it argues that there is a sense of what is called ‘collective long-range control’, and that popular versions of the causal theory of reference imply that people have this kind of control over meanings. (shrink)