Deep disagreements concern our most basic and fundamental commitments. Such disagreements seem to be problematic because they appear to manifest epistemic incommensurability in our epistemic systems, and thereby lead to epistemic relativism. This problem is confronted via consideration of a Wittgensteinian hinge epistemology. On the face of it, this proposal exacerbates the problem of deep disagreements by granting that our most fundamental commitments are essentially arationally held. It is argued, however, that a hinge epistemology, properly understood, does not licence epistemic (...) incommensurability or epistemic relativism at all. On the contrary, such an epistemology in fact shows us how to rationally respond to deep disagreements. It is claimed that if we can resist these consequences even from the perspective of a hinge epistemology, then we should be very suspicious of the idea that deep disagreements in general are as epistemologically problematic as has been widely supposed. (shrink)

How could the fundamental mental operations which facilitate scientific theorizing be the product of natural selection, since it appears that such theoretical methods were neither used nor useful "in the cave"-i.e., in the sequence of environments in which selection took place? And if these wired-in information processing techniques were not selected for, how can we view rationality as an adaptation? It will be the purpose of this paper to address such questions as these, and in the process to sketch some (...) of the considerations that an evolutionary account of rationality may involve. By describing the broad framework within which the evolution of rationality may eventually be understood, I hope to undermine the idea that evolutionary theory is somehow incapable of dealing with this characteristic and requires supplementation by some novel principle. A more modest ambition of the paper is to try to provoke those who think that there are special problems involved in this evolutionary inquiry to say what these problems are. (shrink)

Much recent discussion in the philosophy of mathematics has concerned the indispensability argument—an argument which aims to establish the existence of abstract mathematical objects through appealing to the role that mathematics plays in empirical science. The indispensability argument is standardly attributed to W. V. Quine and Hilary Putnam. In this paper, I show that this attribution is mistaken. Quine's argument for the existence of abstract mathematical objects differs from the argument which many philosophers of mathematics ascribe to him. Contrary to (...) appearances, Putnam did not argue for the existence of abstract mathematical objects at all. I close by suggesting that attention to Quine and Putnam's writings reveals some neglected arguments for platonism which may be superior to the indispensability argument. (shrink)

1. When we attribute beliefs, desires, and other states of common sense psychology to a person, or for that matter to an animal or an artifact, we are assuming or presupposing that the person or object can be treated as an intentional system. 2. An intentional system is one which is rational through and through; its beliefs are those it ought to have, given its perceptual capacities, its epistemic needs, and its biography…. Its desires are those it ought to have, (...) given its biological needs and the most practicable means of satisfying them…. And its behavior will consist of those acts that it would be rational for an agent with those beliefs and desires to perform. [beliefs + desires  action] 3. If rationality is absent, we cannot coherently ascribe beliefs at all. 4. Therefore, no experiment could demonstrate that people systematically invoke invalid or irrational inferential strategies. (shrink)

Roger Gibson has achieved as much as anyone else, indeed, more, in presenting and defending Quine’s philosophy. It is no surprise that the great man W.V. Quine himself said that in reading Gibson he gained a welcome perspective on his own work. His twin books The Philosophy of W.V. Quine and Enlightened Empiricism have no rivals. We are all indebted to Roger. The essay that follows is intended not only to honor him but also to continue a theme that runs (...) throughout his (and Quine’s) work, namely, the seamless division between science and philosophy. The techniques we invoke are consonant with the naturalistic conception of language that central themes of Professor Gibson’s writings, namely, that language is “a social art to be studied empirically” (Enlightened Empiricism, p. 64). (shrink)

This chapter reviews the major contributions of Donald Davidson to philosophy in the 20th century.

It is natural to think that social groups are concrete material particulars, but this view faces an important objection. Suppose the chess club and nature club have the same members. Intuitively, these are different clubs even though they have a common material basis. Some philosophers take these intuitions to show that the materialist view must be abandoned. I propose an alternative explanation. Social groups are concrete material particulars, but there is a psychological explanation of nonidentity intuitions. Social groups appear coincident (...) but nonidentical because they are perceived to be governed by conflicting social norms. (shrink)

I want to explore what happens to two philosophical issues when we assume that the mind, a functional device, is to be understood by the same sort of functional analysis that guides biological investigation of other organismic systems and characteristics. The first problem area concerns the concept of rationality, its connection with reliability and reproductive success, and the status of rationality hypotheses in attribution of beliefs. It has been argued that ascribing beliefs to someone requires the assumption that that person (...) is rational. It also has been argued that evolutionary theory can account for the capacity we have for rational thought by appealing to the idea that rational methods for constructing beliefs are reliable and therefore represented a selected advantage. Both of these claims about rationality are critically examined. In the second part of the paper, I turn to some criticisms that have been advanced against "functionalist" solutions to the mind/body problem. These criticisms are defused when that doctrine is understood in terms of a Teleological (rather than a Turing Machine) notion of function. However, functionalism does not emerge totally unscathed. Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss saw everything in terms of its function and its perfect performance of its function. In the philosophy of mind, his influence lives on in the form of two ideas: (i) that we must possess rational methods for constructing beliefs, since our minds are the product of natural selection, and (ii) that psychological states and properties are individuated by their psychological functions. Contemporary biology provides the resources for avoiding Pangloss's wideeyed teleology in the study of adaptation. It is to be hoped that progress in psychology will loosen the grip of Panglossian assumptions in the study of mind. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, Uchiyama Gudō, Seno’o Girō, Lin Qiuwu, and others advocated a Buddhism that was radical in two respects. Firstly, they adopted a more or less naturalist stance with respect to Buddhist doctrine and related matters, rejecting karma or other supernatural beliefs. And secondly, they held political and economic views that were radically anti-hegemonic, anti-capitalist, and revolutionary. Taking the idea of such a “radical Buddhism” seriously, A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism asks (...) whether it is possible to develop a philosophy that is simultaneously naturalist, anti-capitalist, Buddhist, and consistent. Rather than a study of radical Buddhism, then, this book is an attempt to radicalize it. The foundations of this “radicalized radical Buddhism” are provided by a realist interpretation of Yogācāra, elucidated and elaborated with some help from thinkers in the broader Tiantai/Tendai tradition and American philosophers Donald Davidson and W.V.O. Quine. A key implication of this foundation is that only this world and only this life are real, from which it follows that if Buddhism aims to alleviate suffering, it has to do so in this world and in this life. Twentieth-century radical Buddhists (as well as some engaged Buddhists) came to a similar conclusion, often expressed in their aim to realize “a Buddha land in this world.” Building on this foundation, but also on Mahāyāna moral philosophy, this book argues for an ethics and social philosophy based on a definition of evil as that what is or should be expected to cause death or suffering. On that ground, capitalism should be rejected indeed, but utopianism must be treated with caution as well, which raises questions about what it means – from a radicalized radical Buddhist perspective – to aim for a Buddha land in this world. (shrink)

Doing Worlds with Words throws light on the problem of meaning as the meeting point of linguistics, logic and philosophy, and critically assesses the possibilities and limitations of elucidating the nature of meaning by means of formal logic, model theory and model-theoretical semantics. The main thrust of the book is to show that it is misguided to understand model theory metaphysically and so to try to base formal semantics on something like formal metaphysics; rather, the book states that model theory (...) and similar tools of the analysis of language should be understood as capturing the semantically relevant, especially inferential, structure of language. From this vantage point, the reader gains a new light on many of the traditional concepts and problems of logic and philosophy of language, such as meaning, reference, truth and the nature of formal logic. (shrink)

Two of the most fundamental distinctions in metaphysics are (1) that between reality (or things in themselves) and appearance, the R/A distinction, and (2) that between entities that are fundamental (or real, etcetera) and entities that are ontologically or existentially dependent, the F/D distinction. While these appear to be two very different distinctions, in Buddhist metaphysics they are combined, raising questions about how they are related. In this paper I argue that plausible versions of the R/A distinction are essentially a (...) special kind of F/D distinction, and conversely, that many F/D distinctions imply an R/A distinction. Nevertheless, while this does suggest that the F/D distinction is more basic than the R/A distinction, it does not favor a particular understanding of the F/D distinction. There are many kinds of existential or ontological dependence that cannot be meaningfully combined into a single notion, and reality does not force us to accept any specific kind of dependence as more fundamental. Consequently, what we consider to be ‘real’, ‘fundamental’, or ‘really existing’ is not entirely given by reality, but partially up to us. (shrink)

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

Bradley Armour-Garb and James A. Woodbridge, in Pretense and Pathology, make an ambitious and far-ranging case that philosophical fictionalism (particularly the pretence variety that they favour) illuminates several long-standing philosophical puzzles posed by words in ordinary language, such as ‘exist’, ‘true’ and ‘means that’, as well as the more technical, ‘refers to’, ‘proposition’ and ‘satisfies’. Along the way, Armour-Garb and Woodbridge discuss topics in the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, ontology, epistemology and more. An important aspect of their project is (...) its nominalist aspiration: by showing (if they do) that pretence is involved when we use the foregoing terms, they hope to show that it’s false that these uses induce ontological commitments (to, e.g., propositions or properties). In this respect, their pretence approach is yet another attempt to undercut the family of indispensability arguments (pioneered by W.V.O. Quine) that prima facie force ontological commitments by means of indispensable language usage. (shrink)

There is a long tradition of drawing metaphysical conclusions from investigations into language. This paper concerns one contemporary variation on this theme: the alleged ontological significance of cognitivist truth-theoretic accounts of semantic competence. According to such accounts, human speakers’ linguistic behavior is in part empirically explained by their cognizing a truth-theory. Such a theory consists of a finite number of axioms assigning semantic values to lexical items, a finite number of axioms assigning semantic values to complex expressions on the basis (...) of their structure and the semantic values of their constituents, and a finite number of production schemata. The theory enables the derivation of truth-conditions for each sentence of the language: something of roughly the form ‘S is true iff P’.1 The claim that speakers stand in a cognitive relation to such theories is advanced, not as a conceptual analysis of semantic competence or understanding, but rather as an empirical hypothesis about human speakers in particular, one part of a broader empirical account of our linguistic competence and cognition generally. It therefore must mesh with the rest of our theorizing in these areas and whatever relevant data from neighboring inquiries there may be. The precise nature of the cognitive relation a speaker is supposed to bear to a truththeory is a matter of some dispute. I speak of ‘‘cognizing’’ (following. (shrink)

In Philosophical Investigations §244, Wittgenstein suggests that we understand avowals (first-person psychological utterances) as manifestations or expressions of the speaker's mental states. An interesting philosophical theory, called expressivism, then develops from this Wittgensteinian idea. However, neo-expressivists disagree with simple expressivists on whether avowals are at the same time assertions, which are truth-evaluable. In this paper, I pursue the expressivist debate about whether avowals must also be viewed as assertions. I consider and reject three neo-expressivist objections against simple expressivism. Then, I (...) offer my own account of why we should understand avowals as assertions. (shrink)

Rumors, for better or worse, are an important element of public discourse. The present paper focuses on rumors as an epistemic phenomenon rather than as a social or political problem. In particular, it investigates the relation between the mode of transmission and the reliability, if any, of rumors as a source of knowledge. It does so by comparing rumor with two forms of epistemic dependence that have recently received attention in the philosophical literature: our dependence on the testimony of others, (...) and our dependence on what has been called the ‘coverage-reliability’ of our social environment (Goldberg 2010). According to the latter, an environment is ‘coverage-reliable’ if, across a wide range of beliefs and given certain conditions, it supports the following conditional: If ~p were true I would have heard about it by now. However, in information-deprived social environments with little coverage-reliability, rumors may transmit information that could not otherwise be had. This suggests that a trade-off exists between levels of trust in the coverage-reliability of official sources and (warranted) trust in rumor as a source of information. (shrink)

This paper considers the relationship between science and common sense. It takes as its point of departure, Eddington’s distinction between the table of physics and the table of common sense, as well as Eddington’s suggestion that science shows common sense to be false. Against the suggestion that science shows common sense to be false, it is argued that there is a form of common sense, basic common sense, which is not typically overthrown by scientific research. Such basic common sense is (...) strongly confirmed by our everyday experience and may itself serve as the basic for scientific realism. (shrink)

§13 of Principia Ethica contains G. E. Moore’s most famous open question arguments. Several of Moore’s contemporaries defended various forms of metaethical nonnaturalism—a doctrine Moore himself endorsed—by appeal to OQAs. Some contemporary cognitivists embrace the force of Moore’s OQAs against metaethical naturalism. And those who posit noncognitivist meaning components of ethical terms have traditionally used OQAs to fuel their own emotivist, prescriptivist, and expressivist metaethical programs. Despite this influence, Moore’s OQAs have been ridiculed in recent decades. Their deployment has been (...) labeled “accident prone,” “simple to dismiss,” and just plain invalid. Critics accuse Moore of begging the question. Others argue that his OQAs founder upon the paradox of analysis. And still others argue that Moore’s open question argumentation is incompatible with the Kripke–Putnam causal theory of reference and thus it “simply fails; it is bankrupt”. I aim to show that there is something of continuing value in Moore’s open question efforts. I present and criticize Nicholas Sturgeon’s influential interpretation of Moore’s OQAs as a means to motivate and explicate my own interpretation of Moore’s thoughts in §13 of Principia Ethica. I then articulate the role that OQAs are intended to play in Moore’s overall argumentative strategies to undermine metaethical naturalism and thereby provide some theoretical support for metaethical nonnaturalism. Finally, I attend to the most prominent objections to Moore’s theorizing and attempt to evaluate the extent to which Moore’s efforts are successful. My hope is to display both the promising portions of Moore’s metaethical argumentation in Principia Ethica as well as its limitations. (shrink)

This is a review essay on Carol Rovane's book The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism. I outline the main line of argument, clarify the central claim, raise some questions about some of the arguments, and suggest some limits on the extent to which one could see another's views as right but not accept them.

This book is an inquiry into the philosophical concern with truth as one joint subject in philosophy of language and metaphysics and presents a theory of truth, substantive perspectivism (SP). Emphasizing our basic pre-theoretic understanding of truth (i.e., what is captured by the axiomatic thesis of truth that the nature of truth consists in capturing the way things are), and in the deflationism vs. substantivism debate background, SP argues for the substantive nature of non-linguistic truth and its notion’s indispensable substantive (...) explanatory role, both of which are not only intrinsically beyond what the linguistic function of the truth predicate can tell but are fundamentally related to the raison d’être of the truth predicate. Taking a holistic approach, SP endeavors to do justice to various reasonable perspectives, which are somehow contained in many competing accounts of truth, through a coordinate system: SP interprets such perspectives as distinct but related perspective-elaboration principles that distinctively (regarding distinct dimensions of the truth concern and/or for the sake of distinct purposes) elaborate, but are also unified by, the truth axiom thesis. To look at the issue from a broader vision, the book also takes a cross-tradition approach exploring the relationship between Daoist thinking of truth and thinking about truth in analytic philosophy.This book will enhance our systematic understanding of the issue through its holistic approach, broaden our vision on the issue via its cross-tradition approach, and enrich the conceptual and explanatory resources in treating the issue. (shrink)

Ecumenical views in metaethics hold that normative utterances express hybrid mental states, states which include both a cognitive and a conative component. The ecumenicist can have her cake and eat it too: the view reaps the benefits of both cognitivist and non-cognitivist theories of normative judgement. The conative component of normative judgements accounts for their necessary link with motivation and rational action. The cognitive component makes it possible for the ecumenicist to endorse expressivism without facing the most difficult Frege-Geach challenges. (...) Ridge (2014) provides a defence of ecumenical expressivism about practical normativity that is both ambitious and compelling. I discuss and try to challenge two (unrelated) parts of the view. In the first section, I’ll raise a question for Ridge’s strategy for addressing the Frege-Geach problem, and in particular his proposed recipe for how to interpret normative assertions of arbitrary logical complexity. Then I discuss Ridge’s defence of cognitivism about rationality. I try to highlight some considerations that make expressivism about theoretical and practical rationality attractive. (shrink)

We revisit an important exchange on the problem of radical skepticism between Richard Rorty and Michael Williams. In his contribution to this exchange, Rorty defended the kind of transcendental approach to radical skepticism that is offered by Donald Davidson, in contrast to Williams’s Wittgenstein-inspired view. It is argued that the key to evaluating this debate is to understand the particular conception of the radical skeptical problem that is offered in influential work by Barry Stroud, a conception of the skeptical problem (...) which generates metaepistemological ramifications for anti-skeptical theories. In particular, we argue that, contra Williams, Rorty’s view that Davidson was offering a theoretical diagnosis of radical skepticism can be consistently maintained with his transcendental approach. (shrink)

The familiar Cartesian sceptical arguments all involve an explanation of our experiences. An account of the persuasive power of the sceptical arguments should explain why this is so. This supports a diagnosis of the error in Cartesian sceptical arguments according to which they mislead us into regarding our perceptual beliefs as if they were justified as inferences to the best explanation. I argue that they have instead a perceptual justification that does not involve inference to the best explanation and that (...) should not be put in doubt by the sceptical hypotheses. (shrink)

Since the linguistic turn, many have taken semantics to guide ontology. Here, I argue that semantics can, at best, serve as a partial guide to ontological commitment. If semantics were to be our guide, semantic data and semantic treatments would need to be taken seriously. Through an examination of plurals and their treatments, I argue that there can be multiple, equally semantically adequate, treatments of a natural language theory. Further, such treatments can attribute different ontological commitments to a theory. Given (...) this, I argue that semantics can fail to deliver determinate ontological commitments and determinate answers to ontological questions, more generally. (shrink)

Davidson’s anomalous monism, his argument for the identity between mental and physical event tokens, has been frequently attacked, usually demanding a higher degree of physicalist commitment. My objection runs in the opposite direction: the identities inferred by Davidson from mental causation, the nomological character of causality and the anomaly of the mental are philosophically problematic and, more dramatically, incompatible with his famous argument against the third dogma of empiricism, the separation of content from conceptual scheme. Given the anomaly of the (...) mental and the absence of psychophysical laws, there are no conceptual resources to relate mental and physical predicates. We fall in the third dogma if we claim that the very same token event is mental and physical. One of the premises must be rejected: I will claim that we do not need a law to subsume cause and effect to be entitled to speak of causation. Davidson has never offered an argument to back this premise. Against such a dogma I will sketch some ideas pointing towards a different conception of causality, singularist and undetachable from explanatory practices. (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)

This thesis examines Nietzsche's philosophy as a response to Kant. I show that Kant, as interpreted by Nietzsche, dissociates epistemology and metaphysics. According to Nietzsche, the consequence of this dissociation is the collapse of Kant's transcendental epistemology into a sceptical idealism, which disables the making of positive metaphysical claims about the nature of reality. I argue that Nietzsche overcomes the dissociation of epistemology and metaphysics by rejecting Kant's distinction between constitutive, empirical knowledge and regulative, metaphysical belief. Furthermore, I show that (...) Nietzsche rejects, what he considers to be, Kant's formalistic constitutive epistemology in favour of a regulative and interest-directed account of knowledge. I argue that Nietzsche adopts an internal realist epistemology that stipulates that our epistemic claims must be justified from within our perspectival practices of justification but that such claims must be subject to a realist constraint. Moreover, I propose that Nietzsche is justified, from within these epistemic parameters, in putting forward metaphysical claims about the nature of reality. The thesis is structured in four chapters. Chapter one examines Nietzsche's appropriation of Kant. Chapter two takes up the issue of Nietzsche's perspectivism in the context of his concerns with the issues of justification and truth. The penultimate chapter examines the emergence of Nietzsche's internal realism in his early writings. Finally, chapter four examines Nietzsche's will to power thesis where I contend that the metaphysics of the will to power is both facilitated by and compatible with his perspectivism. (shrink)

This paper analyzes and discusses Mephisto's famous remark in Goethe's FAUST. It turns out that he is being incoherent in interesting ways.

With a few notable exceptions formal semantics, as it originated from the seminal work of Richard Montague, Donald Davidson, Max Cresswell, David Lewis and others, in the late sixties and early seventies of the previous century, does not consider Wittgenstein as one of its ancestors. That honour is bestowed on Frege, Tarski, Carnap. And so it has been in later developments. Most introductions to the subject will refer to Frege and Tarski (Carnap less frequently) —in addition to the pioneers just (...) mentioned, of course— , and discuss the main elements of their work that helped shape formal semantics in some detail. But Wittgenstein is conspicuously absent whenever the history of the subject is mentioned (usually briefly, if at all). (shrink)

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

Models are the coin of the realm in current philosophy of science, as they are in science itself, having replaced laws and theories as the primary strategy. Logical Positivism tried to erase the older neo-Kantian distinction between ideal constructions and reality. It returns in the case of models. Nowak’s concept of idealization pro- vided an alternative account of this issue. It construed model application as concretizations of hypotheses which improve by accounting for exceptions. This appears to account for physical law. (...) But it raises the problem of uniqueness: is the result unique, as physical law should be? Neo-Kantianism failed this test. Its solutions were circular justifications for claims of uniqueness. Nowak inherited the problem without resolving it. (shrink)

(First paragraph.) Different views on the relation between phenomenal reality, the world as we consciously experience it, and noumenal reality, the world as it is independent from an experiencing subject, have different implications for a collection of interrelated issues of meaning and reality including aspects of metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and philosophical methodology. Exploring some of these implications, this paper compares and brings together analytic, continental, and Buddhist approaches, focusing on relevant aspects of the philosophy of Donald Davidson, Jacques (...) Derrida, Dharmakīrti, and Dōgen. Prima facie, these philosophers have little in common, and indeed the differences are vast. Even in case of the two Western thinkers there is a fundamental difference between Davidson’s anti-dualist identification of phenomenal, experienced reality with the noumenal, real, external world on the one hand, and the bracketing or elimination of noumenal reality at the base of Derrida’s thought on the other, which lead to radically different ideas with regards to (the possibility and nature of) objectivity and our linguistic access to the real/external/noumenal world. Nevertheless, there are important similarities between Dharmakīrti’s theory of apoha and Davidson’s and Derrida’s theories of triangulation and différance respectively, and these similarities can be exploited to bridge some of the differences and attempt a constructive engagement. (shrink)

This paper examines Gadamer's and Davidson's dialogical models of interpretation. It shows them to be comparable, but importantly dissimilar with respect to the kind of agreement they require for communication to be possible. It is argued that this difference entails different concepts of alterity: they model not only how we talk, but implicitly who we can intelligibly talk to. Another important contribution of this paper is to uncover a distinction in Gadamer between two kinds of agreement missed so far by (...) all commentators. The final section of this paper defends a second thesis, namely that the degree of agreement required by the models is proportional to the conceptual difference it can make intelligible. Hence, the extent of graspable cultural difference is not only an empirical matter, but is entailed by our choice of model. (shrink)

Plato did it. Aristotle did it. All the great philosophers did it. You do it and we do it: we draw philosophical conclusions from linguistic data. Although we all do it, the degree, manner, and intensity to which it is done varies. Some have made piecemeal observations about language (e.g., “all these different things have the same term predicated of them”) to draw metaphysical conclusions (e.g., “there is some one existing thing that all these different entities share”). Others have made (...) observations about how all people – or at least, some important subset of them – employ a term (e.g., “we don’t say an action is voluntary unless we wish to say that it was done for (or in) an unusual reason (or manner)”) to draw conclusions about human agency (e.g., “actions that are done in the normal way in the normal course of events are neither free nor compulsory”). And others have looked to how people would talk were certain actual conditions not to be true (e.g., “we would say that we were still talking about Aristotle even if it were to turn out that he didn’t teach Alexander the Great”) to infer necessary features of the semantic realm (e.g., that some propositions must contain an actual individual and not a description of an individual). Still others have looked to empirical results from the science of linguistics (e.g., “the types of complements allowed by the verbs believes and knows are different”) to draw epistemological conclusions (e.g., “knowledge of something does not imply belief of it”), or again “the distributional facts concerning knows that and knows how are the same” to draw the conclusion “practical knowledge is a kind of theoretical knowledge”. (shrink)

A traditional objection to coherentism is that there may be incompatible though equally coherent sets of beliefs. The purpose of the paper is to assess this objection. It is argued that the better a belief "p" coheres with the system of a person, the less likely it is that the negation of the belief coheres equally well with someone else's system, or even that there is someone else who believes the negation of "p". The arguments are based on two plausible (...) assumptions about coherence, and some more controversial assumptions concerning meaning and interpretation. (shrink)

In this paper I will compare some of Dummett and Davidson’s claims on the problem of communication and idiolects: how can we understand each other if we use different idiolects? First I define the problem, giving the alternative theses of (I) the priority of language over idiolects and (II) the priority of idiolects over language. I then present Dummett's claims supporting (I) and Davidson's claims supporting (II).

The widely agreed view that actions are events faces the problem of how to describe the “branches” in so-called action trees, i.e. actions which are done by doing other actions. Moreover, the view is also inconsistent with the existence of two familiar species of agency: omitting something and letting things happen. In this article, an alternative conception of action is proposed which takes letting happen as the paradigm of agency. Agency should be construed as an explanatory relation between agents and (...) things happening in the world. This relational view of agency can accommodate for all kinds of agency: doing, letting happen, omitting, prohibiting. And it also provides a satisfactory account of the ontological basis of action trees. We should at first say that to do something is to originate or to bring into existence, i.e., really, to cause, some not yet existing state either of ourselves or of someone else, or, again, of some body. (shrink)

The idea that science aspires to and routinely achieves truths about the world has been challenged in recent writings. Rather than beginning with a theory of scientific development, or of scientific explanation, we begin with a consideration of truth claims in ordinary discourse, particularly with Davidson's truth-functional semantics. Next we consider the way in which some framework features of ordinary language discourse are extended to and modified in scientific discourse. Two areas are treated in more detail: quantum theory, and the (...) peculiar problem of semantic entailment it involves; and quantum field theory. These supply a basis for criticizing some historicist and logicist treatments of the truth of scientific claims. (shrink)

Several subjects are fully convinced that they are brains in vats whose experiences are hallucinatory. They confront a ‘skeptic’ who raises the possibility that they are not brains in vats who lack and hallucinate hands but ‘brains in skulls’ who have hands and see them. Familiar responses to skepticism are offered in support of the claim that the subjects know they do not have hands. The philosophical significance of this looking-glass approach to skepticism is also discussed. It is suggested that (...) these familiar responses to skepticism do not achieve anything because, if we begin from the assumption that we are brains in vats, we can employ those same responses to skepticism to support the claim that we know we do not have hands. One interlocutor argues that things are not so dismal. The main conversation is framed by a discussion among night watchmen at some sort of skepticism laboratory. (shrink)

RESUMEN En este artículo, se defiende un relativismo conceptual sin esquemas conceptuales. En primer lugar, se presenta la crítica de Davidson al relativismo conceptual. Luego, se construye un contraejemplo que cuestiona la eficacia del principio de caridad y se argumenta que, si se trata de sostener el holismo con el fin de evitar el relativismo, habría que aceptar un relativismo moderado que trace la distinción entre un background de creencia y redes internas de creencias. Este relativismo es compatible con el (...) abandono de la idea de un esquema conceptual y, por tanto, no implica ningún tipo de inconmensurabilidad ni de intraducibilidad. ABSTRACT The article defends a conceptual relativism without conceptual schemes. First, it presents Davidson's critique of conceptual relativism. Ten, it goes on to build a counterexample questioning the efficacy of the principle of charity, and argues that upholding holism in order to avoid relativism would entail accepting a moderate relativism that distinguishes between a background of belief and internal networks of beliefs. This relativism is compatible with abandoning the idea of a conceptual scheme, and, therefore, does not imply any type of incommensurability or untranslatability. (shrink)

An investigation into what kind of knowledge is necessary for interpretation is an important research project for the two fields of the theory of meaning and epistemology, through which they are combined. By examining the two basic requirements for a theory on the interpretation of language drafted by Donald Davidson, this paper analyzes several kinds of knowledge which are necessary for interpretation. The goal is to explore the knowledge of radical interpretation and the distinctions and connections between this knowledge and (...) radical translation and Convention-T, thus revealing its characteristics and possibility to interpretation. (shrink)

The thesis evaluates a contemporary debate concerning the very possibility of thinking about the world. In the first chapter, McDowell's critique of Davidson is presented, focusing on the coherentism defended by the latter. The critique of the myth of the given (as it appears in Sellars and Wittgenstein), as well as the necessity of a minimal empiricism (which McDowell finds in Quine and Kant), lead to an oscillation in contemporary thinking between two equally unsatisfactory ways of understanding the empirical content (...) of thought. In the second chapter, I defend Davidson's approach, focusing on his theory of interpretation and semantic externalism, as well as on the relation between causes and reasons. In the third chapter, the debate is analyzed in more detail. I criticize the anomalous monism, the way in which the boundaries between the conceptual and the non-conceptual are understood by Davidson, as well as the naturalized Platonism defended by McDowell. This thesis is mainly negative, and it concludes by revealing problems in both positions under evaluation. (shrink)