- Submit
-
Browse
- All Categories
- Metaphysics and Epistemology
- Value Theory
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Logic and Philosophy of Logic
- Philosophy of Biology
- Philosophy of Cognitive Science
- Philosophy of Computing and Information
- Philosophy of Mathematics
- Philosophy of Physical Science
- Philosophy of Social Science
- Philosophy of Probability
- General Philosophy of Science
- Philosophy of Science, Misc
- History of Western Philosophy
- Philosophical Traditions
- Philosophy, Misc
- Other Academic Areas
- More
Switch to: References
Citations of:
Add citations
You must login to add citations.
|
|
|
ABSTRACTFregeans hold that predicates denote things, albeit things different in kind from what singular terms denote. This leads to a familiar problem: it seems impossible to say what any given predicate denotes. One strategy for avoiding this problem reduces the Fregean position to form of nominalism. I develop an alternative strategy that lets the Fregean hold on to the view that predicate denote things by reconceiving the nature of singular denotation and of Fregean objects. |
|
|
Peter Hanks and Scott Soames both defend pragmatic solutions to the problem of the unity of the proposition. According to them, what ties together Tim and baldness in the singular proposition expressed by ‘Tim is bald’ is an act of the speaker : the act of predicating baldness of Tim. But Soames construes that act as force neutral and noncommittal while, for Hanks, it is inherently assertive and committal. Hanks answers the Frege–Geach challenge by arguing that, in complex sentences, the (...) |
|
|
In this survey paper, I start from two classical theses of speech act theory: that speech act content is uniformly propositional and that sentence mood encodes illocutionary force. These theses have been questioned in recent work, both in philosophy and linguistics. The force/content distinction itself – a cornerstone of 20‐century philosophy of language – has come to be rejected by some theorists, unmoved by the famous ‘Frege–Geach’ argument. The paper reviews some of these debates. |
|
|
Logical inferentialism claims that the meaning of the logical constants should be given, not model-theoretically, but by the rules of inference of a suitable calculus. It has been claimed that certain proof-theoretical systems, most particularly, labelled deductive systems for modal logic, are unsuitable, on the grounds that they are semantically polluted and suffer from an untoward intrusion of semantics into syntax. The charge is shown to be mistaken. It is argued on inferentialist grounds that labelled deductive systems are as syntactically (...) |
|
|
Inferentialism claims that the rules for the use of an expression express its meaning without any need to invoke meanings or denotations for them. Logical inferentialism endorses inferentialism specically for the logical constants. Harmonic inferentialism, as the term is introduced here, usually but not necessarily a subbranch of logical inferentialism, follows Gentzen in proposing that it is the introduction-rules whch give expressions their meaning and the elimination-rules should accord harmoniously with the meaning so given. It is proposed here that the (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
I present a puzzle for the standard, propositional semantic account of belief reports by considering novel inferences which it incorrectly predicts to be invalid under assumptions that are plausible by its advocates’ own lights. In response, I propose a conservative departure from the standard view on which certain ‘that’-clauses designate novel devices of semantic type that I call open propositions. After outlining some desiderata for a theory of open propositions, I provide some reasons for advocates of the standard view to (...) |
|
|
Kit Fine (2007) outlines an account of semantic coordination, an account motivated by the role of semantic coordination in cognition. Actually, Fine outlines two accounts of semantic coordination, one in terms of co-reference and another in terms of synonymy. I argue, first, that Fine's two accounts are not equivalent, with one being logically stronger than the other, but second and more importantly, that neither account is correct. I outline an alternative account of semantic coordination – the epistemic conception of semantic (...) |
|
|
Does the epistemology of disagreement have significant consequences for theories of conceptual understanding? I argue that it does. I argue that the epistemology of disagreement manifests the existence of a special kind of concept, perspectival modes of metarepresentation, a kind of concept instances of which figure in the thinking about thoughts that occurs in deep disagreement. These perspectival modes of metarepresentation are de re modes of presentation of thoughts themselves – hence de re modes of metarepresentation – in which one (...) |
|
|
It is argued that propositions cannot be the compositional semantic values of sentences (in context) simply due to issues stemming from the compositional semantics of modal operators (or modal quantifiers). In particular, the fact that the arguments for double indexing generalize to multiple indexing exposes a fundamental tension in the default philosophical conception of semantic theory. This provides further motivation for making a distinction between two sentential semantic contents—what (Dummett 1973) called “ingredient sense” and “assertoric content”. |
|
|
This essay investigates whether or not we should think that the things we say are identical to the things our sentences mean. It is argued that these theoretical notions should be distinguished, since assertoric content does not respect the compositionality principle. As a paradigmatic example, Kaplan's formal language LD is shown to exemplify a failure of compositionality. It is demonstrated that by respecting the theoretical distinction between the objects of assertion and compositional values certain conflicts between compositionality and contextualism are (...) |
|
|
In the literature seeking to explain concepts in terms of their point, talk of ‘the point’ of concepts remains under-theorised. I propose a typology of points which distinguishes practical, evaluative, animating, and inferential points. This allows us to resolve tensions such as that between the ambition of explanations in terms of the points of concepts to be informative and the claim that mastering concepts requires grasping their point; and it allows us to exploit connections between types of points to understand (...) |
|
|
A semantic theory is committed to semantic monism just in case every particular semantic property posited by the theory is a member of the same kind. The commitment to semantic monism appears to draw some support from the need to provide a compositional semantics, since taking a single kind of semantic property as key to a semantic theory affords a uniform pattern on the basis of which the meaning of any given sentence can be compositionally determined. This line of support (...) |
|
|
The meaning of 'most' can be described in many ways. We offer a framework for distinguishing semantic descriptions, interpreted as psychological hypotheses that go beyond claims about sentential truth conditions, and an experiment that tells against an attractive idea: 'most' is understood in terms of one-to-one correspondence. Adults evaluated 'Most of the dots are yellow', as true or false, on many trials in which yellow dots and blue dots were displayed for 200 ms. Displays manipulated the ease of using a (...) |
|
|
There are two dominant approaches to quantification: the Fregean and the Tarskian. While the Tarskian approach is standard and familiar, deep conceptual objections have been pressed against its employment of variables as genuine syntactic and semantic units. Because they do not explicitly rely on variables, Fregean approaches are held to avoid these worries. The apparent result is that the Fregean can deliver something that the Tarskian is unable to, namely a compositional semantic treatment of quantification centered on truth and reference. (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
This paper gives attention to a special point in Brandom. |
|
|
Possible world semantics considers not only what an expression actually refers to but also what it might have referred to in counterfactual circumstances. This has proven exceptionally useful both inside and outside philosophy. The way this is achieved is by using intensions. An intension of an expression is a function that assigns to each possible world the reference of the expression in that world. However, the specific intension of terms has been subject to frequent disputes. How is one to determine (...) |
|
|
It is just over fifty years since the publication of Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. That paper expresses a broad vision of the system of relations between meaning, experience, and the rational formation of belief. The deepest challenges the paper poses come not from the detailed argument of its first four sections – formidable though that is – but from the visionary material in its last two sections.1 It is this visionary material that is likely to force the reader to (...) |
|
|
Frege's account of opacity is based on two attractive ideas: every meaningful expression has a sense (Sinn) that determines the expression's semantic value (Bedeutung); and the semantic value of a‘that’‐clause is the thought expressed by its embedded sentence. Considerations of compositionality led Frege to a more problematic view: inside ‘that’‐clauses, an expression does not have its customary Bedeutung. But contrary to initial appearances, compositionality does not entail a familiar substitutivity principle. And Fregeans can exploit this point in a way that (...) |
|
|
Reductionist realist accounts of certain entities, such as the natural numbers and propositions, have been taken to be fatally undermined by what we may call the problem of arbitrary identification. The problem is that there are multiple and equally adequate reductions of the natural numbers to sets (see Benacerraf, 1965), as well as of propositions to unstructured or structured entities (see, e.g., Bealer, 1998; King, Soames, & Speaks, 2014; Melia, 1992). This paper sets out to solve the problem by canvassing (...) |
|
|
Frege's puzzle about identity sentences has long challenged many philosophers to find a solution to it but also led other philosophers to object that the evidential datum it is grounded on is false. The present work is an elaboration of this second kind of reaction: it explains why Frege's puzzle seems to resist the traditional objection, giving voice to different and more elaborated presentations of the evidential datum, faithful to the spirit but not to the letter of Frege's puzzle. The (...) |
|
|
Many philosophers suppose that sometimes we think we are saying or thinking something meaningful when in fact we’re not saying or thinking anything at all: we are producing nonsense. But what is nonsense? An account of nonsense must, I argue, meet two constraints. The first constraint requires that nonsense can be rationally engaged with, not just mentioned. In particular, we can reason with nonsense and use it within that-clauses. An account which fails to meet this constraint cannot explain why nonsense (...) |
|
|
According to Michael Thompson’s defence of neo-Aristotelian naturalism in meta-ethics, (i) ‘[t]he concept LIFE-FORM is a pure or a priori, perhaps a logical, concept’, and (ii) ‘[t]he concept HUMAN, as we human beings have it, is an a priori concept’ (p. 57). Here I show Thompson’s argument for (ii) to be unsound, hoping thereby to shed light on the neglected subject of the a prioricity of concepts more generally. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Standardly, a one-level criterion of identity 1 is given in the form: ∀ x∀ y )where ‘ K’ denotes the kind of thing for which the criterion is being given and ‘ R’ denotes the criterial relation.Thus, we have, for example, the criterion of identity for sets: ∀ x∀ y))and for composites: ∀ x∀ y))and for events: ∀ x∀ y)). is equivalent to the conjunction of: ∀ x and ∀ x )),which just give two necessary 2 conditions for application of (...) |
|
|
Examples suggest that one and the same A may be different Bs, and hence that there is some sort of incompleteness in the unqualified statement that x and y are the same which needs to be eliminated by answering the question “the same what?” One way to make this more precise is by appeal to Geach's idea that identity is relative. In this paper I evaluate Geach's relative identity thesis. |
|
|
In the Addenda to Naming and Necessity (1980), Kripke famously argues that it is false that there could have been unicorns, or more properly, that “no counterfactual situation is properly describable as one in which there would have been unicorns.” He adds that he holds similarly that ‘one cannot say of any possible person that he would have been Sherlock Holmes, had he existed.” He notes the “cryptic brevity” of these remarks and refers to a forthcoming work for elaborations—the work (...) |
|
|
Blackburn argues against naturalistic moral realism. He argues that there is no conceptual entailment from satisfying a naturalistic predicate to satisfying a moral predicate. But the moral is conceptually supervenient on the natural. However, this conjunction of conceptual supervenience with lack of conceptual entailment is something the non-realist can explain, but the realist cannot. I argue first that Blackburn’s best formulation of his challenge is his first one. Subsequently he reformulates it as a demand for a ‘ban on mixed worlds’. (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A comparison is given between two conditions used to define logical constants: Belnap's uniqueness and Hacking's deducibility of identicals. It is shown that, in spite of some surface similarities, there is a deep difference between them. On the one hand, deducibility of identicals turns out to be a weaker and less demanding condition than uniqueness. On the other hand, deducibility of identicals is shown to be more faithful to the inferentialist perspective, permitting definition of genuinely proof-theoretical concepts. This kind of (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
Discussion of Frege’s theory of fiction has tended to focus on the problem of empty names, and has consequently missed the truly problematic aspect of the theory, Frege’s commitment to the view that even fictional sentences that contain no empty names fail to refer. That claim prima facie conflicts with his commitment to the cognitive transparency of sense, and the determination of reference by sense. Resolving this tension compels us to recognize that fiction for Frege is a special kind of (...) |
|
|
The most basic divide amongst analytic metaphysicians separates realists from anti-realists. By examining certain characteristic and problematic features of these two families of views, we uncover their underlying metametaphysicalorientations, which turn out to coincide. This shared philosophical picture that underlies both the realist and the anti-realist project we call the Modern Picture. It rests on a crucial distinction between reality as it is for us and reality as it is in itself. It is argued that this distinction indeed generates the (...) |
|
|
In this essay, I propose a novel hybrid metanormative theory. According to this theory, speakers making normative claims express both cognitive and motivational attitudes in virtue of the constitutive norms of the particular speech acts they perform. This view has four principal virtues: it is consistent with traditional semantic theories, it supports a form of motivational judgment internalism that does justice to externalist intuitions, it illuminates the connection between normative language and normative thought, and it explains how speakers can express (...) |
|
|
In this essay, I propose a novel hybrid metanormative theory. According to this theory, speakers making normative claims express both cognitive and motivational attitudes in virtue of the constitutive norms of the particular speech acts they perform. This view has four principal virtues: it is consistent with traditional semantic theories, it supports a form of motivational judgment internalism that does justice to externalist intuitions, it illuminates the connection between normative language and normative thought, and it explains how speakers can express (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
According to an “orthodox” reading proposed by Dummett and more recently endorsed by Lugg and Price, the later Wittgenstein rejects the idea of grouping together certain utterances as a single class of assertions. We offer an alternative commentary on the Philosophical Investigations §§21–24, developing what we call a Wittgensteinian role‐based account of assertion. We then examine whether this role‐based account can solve the problem of on‐stage utterances. In the course of this, the merits of the account are shown and compared (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
This two-part paper reviews a scholarly debate on an alleged tension in Frege's philosophy of logic. In Section 1 of Part I, I discuss Frege's view that logic is concerned with establishing norms for correct thinking and is therefore a normative science. In Section 2, I explore a different understanding of the role of logic that Frege seems to advance: logic is constitutive of the very possibility of thought, because it sets forth necessary conditions for thought. Hence, the tension the (...) |
|
|
The identity conception of truth holds that a thinkable is true just in case it is a fact. As such, it sets itself against correspondence theories of truth, while respecting the substantive role played by truth in respect of enquiry. In this article, I motivate and develop that view, and, in so doing, promote a particular conception of sense. This allows me to defend the view from two substantial criticisms. First, that the identity conception of truth is incoherent in respect (...) |
|
|
In “Understanding Demonstratives”, Gareth Evans bites the bullet regarding Rip van Winkle cases in cognitive dynamics: the fact that Rip sleeps for twenty years and completely loses track of time means he is unable to retain his original belief that “Today is a fine day”. In this paper, the author argues that Evans need not bite this bullet because there are resources in his account of the cognitive dynamics involved in belief retention developed in The Varieties of Reference to successfully (...) |
|
|
David Lewis, following in the tradition of Broad, Quine and Goodman, says that change in an object X consists in X's being temporally extended and having qualitatively different temporal parts. Analogously, change in a spatially extended object such as a road consists in its having different spatial parts . The alternative to this view is that ordinary objects undergo temporal change in virtue of having different intrinsic non-relational properties at different times. They endure, remaining the same object throughout change, whereas (...) |
|
|
According to Brentano in a much-quoted passage,Every psychological phenomenon is characterized by…intentional inherent existence of … an object… In the idea something is conceived, in the judgement something is recognized or discovered, in loving loved, in hating hated, in desiring desired, and so on. |
|
|
I question the received view that Frege advocates the description theory of proper names. First, I argue that the textual evidence for this view from Frege’s writings is not conclusive. Secondly, I propose that the Fregean Sinne (of proper names) may be understood nondescriptionally in terms of symbolhood. Finally, I suggest that in the notorious passages where Frege is apparently supporting the description theory he is just indicating the potential problems with communication with proper names. |
|
|
The thesis that mental states are physical states enjoys widespread popularity. After the abandonment of typeidentity theories, however, this thesis has typically been framed in terms of state tokens. I argue that token states are a philosopher’s fiction, and that debates about the identity of mental and physical state tokens thus rest on a mistake. |
PhilPapers logo by Andrea Andrews and Meghan Driscoll.
This site uses cookies and Google Analytics (see our terms & conditions for details regarding the privacy implications). Use of this site is subject to terms & conditions.
All rights reserved by The PhilPapers Foundation
Server: philpapers-web-5ff6c685cb-ldh8k uwo