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  1. The Authority of Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis.Justin C. Fisher - unknown
    This paper defends Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis , a proposed empirical methodology for explicating philosophical concepts. This methodology attributes to our shared concepts whatever application conditions they would need to have in order best to continue delivering benefits in the ways they have regularly delivered benefits in the past. In the first stage of my argument I argue that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis has what I call normative authority : we have practical and epistemic reason to adopt the explications that it delivers (...)
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  • Towards an Explanation of Language.Daniel O. Dahlstrom - 2010 - Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 84:33-46.
    After reviewing basic features of language, this paper reviews a central debate among twentieth-century philosophers over the proper analysis of linguisticmeaning. While some center the analysis of meaning in language’s capacity to be true, others locate meaning in the communicative intentions of the users of thelanguage. As a means of addressing this impasse and suggesting its unfounded character, the paper draws on recent studies of language acquisition and relates them to existential dimensions of language.
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  • Kripke's Objections to Description Theories of Names.Michael McKinsey - 1978 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (3):485 - 497.
    In “Naming and Necessity” Saul Kripke describes some cases which, he claims, provide counterexamples both to cluster theories and, more generally, to description theories of proper names. My view of these cases is that while they do not provide counterexamples to cluster theories, they can be used to provide evidence against single-description theories. In this paper I shall defend both of the claims involved in my view.
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  • Concept Possession, Experimental Semantics, and Hybrid Theories of Reference.James Genone & Tania Lombrozo - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 25 (5):1-26.
    Contemporary debates about the nature of semantic reference have tended to focus on two competing approaches: theories which emphasize the importance of descriptive information associated with a referring term, and those which emphasize causal facts about the conditions under which the use of the term originated and was passed on. Recent empirical work by Machery and colleagues suggests that both causal and descriptive information can play a role in judgments about the reference of proper names, with findings of cross-cultural variation (...)
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  • Understanding proper names.Michael McKinsey - 2010 - Linguistics and Philosophy 33 (4):325-354.
    There is a fairly general consensus that names are Millian (or Russellian) genuine terms, that is, are singular terms whose sole semantic function is to introduce a referent into the propositions expressed by sentences containing the term. This answers the question as to what sort of proposition is expressed by use of sentences containing names. But there is a second serious semantic problem about proper names, that of how the referents of proper names are determined. This is the question that (...)
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  • Naming with Necessity (Part of the dissertation portfolio Modality, Names and Descriptions).Zsófia Zvolenszky - 2007 - Dissertation, New York University
    In “Naming with Necessity”, it is argued that Kripke’s thesis that proper names are rigid designators is best seen as being motivated by an individual-driven picture of modality, which has two parts. First, inherent in proper-name usage is the expectation that names refer to modally robust individuals: individuals that can sustain modal predications like ‘is necessarily human’. Second, these modally robust individuals are the fundamental building blocks on the basis of which possible worlds should be conceived in a modal semantics (...)
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  • Aim that Bow! An Interactivist Gaze at the Problem of Intentional Tracking.Itay Shani - 2011 - Axiomathes 21 (1):67-97.
    In this essay I offer a theory of the outward directedness of intentional states, namely, an account of what makes intentional states directed at their respective intentional objects. The theory is meant to be complementary to the canonical interactivist account of mental content in that the latter emphasizes the predicative, intensional, and internal aspects of representation whereas here I shall focus on its denotative, extensional, and external aspects. Thus, the aim is to establish that the two projects are not only (...)
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  • Some Models of Linguistic Understanding.Guy Longworth - 2009 - The Baltic International Yearbook 5 (1):7.
    I discuss the conjecture that understanding what is said in an utterance is to be modelled as knowing what is said in that utterance. My main aim is to present a number of alter- native models, as a prophylactic against premature acceptance of the conjecture as the only game in town. I also offer preliminary assessments of each of the models, including the propositional knowledge model, in part by considering their respective capacities to sub-serve the transmission of knowledge through testimony. (...)
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  • Against generality: Meaning in genetics and philosophy.Richard M. Burian, Robert C. Richardson & Wim J. Van der Steen - 1996 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 27 (1):1-29.
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  • The Sense of Communication.Richard Heck - 1995 - Mind 104 (413):79 - 106.
    Many philosophers nowadays believe Frege was right about belief, but wrong about language: The contents of beliefs need to be individuated more finely than in terms of Russellian propositions, but the contents of utterances do not. I argue that this 'hybrid view' cannot offer no reasonable account of how communication transfers knowledge from one speaker to another and that, to do so, we must insist that understanding depends upon more than just getting the references of terms right.
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  • Causality and the Paradox of Names.Michael McKinsey - 1984 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 9 (1):491-515.
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  • Rigidity, natural kind terms and metasemantics.Corine Besson - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. New York: Routledge. pp. 25--44.
    A paradigmatic case of rigidity for singular terms is that of proper names. And it would seem that a paradigmatic case of rigidity for general terms is that of natural kind terms. However, many philosophers think that rigidity cannot be extended from singular terms to general terms. The reason for this is that rigidity appears to become trivial when such terms are considered: natural kind terms come out as rigid, but so do all other general terms, and in particular all (...)
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  • Theories of meaning (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).Jeff Speaks - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • History and the critique of social concepts.Brian Epstein - 2010 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 40 (1):3-29.
    Many theorists, including Nietzsche, Adorno, and Foucault, have regarded genealogy as an important technique for social criticism. But it has been unclear how genealogy can go beyond the accomplishments of other, more mundane, critical methods. I propose a new approach to understanding the critical potential of history. I argue that theorists have been misled by the assumption that if a claim is deserving of criticism, it is because the claim is false. Turning to the criticism of concepts rather than criticism (...)
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  • Metaethical Relativism: Against the Single Analysis Assumption.Ragnar Francén - 2007 - Dissertation, University of Gothenburg
    This dissertation investigates the plausibility of metaethical relativism, or more specifically, what I call “moral truth-value relativism”: the idea that the truth of a moral statement or belief depends on who utters or has it, or who assesses it. According to the most prevalent variants of this view in philosophical literature – “standard relativism” – the truth-values are relative to people’s moralities, often understood as some subset of their affective or desirelike attitudes. Standard relativism has two main contenders: absolutism – (...)
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  • The great beetle debate: A study in imagining with names.Stacie Friend - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 153 (2):183-211.
    Statements about fictional characters, such as “Gregor Samsa has been changed into a beetle,” pose the problem of how we can say something true (or false) using empty names. I propose an original solution to this problem that construes such utterances as reports of the “prescriptions to imagine” generated by works of fiction. In particular, I argue that we should construe these utterances as specifying, not what we are supposed to imagine—the propositional object of the imagining—but how we are supposed (...)
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  • Goodbye, Humean Supervenience.Troy Cross - 2012 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 7:129-153.
    Reductionists about dispositions must either say the natural properties are all dispositional or individuate properties hyperintensionally. Lewis stands in as an example of the sort of combination I think is incoherent: properties individuated by modal profile + categoricalism.
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  • Linguistic and metalinguistic intuitions in the philosophy of language.Edouard Machery, Christopher Y. Olivola & Molly De Blanc - 2009 - Analysis 69 (4):689-694.
    Machery et al. (2004) reported some preliminary evidence that intuitions about reference vary within and across cultures, and they argued that if real, such variation would have significant philosophical implications (see also Mallon et al. 2009). In a recent article, Genoveva Martı´ (2009) argues that the type of intuitions examined by Machery and colleagues (‘metalin- 10 guistic intuitions’) is evidentially irrelevant for identifying the correct theory of reference, and she concludes that the variation in the relevant intuitions about reference within (...)
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  • Experimental philosophy and the theory of reference.Max Deutsch - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (4):445-466.
    It is argued on a variety of grounds that recent results in 'experimental philosophy of language', which appear to show that there are significant cross-cultural differences in intuitions about the reference of proper names, do not pose a threat to a more traditional mode of philosophizing about reference. Some of these same grounds justify a complaint about experimental philosophy as a whole.
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  • On an argument of Segal’s against singular object-dependent thoughts.Teresa Marques - 2006 - Disputatio 2 (21):19-37.
    This paper discusses and criticizes Segal’s 1989 argument against singular object-dependent thoughts. His argument aims at showing that object-dependent thoughts are explanatorily redundant. My criticism of Segal’s argument has two parts. First, I appeal to common anti-individualist arguments to the effect that Segal’s type of argument only succeeds in establishing that object-dependent thoughts are explanatorily redundant for those aspects of subjects’ behaviour that do not require reference to external objects. Secondly, Segal’s view on singular thoughts is at odds with his (...)
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  • Saving the intuitions: polylithic reference.Ioannis Votsis - 2011 - Synthese 180 (2):121 - 137.
    My main aim in this paper is to clarify the concepts of referential success and of referential continuity that are so crucial to the scientific realism debate. I start by considering the three dominant theories of reference and the intuitions that motivate each of them. Since several intuitions cited in support of one theory conflict with intuitions cited in support of another something has to give way. The traditional policy has been to reject all intuitions that clash with a chosen (...)
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  • From constitutional necessities to causal necessities.Jessica Wilson - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. New York: Routledge.
    Humeans and non-Humeans reasonably agree that there may be necessary connections between entities that are identical or merely partly distinct—between, e.g., sets and their individual members, fusions and their individual parts, instances of determinates and determinables, members of certain natural kinds and certain of their intrinsic properties, and (especially among physicalists) certain physical and mental states. Humeans maintain, however, that as per “Hume’s Dictum”, there are no necessary connections between entities that are wholly distinct;1 and in particular, no necessary causal (...)
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  • Against Arguments from Reference.Ron Mallon, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols & Stephen Stich - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (2):332 - 356.
    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.
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  • Acta cum fundamentis in re.Barry Smith - 1984 - Dialectica 38 (2‐3):157-178.
    It will be the thesis of this paper that there are among our mental acts some which fall into the category of real material relations. That is: some acts are necessarily such as to involve a plurality of objects as their relata or fundamenta. Suppose Bruno walks into his study and sees a cat. To describe the seeing, here, as a relation, is to affirm that it serves somehow to tie Bruno to the cat. Bruno's act of seeing, unlike his (...)
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  • Thought by description.Michael Mckinsey - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78 (1):83-102.
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  • The realpolitik of reference.Brian Epstein - 2008 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (1):1–20.
    What are the conditions for fixing the reference of a proper name? Debate on this point has recently been rekindled by Scott Soames, Robin Jeshion, and others. In this paper, I sketch a new pragmatic approach to the justification of reference-fixing procedures, in opposition to accounts that insist on an invariant set of conditions for fixing reference across environments and linguistic communities. Comparing reference to other relations whose instances are introduced through "initiation" procedures, I outline a picture in which the (...)
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  • Names and natural kind terms.David Braun - 2005 - In Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 490--515.
    Names and natural kind terms have long been a major focus of debates about meaning and reference. This article discusses some of the theories and arguments that have appeared in those debates. It is remarkably difficult to say what names are without making controversial theoretical assumptions. This article does not attempt to do so here. It instead relies on paradigm examples that nearly all theorists would agree are proper names, for instance, ‘Aristotle’, ‘Mark Twain’, ‘London’, ‘Venus’, and ‘Pegasus’. All of (...)
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  • Names as tokens and names as tools.M. W. Pelczar - 2001 - Synthese 128 (1-2):133 - 155.
    After presenting a variety of arguments in support of the idea that ordinary names are indexical, I respond to John Perry's recent arguments against the indexicality of names. I conclude by indicating some connections between the theory of names defended here and Wittgenstein's observations on naming, and suggest that the latter may have been misconstrued in the literature.
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  • The semantics of rigid designation.John Justice - 2003 - Ratio 16 (1):33–48.
    Frege's thesis that each singular term has a sense that determines its reference and serves as its cognitive value has come to be widely doubted. Saul Kripke argued that since names are rigid designators, their referents are not determined by senses. David Kaplan has argued that the rigid designation of indexical terms entails that they also lack referent–determining senses. Kripke's argument about names and Kaplan's argument about indexical terms differ, but each contains a false premise. The referents of both names (...)
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  • Husserl's noema and the internalism‐externalism debate.Dan Zahavi - 2004 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 47 (1):42-66.
    In a number of papers, Hubert Dreyfus and Ronald McIntyre have claimed that Husserl is an internalist. In this paper, it is argued that their interpretation is based on two questionable assumptions: (1) that Husserl's noema should be interpreted along Fregean lines, and (2) that Husserl's transcendental methodology commits him to some form of methodological solipsism. Both of these assumptions are criticized on the basis of the most recent Husserl-research. It is shown that Husserl's concept of noema can be interpreted (...)
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  • Can there be a uniform application of direct reference?Alberto Voltolini - 2004 - Erkenntnis 61 (1):75-98.
    There are two interpretations of what it means for a singular term to be referentially direct, one truth-conditional and the other cognitive. It has been argued that on the former interpretation, both proper names and indexicals refer directly, whereas on the latter only proper names are directly referential. However, these interpretations in fact apply to the same singular terms. This paper argues that, if conceived in purely normative terms, the linguistic meaning of indexicals can no longer be held to make (...)
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  • Models and reality.Hilary Putnam - 1980 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 45 (3):464-482.
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  • Complex demonstratives.Josh Dever - 2001 - Linguistics and Philosophy 24 (3):271-330.
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  • The Flight to Reference, or How Not to Make Progress in the Philosophy of Science.Michael A. Bishop & Stephen P. Stich - 1998 - Philosophy of Science 65 (1):33-49.
    The flight to reference is a widely-used strategy for resolving philosophical issues. The three steps in a flight to reference argument are: (1) offer a substantive account of the reference relation, (2) argue that a particular expression refers (or does not refer), and (3) draw a philosophical conclusion about something other than reference, like truth or ontology. It is our contention that whenever the flight to reference strategy is invoked, there is a crucial step that is left undefended, and that (...)
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  • The Pessimistic Induction, the Flight to Reference and the Metaphysical Zoo.Michael A. Bishop - 2003 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 17 (2):161 – 178.
    Scientific realism says of our best scientific theories that (1) most of their important posits exist and (2) most of their central claims are approximately true. Antirealists sometimes offer the pessimistic induction in reply: since (1) and (2) are false about past successful theories, they are probably false about our own best theories too. The contemporary debate about this argument has turned (and become stuck) on the question, Do the central terms of successful scientific theories refer? For example, Larry Laudan (...)
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  • Nondescriptionality and natural kind terms.Barbara Abbott - 1989 - Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (3):269 - 291.
    The phrase "natural kind term" has come into the linguistic and philosophical literature in connection with well-known work of Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1970, 1975a). I use that phrase here in the sense it has acquired from those and subseqnent works on related topics. This is not the transparent sense of the phrase. That is, if I am right in what follows there are words for kinds of things existing in nature which are not natural kind terms in the current (...)
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  • Semantics, cross-cultural style.Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols & Stephen Stich - 2004 - Cognition 92 (3):1-12.
    Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al. 2001) has shown systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical cases (...)
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  • Semantic intuitions, conceptual analysis, and cross-cultural variation.Henry Jackman - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 146 (2):159 - 177.
    While philosophers of language have traditionally relied upon their intuitions about cases when developing theories of reference, this methodology has recently been attacked on the grounds that intuitions about reference, far from being universal, show significant cultural variation, thus undermining their relevance for semantic theory. I’ll attempt to demonstrate that (1) such criticisms do not, in fact, undermine the traditional philosophical methodology, and (2) our underlying intuitions about the nature of reference may be more universal than the authors suppose.
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  • Self-knowledge failures and first person authority.Mark Mccullagh - 2002 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2):365-380.
    Davidson and Burge have claimed that the conditions under which self-knowledge is possessed are such that externalism poses no obstacle to their being met by ordinary speakers and thinkers. On their accounts. no such person could fail to possess self-knowledge. But we do from time to time attribute to each other such failures; so we should prefer to their accounts an account that preserves first person authority while allowing us to make sense of what appear to be true attributions of (...)
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  • How to Define your (Mental) Terms.Tim Crane - 1998 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 41 (3):341-354.
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  • Red and 'red'.Galen Strawson - 1989 - Synthese 78 (February):193-232.
    THIS PAPER ARGUES FOR THE CLAIM THAT ALTHOUGH COLOUR WORDS LIKE 'RED' ARE, ESSENTIALLY, 'PHENOMENAL-QUALITY' WORDS—I.E., WORDS FOR PROPERTIES WHOSE WHOLE AND ESSENTIAL NATURE CAN BE AND IS FULLY REVEALED IN SENSORY EXPERIENCE, GIVEN ONLY THE QUALITATIVE CHARACTER THAT THAT EXPERIENCE HAS—STILL 'RED' CANNOT BE SUPPOSED TO BE A WORD THAT PICKS OUT OR DENOTES ANY PARTICULAR PHENOMENAL QUALITY. THE ARGUMENT RESTS ESSENTIALLY ON THE SUPPOSITION, OFTEN DISCUSSED UNDER THE HEADING OF THE 'COLOR-SPECTRUM INVERSION ARGUMENT', THAT TWO PEOPLE COULD POSSIBLY (...)
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  • Nonconceptual demonstrative reference.Athanassius Raftopoulos & Vincent Muller - 2006 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (2):251-285.
    The paper argues that the reference of perceptual demonstratives is fixed in a causal nondescriptive way through the nonconceptual content of perception. That content consists first in spatiotemporal information establishing the existence of a separate persistent object retrieved from a visual scene by the perceptual object segmentation processes that open an object-file for that object. Nonconceptual content also consists in other transducable information, that is, information that is retrieved directly in a bottom-up way from the scene (motion, shape, etc). The (...)
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  • Intuitions and semantic theory.Henry Jackman - 2005 - Metaphilosophy 36 (3):363-380.
    While engaged in the analysis of topics such as the nature of knowledge, meaning, or justice, analytic philosophers have traditionally relied extensively on their own intuitions about when the relevant terms can, and can't, be correctly applied. Consequently, if intuitions about possible cases turned out not to be a reliable tool for the proper analysis of philosophically central concepts, then a radical reworking of philosophy's (or at least analytic philosophy's) methodology would seem to be in order. It is thus not (...)
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  • On sense and intension.David J. Chalmers - 2002 - Philosophical Perspectives 16:135-82.
    What is involved in the meaning of our expressions? Frege suggested that there is an aspect of an expression.
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  • Considering empty worlds as actual.Laura Schroeter - 2005 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (3):331-347.
    This paper argues that David Chalmer's new epistemic interpretation of 2-D semantics faces the very same type of objection he takes to defeat earlier contextualist interpretation of the 2-D framework.
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  • Narrow taxonomy and wide functionalism.Patricia Kitcher - 1985 - Philosophy of Science 52 (March):78-97.
    Three recent, influential critiques (Stich 1978; Fodor 1981c; Block 1980) have argued that various tasks on the agenda for computational psychology put conflicting pressures on its theoretical constructs. Unless something is done, the inevitable result will be confusion or outright incoherence. Stich, Fodor, and Block present different versions of this worry and each proposes a different remedy. Stich wants the central notion of belief to be jettisoned if it cannot be shown to be sound. Fodor tries to reduce confusion in (...)
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  • Deference and self-knowledge.Henry Jackman - 2000 - Southwest Philosophy Review 16 (1):171-180.
    It has become increasingly popular to suggest that non-individualistic theories of content undermine our purported a priori knowledge of such contents because they entail that we lack the ability to distinguish our thoughts from alternative thoughts with different contents. However, problems relating to such knowledge of 'comparative' content tell just as much against individualism as non-individualism. Indeed, the problems presented by individualistic theories of content for self-knowledge are at least, if not more, serious than those presented by non-individualistic theories. Consequently, (...)
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  • Semantic Norms and Temporal Externalism.Henry Jackman - 1996 - Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh
    There has frequently been taken to be a tension, if not an incompatibility, between "externalist" theories of content (which allow the make-up of one's physical environment and the linguistic usage of one's community to contribute to the contents of one's thoughts and utterances) and the "methodologically individualist" intuition that whatever contributes to the content of one's thoughts and utterances must ultimately be grounded in facts about one's own attitudes and behavior. In this dissertation I argue that one can underwrite such (...)
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  • We live forwards but understand backwards: Linguistic practices and future behavior.Henry Jackman - 1999 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 80 (2):157-177.
    Ascriptions of content are sensitive not only to our physical and social environment, but also to unforeseeable developments in the subsequent usage of our terms. This paper argues that the problems that may seem to come from endorsing such 'temporally sensitive' ascriptions either already follow from accepting the socially and historically sensitive ascriptions Burge and Kripke appeal to, or disappear when the view is developed in detail. If one accepts that one's society's past and current usage contributes to what one's (...)
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  • Why be an anti-individualist?Laura Schroeter - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1):105-141.
    Anti-individualists claim that concepts are individuated with an eye to purely external facts about a subject's environment about which she may be ignorant or mistaken. This paper offers a novel reason for thinking that anti-individualistic concepts are an ineliminable part of commonsense psychology. Our commitment to anti-individualism, I argue, is ultimately grounded in a rational epistemic agent's commitment to refining her own representational practices in the light of new and surprising information about her environment. Since anti-individualism is an implicit part (...)
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