According to the standard view of definition, all defined terms are mere stipulations, based on a small set of primitive terms. After a brief review of the Hilbert-Frege debate, this paper goes on to challenge the standard view in a number of ways. Examples from graph theory, for example, suggest that some key definitions stem from the way graphs are presented diagramatically and do not fit the standard view. Lakatos's account is also discussed, since he provides further examples that suggest (...) many definitions are much more than mere convenient abbreviations. (shrink)

Hyperintensionality – the failure of substitutivity salva veritate of intensionally equivalent expressions – is one of the most debated topics in recent philosophy of language. Being a phenomenon that affects a wide variety of different sentential contexts, a question concerning its source arises: is hyperintensionality something that can originate from actual features of the world, or it is simply some kind of representational phenomenon, which entirely depends on our conceptual faculties and preferred semantics? After a brief general introduction to the (...) topic from the semantic standpoint, in the present work I defend a view developed by Daniel Nolan, according to which hyperintensionality can be a worldly, non-representational phenomenon. I first reconstruct Nolan’s view and argument for worldly hyperintensionality, understood through the comparison with de re intensional modality. Then, I address the main criticism that has been raised against it, developing three objections. Evidence for worldly hyperintensionality is thereby presented, by focusing on a paradigmatic trigger: counterpossible conditionals. I provide two jointly sufficient criteria for a counterpossible to be a genuine instance of worldly hyperintensionality, then illustrate three case studies from scientific practices that all rely on counterpossible reasoning: reducibility in relative computability theory; scientific explanation of certain substances’ essential properties; and emergent molecular structure in chemistry. Each of them is evaluated by checking if it satisfies the criteria for worldly hyperintensionality, leading to the detection of patterns of counterpossible dependence occurring in at least some specific instances of the case studies discussed. Finally, I suggest a possible realist reading of such dependence relation, locating its relata in the world, independently from our representations. (shrink)

A provocative case for the inherently political nature of language In The Politics of Language, David Beaver and Jason Stanley present a radical new approach to the theory of meaning, offering an account of communication in which political and social identity, affect, and shared practices play as important a role as information. This new view of language, they argue, has dramatic consequences for free speech, democracy, and a range of other areas in which speech plays a central role. Drawing on (...) a wealth of disciplines, The Politics of Language argues that the function of speech—whether in dialogue, larger group interactions, or mass communication—is to attune people to something, be it a shared reality, emotion, or identity. Reconceptualizing the central ideas of pragmatics and semantics, Beaver and Stanley apply their account to a range of phenomena that defy standard frameworks in linguistics and philosophy of language—from dog whistles and covert persuasion to echo chambers and genocidal speech. The authors use their framework to show that speech is inevitably political because all communication is imbued with the resonances of particular ideologies and their normative perspectives on reality. At a time when democracy is under attack, authoritarianism is on the rise, and diversity and equality are being demanded, The Politics of Language offers a powerful new vision of the language of politics, ideology, and protest. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that textualism is far less attractive as a theory of written law than some of its modern proponents think. For it is not usually sensible to expect the grammatical meaning of a provision to determine its appropriate legal meaning. Factors that are unrelated to grammar in the identification of law (e.g., legal theory, context) do too much of the work. **Draft -- acknowledgments welcome, but please do not cite.**.

A central dispute in understanding Frege’s philosophy concerns how the sense of a complex expression relates to the senses of its component expressions. According to one reading, the sense of a complex expression is a whole built from the senses of the component expressions. On this interpretation, Frege is an early proponent of structured propositions. A rival reading says that senses compose by functional application: the sense of a complex expression is the value of the function denoted by its functional (...) component for the arguments denoted by its remaining components. I argue that two non-negotiable Fregean theses entail that senses compose by functional application. One thesis is that referents compose by functional application. The other thesis is that an expression in an indirect context refers to its customary sense. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show the real nature of Universal Grammar. Universal grammar is separate part of human mind which makes language learning possible and generative. Universal grammar is the symbolic and systematic rules inside our mind. These rules help us to classify, analyze, differentiate, assimilate, understand and recognize human language. This paper determines the real nature of philosophical grammar and discusses the modular and non-modular approach of it. I shall examine the critical approaches of Wittgenstein and Chomsky and their (...) comparison to investigate the philosophical grammar. (shrink)

The informal logic movement began as an attempt to develop – and teach – an alternative logic which can account for the real life arguing that surrounds us in our daily lives – in newspapers and the popular media, political and social commentary, advertising, and interpersonal exchange. The movement was rooted in research and discussion in Canada and especially at the University of Windsor, and has become a branch of argumentation theory which intersects with related traditions and approaches (notably formal (...) logic, rhetoric and dialectics in the form of pragma-dialectics). In this volume, some of the best known contributors to the movement discuss their views and the reasoning and argument which is informal logic’s subject matter. Many themes and issues are explored in a way that will fuel the continued evolution of the field. Federico Puppo adds an insightful essay which considers the origins and development of informal logic and whether informal logicians are properly described as a “school” of thought. In considering that proposition, Puppo introduces readers to a diverse range of essays, some of them previously published, others written specifically for this volume. (shrink)

The principle of compositionality requires that the meaning of a complex expression remains the same after substitution of synonymous expressions. Alleged counterexamples to compositionality seem to force a theoretical choice: either apparent synonyms are not synonyms or synonyms do not syntactically occur where they appear to occur. Some theorists have instead looked to Frege’s doctrine of “reference shift” according to which the meaning of an expression is sensitive to its linguistic context. This doctrine is alleged to retain the relevant claims (...) about synonymy and substitution while respecting the compositionality principle. Thus, Salmon (Philos Rev 115(4):415, 2006) and Glanzberg and King (Philosophers’ Imprint 20(2):1–29, 2020) offer occurrence-based accounts of variable binding, and Pagin and Westerståhl (Linguist Philos 33(5):381–415, 2010c) argue that an occurrence-based semantics delivers a compositional account of quotation. Our thesis is this: the occurrence-based strategies resolve the apparent failures of substitutivity in the same general way as the standard expression-based semantics do. So it is a myth that a Frege-inspired occurrence-based semantics affords a genuine alternative strategy. (shrink)

Gareth Evans a déclaré que la théorie causale de la référence doit être élargie pour inclure ce qu'il appelle des « bases multiples ». Après le baptême initial, l'utilisation du nom en présence de la personne peut, dans les bonnes circonstances, être considérée comme renforçant le nom dans son référent. Pour ceux qui sont en contact direct avec la personne, la référence pour l'expression du nom est résolue au moyen d'une chaîne causale qui inclut les personnes qui l'ont connue lors (...) du « baptême », ou en indexant la personne au nom au moment de la communication. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.27380.37763. (shrink)

Öz: Frege özel adların (ve diğer dilsel simgelerin) anlamları ve gönderimleri arasında ünlü ayrımını yaptığı “Anlam ve Gönderim Üzerine” (1948) adlı makalesinde, bu ayrımın önemi, gerekliliği ve sonuçları üzerine uzun değerlendirmeler yapar ancak özel adın anlamından tam olarak ne anlaşılması gerektiğinden yalnızca bir dipnotta kısaca söz eder. Örneğin “Aristoteles” özel adının anlamının Platon’un öğrencisi ve Büyük İskender’in öğretmeni ya da Stagira’da doğan Büyük İskender’in öğretmeni olarak alınabileceğini söyler. Burada dikkat çeken nokta örnekteki özel adın olası anlamları olarak gösterilen belirli betimlemelerin (...) de özel ad içeriyor olması. Anlamın Frege için bileşimsel olduğu, bir başka deyişle bir dilsel simgenin anlamının (varsa) parçalarının anlamlarınca belirlendiği düşünülürse, örnekteki belirli betimlemelerin anlamlarının saptanabilmesi için içerdikleri özel adların da anlamları saptanıp betimleme içinde geçtikleri yere konmalıdır. Bu işlem hiçbir özel ad kalmayana kadar sürdürülmelidir. Ancak biraz düşünülünce bir özel adın nesnesini tekil olarak betimleyecek ve içinde özel ad geçmeyecek bir betimleme bulmanın kolay olmadığı görülür. Örneğin yukarıdaki betimlemelerde geçen “Platon”, “Büyük İskender” ve “Stagira” gibi özel adların anlamları olabilecek ancak özel ad içermeyen betimlemeler bulmak pek kolay görünmüyor. Ortaya bir sonsuz gerileme sorunu çıkmış gibi duruyor. Frege’nin anlam-gönderim ayrımını için ciddi sonuçları olabilecek bu sorunu Frege çözebilir mi? Bu yazıda bu sorunun yanıtını arayacağım. Sorunu betimledikten sonra Frege’nin önündeki seçenekleri (örneğin bağlama duyarlı terimlerden (gösterme adılları veya belirteçler) yararlanma veya bağlamı sınırlama gibi) değerlendireceğim. -/- Abstract: In his “Sense and Reference” (1948), Frege makes his famous distinction between the sense and the reference of a proper name (and other signs) and discusses at length the significance, necessity and consequences of the distinction, but he explains how the sense of a proper name should be understood very briefly in a footnote. According to him, for example, the sense of the proper name “Aristotle” can be taken as the pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great or the teacher of Alexander the Great who was born in Stagira. What is interesting here is that the definite descriptions given as the possible senses of this proper name do themselves contain proper names too. Since the sense is something compositional for Frege, which means the sense of a linguistic sign is determined by its constituents (if there are any), in order to determine the sense of definite descriptions in question, we should first determine the senses of proper names they contain and substitute these senses with the proper names themselves. This process should continue until no proper name remains. However, it does not seem easy to find a definite description which describes the object of a proper name uniquely but contains no proper name itself. For instance, could we find appropriate senses that contain no proper name for “Plato”, “Alexander the Great” and “Stagira”? It does not seem likely. A problem of infinite regress appears to arise. Can Frege solve this problem, which poses a serious threat for his sensereference distinction? I will explore this problem in this paper. After explaining the problem, I will discuss the options (e.g. turning to indexicals or context restriction) Frege can take to deal with it. (shrink)

Husserl’s philosophy, by the usual account, evolved through three stages: 1. development of an anti-psychologistic, objective foundation of logic and mathematics, rooted in Brentanian descriptive psychology; 2. development of a new discipline of "phenomenology" founded on a metaphysical position dubbed "transcendental idealism"; transformation of phenomenology from a form of methodological solipsism into a phenomenology of intersubjectivity and ultimately (in his Crisis of 1936) into an ontology of the life-world, embracing the social worlds of culture and history. We show that this (...) story of three revolutions can provide at best a preliminary orientation, and that Husserl was constantly expanding and revising his philosophical system, integrating views in phenomenology, ontology, epistemology and logic with views on the nature and tasks of philosophy and science as well as on the nature of culture and the world in ways that reveal more common elements than violent shifts of direction. We argue further that Husserl is a seminal figure in the evolution from traditional philosophy to the characteristic philosophical concerns of the late twentieth century: concerns with representation and intentionality and with problems at the borderlines of the philosophy of mind, ontology, and cognitive science. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the prospects for using the distinction between rejection and denial to resolve Saul Kripke’s puzzle about belief. One puzzle Kripke presents in A Puzzle About Belief poses what would have seemed a fairly straightforward question about the beliefs of the bilingual Pierre, who is disposed to sincerely and reflectively assent to the French sentence Londres est jolie, but not to the English sentence London is pretty, both of which he understands perfectly well. The question to (...) be answered is whether Pierre believes that London is pretty, and Kripke argues, of each answer, that it is unacceptable. On my proposal, either answer to the question is to be rejected, but neither answer is to be denied, using the resource of partially-defined predicates. After demonstrating how this serves as a solution to the puzzle, I illustrate some philosophical motivations—independent of Kripke’s puzzle —for adopting a view on which belief is a partially defined predicate. I conclude that there are decent prospects for the proposed response to Kripke’s puzzle. (shrink)

Could Christians and Muslims be referring to the same God? For an account of the reference of divine names, I follow Bogardus and Urban (2017) in advocating in favour of using Gareth Evans’s causal theory of reference, on which a name refers to the dominant source of information in the name’s “dossier”. However, I argue further that information about experiences, in which God is simply the object of acquaintance, can dominate the dossier. Thus, this demonstrative use of names offers a (...) promising alternative avenue by which users of the divine names can refer to the same referent despite having different conceptions of God. I also respond to Burling’s (2019) worship-worthiness view. (shrink)

Goodman and Lederman (2020) argue that the traditional Fregean strategy for preserving the validity of Leibniz’s Law of substitution fails when confronted with apparent counterexamples involving proper names embedded under propositional attitude verbs. We argue, on the contrary, that the Fregean strategy succeeds and that Goodman and Lederman’s argument misfires.

semantic minimalism and moderte contextualism.

Abstract: This paper introduces and analyses the doctrine of externalism about semantic content; discusses the Twin Earth argument for externalism and the assumptions behind it, and examines the question of whether externalism about content is compatible with a privileged knowledge of meanings and mental contents.

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 (...) the proper names that are discussed in the article are singular nouns that have no syntactic structure. Most of them refer to objects, but some, such as ‘Pegasus’, apparently do not. The article begins with proper names and the question ‘What is the meaning of a proper name?’ It turns to natural kind terms later. (shrink)

An introduction to philosophy of language since Frege, focusing on the 20th century.

There is a difference between merely thinking that P and really grasping that P. For example, Jackson's (1982) black-and-white Mary cannot (before leaving her black-and-white room) fully grasp what it means to say that fire engines are red, but she can perfectly well entertain the thought that fire engines are red. The contrast between merely thinking and grasping is especially salient in the context of certain moral decisions. For example, an individual who grasps the plight of starving children thanks to (...) evocative images seems much more likely to donate for the children's benefit than someone who is merely told about their plight. This paper offers a phenomenal account of grasping according to which grasping a content (whether a proposition or concept) consists in one's thoughts about the content being constituted by phenomenal experiences of constituents of the content. This account improves on earlier phenomenal accounts of grasping (Bourget 2017a, 2018) by allowing for partial grasping and generalizing to concepts. The paper also addresses objections to phenomenal accounts of grasping, including the objection that recent developments in AI technology show that consciousness is irrelevant to grasping and understanding. (shrink)

This paper continues my discussion with Michael Dummett on Frege’s senses, published in The Philosophy of Michael Dummett and further developed in Diametros. In his reply to my original paper, Dummett came to agree with me that senses are neither objects nor functions, since they have a categorially different kind of linguistico-metaphysical function to perform. He then asks how we might quantify over senses, if they are neither objects nor functions. He discusses two main options, and finds one unviable and (...) the other “very un-Fregean.” I then offer a Fregean or neo-Fregean option in my rejoinder. And I still hold that this way out will do the job, or is at least plausible enough that the burden of persuasion is on those who disagree. But I hope to show in this paper that on a more complete examination of Frege, there are at least twenty Fregean or neo-Fregean ways out, with the one I proposed being option. (shrink)

There is widespread excitement in the literature about the method of arbitrary functions: many take it to show that it is from the dynamics of systems that the objectivity of probabilities emerge. In this paper, I differentiate three ways in which a probability function might be objective, and I argue that the method of arbitrary functions cannot help us show that dynamics objectivise probabilities in any of these senses.

The current discussion of the intentionality nature has become more sophisticated and complex. In this paper I will delineate a number of approaches to intentionality in contemporary philosophy: 1 mentalistic; 2 semantic / linguistic; 3 pragmatic; 4 somatic; 5 and naturalistic. Although philosophers identify and analyse many concepts of intentionality, from the author point of view, there is only one intentionality: mentalistic intentionality. Furthermore, there are the pre-intentionality in the physical world and the meta-intentionality in the world of culture.

Variabilism is the view that proper names (like pronouns) are semantically represented as variables. Referential names, like referential pronouns, are assigned their referents by a contextual variable assignment (Kaplan 1989). The reference parameter (like the world of evaluation) may also be shifted by operators in the representation language. Indeed verbs that create hyperintensional contexts, like ‘think’, are treated as operators that simultaneously shift the world and assignment parameters. By contrast, metaphysical modal operators shift the world of assessment only. Names, being (...) variables, refer rigidly in the latter merely intensional contexts, but may vary their reference in hyperintensional contexts. This conforms to the intuition that the content of attitude ascriptions encapsulates referential uncertainty. Furthermore, names in hyperintensional contexts are ambiguous between de re* and de dicto* interpretations. This fact is used to account for asymmetric mistaken identity attributions (for example, Biron thinks Katherine is Rosaline, but he doesn’t think Rosaline is Katherine). -/- The variable theory compares favourably with its alternatives, including Millianism and descriptivism. Millians cannot account for the behaviour of names in hyperintensional contexts, while descriptivists cannot generate a necessary contrast between intensional and hyperintensional contexts. No other theory can capture the facts pertaining to the existentially bound use of names. (shrink)

Aspects of Psychologism is a collection of essays unified around a philosophical approach to the mind that is non-reductive and yet compatible (or continuous) with scientific psychology. The essays in the book, published over a period of twenty years, investigate the phenomena of intentionality and consciousness, with a special emphasis on perceptual phenomena. The central theme which unites the essays is an approach to the mind which I call ‘psychologism about the psychological’. Psychologism about the psychological, as I understand it, (...) is a vision of what is important in the study of the mind. It asserts the reality of the psychological and the need to investigate it through a variety of approaches, of which metaphysics, psychology, cognitive science and phenomenology are examples. These disciplines, according to psychologism, are concerned with fundamentally the same subject-matter: the mind. But since I have found it difficult sometimes to get this point across in abstract terms, perhaps it is easier to introduce what I mean by ‘psychologism’ by saying what it is not. (shrink)

An underpinning assumption of modern legal positivism is that the question of how legal standards differ from normative standards in other spheres of human thought is resolved via the concept of a legal system and the notion of internal logic, through use of contextual definition. This approach is seen to lead to an untenable form of structuralism altogether at odds with the positivist's intentions. An alternative strategy is offered which allows the positivists to retain their deepest insights, though at a (...) price. (shrink)

A predicate logic typically has a heterogeneous semantic theory. Subjects and predicates have distinct semantic roles: subjects refer; predicates characterize. A sentence expresses a truth if the object to which the subject refers is correctly characterized by the predicate. Traditional term logic, by contrast, has a homogeneous theory: both subjects and predicates refer; and a sentence is true if the subject and predicate name one and the same thing. In this paper, I will examine evidence for ascribing to Aristotle the (...) view that subjects and predicates refer. If this is correct, then it seems that Aristotle, like the traditional term logician, problematically conflates predication and identity claims. I will argue that we can ascribe to Aristotle the view that both subjects and predicates refer, while holding that he would deny that a sentence is true just in case the subject and predicate name one and the same thing. In particular, I will argue that Aristotle's core semantic notion is not identity but the weaker relation of constitution. For example, the predication ‘All men are mortal’ expresses a true thought, in Aristotle's view, just in case the mereological sum of humans is a part of the mereological sum of mortals. (shrink)

Due to their reliance on constitutive higher-order representing to generate the qualities of which the subject is consciously aware, I argue that the major existing higher-order representational theories of consciousness insulate us from our first-order sensory states. In fact on these views we are never properly conscious of our sensory states at all. In their place I offer a new higher-order theory of consciousness, with a view to making us suitably intimate with our sensory states in experience. This theory relies (...) on the idea of ‘quoting’ sensory qualities, so is dubbed the ‘quotational higher-order thought theory’. I argue that it can capture something of the idea that we are ‘acquainted’ with our conscious states without slipping beyond the pale for naturalists, whilst also providing satisfying treatments of traditional problems for higher-order theories concerning representational mismatch. The theory achieves this by abandoning a representational mechanism for mental intentionality, in favour of one based on ‘embedding’. (shrink)

O objetivo central desse artigo é apresentar uma posição cognitivista e contextualista no que diz respeito à atribuição de significado dos conceitos normativos de ‘dever’, ‘correto’ e ‘errado’ usados em sentenças cotidianas. Argumentaremos que esses conceitos normativos são melhor compreendidos em termos de razões para agir. Após várias distinções iniciais de esclarecimentos, apontaremos para uma estratégia naturalizada da normatividade não reducionista, bem como para um procedimento de isolamento visando a justificação dos juízos normativos. Por fim, defenderemos que a atribuição de (...) verdade aos juízos normativos se dará em um âmbito de convergência prática. (shrink)

I defend what I believe to be a new variation on Kripkean themes, for the purpose of providing an improved way to understand the referring functions of proper names. I begin by discussing roles played by perceptual perspectives in the use of proper names, and then broaden the discussion to include what I call cognitive perspectives. Although both types of perspectives underwrite the existence of intentional intermediaries between proper names and their referents, the existence of these intentional intermediaries does not (...) entail that a Kripke-inspired view of direct reference must be abandoned. At the same time, the existence of these intermediaries can be seen to play illuminating roles as regards the referring functions of proper names in the following types of cases, among others: (a) where different names pick out the same subject; (b) where names are empty. Along the way, I argue that perspectival views are not something inside the head of language users as intended by Putnam in his well-known discussion of meaning. (shrink)

Economists reason causally. Like many other scientists, they aim at formulating justified causal claims about their object of study. This thesis contributes to our understanding of how causal reasoning proceeds in economics. By using the research on the causes of unemployment as a case study, three questions are adressed. What are the meanings of causal claims? How can a causal claim be adequately supported by evidence? How are causal beliefs affected by incoming facts? In the process of answering these semantic, (...) epistemic and dynamical questions, the richness of causal reasoning in economics is brought to the foreground. In the part on semantics, it is argued that the meaning of causal generalizations in policy-oriented economics is best captured by using the concept of ‘inferential relation’ rather than the one of ‘referential relation’. This part contributes to develop an inferentialist semantics by distinguishing among types of inferential relations. In the part on epistemology, it is argued that justification in sciences like economics often relies, and ought to rely, on evidential variety―i.e. the combination of evidence from multiple sources. An interpretation of independence among evidential sources is offered: two evidential sources are fully independent if and only if the reasons why they would be unreliable do not overlap. It is then shown that the variety-of-evidence thesis does not hold under extreme circumstances. The part on dynamics focuses on deviant-case study. A storyline is provided for what deviant-case study aims at and how it proceeds in what is characterized as an ‘eclectic science’. (shrink)

The most common way of analysing the meaning of causal generalisations relies on referentialist semantics. In this article, we instead develop an analysis based on inferentialist semantics. According to this approach, the meaning of a causal generalisation is constituted by the web of inferential connections in which the generalisation participates. We distinguish and discuss five classes of inferential connections that constitute the meaning of causal generalisations produced in policy-oriented economic research. The usefulness of our account is illustrated with the analysis (...) of generalisations about unemployment put forward by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in its highly influential 1994 OECD Jobs Study. The article ends with a discussion of some crucial philosophical questions about the use of inferentialism in the analysis of causal generalisations. (shrink)

This paper develops the situational model of primate beliefs from the Prior-Lurz line of thought. There is a strong skepticism concerning primate beliefs in the analytic tradition which holds that beliefs have to be propositional and non-human animals do not have them. The response offered in this paper is twofold. First, two arguments against the propositional model as applied to other animals are put forward: an a priori argument from referential opacity and an empirical argument from varieties of working memory. (...) Second, the Prior-Lurz situational model based on state of affairs as opposed to propositions is introduced and defended with two significant modifications. With this model of primate beliefs we can make progress in understanding how other primates can have certain mindreading capacity. (shrink)

Concepts are traditionally pictured as discrete containers that bring together objects or qualities based on the possession of shared, uniform properties. This paper focuses on a contrasting notion of the concept which holds that concepts are defined by their capacity to reach out and connect with other concepts. Two theories in recent continental philosophy maintain this view: one from Ricoeur, the other from Deleuze and Guattari. Both are offered as attempts to bring art and philosophy into relation, but they differ (...) over how the process of connection is theorized. With Ricoeur, a concept is only a concept if it is inherently predisposed to connect with others, and open to being misapplied through metaphor, whereas, with Deleuze and Guattari, connection is left as the general notion of each and every concept being mutually consistent with other concepts, with the consistency attributed to the external action of “bridging.” The author demonstrates the impact of this difference on how the philosophers perceive the art–philosophy relation, and argues that Ricoeur is better placed to provide a theory of philosophical discourse that is open to the aesthetic. Ricoeur can show it through metaphor, while Deleuze and Guattari can only assert or state an art–philosophy relation through a series of technical claims. The significance of the showing–saying distinction is that it can demonstrate the depth with which conceptual connectivity is located within the philosophers’ respective ontologies, and can help to reveal the value of conceptual connectivity for that ontology. (shrink)

This paper presents a purely pragmatic account of quotation which, it is argued, will be able to accommodate all relevant linguistic phenomena. Given that it is more parsimonious to explain the data by reference to pragmatic principles only than to explain them by reference to both pragmatic and semantic principles, as is common in the literature, I conclude that the account of quotation I present is to be preferred to the more standard accounts (including the alternative theories of quotation, discussed (...) here). (shrink)

Although first published in 1969, the methodological views advanced in Quentin Skinner's “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” remain relevant today. In his article Skinner suggests that it would be inappropriate to even attempt to write the history of any idea or concept. In support of this view, Skinner advances two arguments, one derived from the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein and the other from that of J. L. Austin.In this paper I focus on the first of these (...) arguments. I claim that the conclusion which Skinner draws from this particular argument does not necessarily follow and that an alternative assessment of the methodological significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for historians of ideas is possible. On this alternative view, far from ruling out conceptual history, an appeal to the view of meaning set out in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations leads to a quite different conclusion, namely that the writing of such a history is arguably a necessary precondition for the elucidation of the meaning of a number of the core concepts in the canon of the history of political thought.Skinner's views have changed somewhat since 1969. Indeed, from the mid 1970s onwards he came to relax the strict opposition to the idea of conceptual history to which he was then committed. The paper concludes by noting that this evolution in Skinner's thinking has made him much more sympathetic than anybody reading “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” would have imagined to the research project of the Begriffgeschichte School of conceptual history. (shrink)

The author puts forth an approach to propositional attitude contexts based upon the view that one does not have beliefs of ordinary extensional entitiessimpliciter. Rather, one has beliefs of such entities as presented in various manners. Roughly, these are treated as beliefs of ordered pairs — the first member of which is the ordinary extensional entity and the second member of which is a predicate that it satisfies. Such an approach has no difficulties with problems involving identity, such as of (...) The Morning Star and The Evening Star (section 1). Given the second members of the pairs, the modes of presentation, it is quite natural to allow exportation everywhere. There is no need for essentialism. (One also can have non-essentialistic modal logic if one grants analyticity or the like.) (section 2). Given that the second member of the pair need only be one that is satisfied by the entity that is the first member (and need not be specificative), the method has no difficulties when one is concerned only with discriminations (and not specifications) (section 3). When this method is combined with the Frege-Carnap method of descriptions, fictional entities can be accommodated; Goodman''s unicorn-picture and the like can be brought within a Tarskian semantics; and Geach''s difficulties with intentional identity appear to be handled (section 4). Given the author''s ordered pair construals, there appears to be no additional need for notional construals; i.e., the author''s one unified method appears satisfactory for dealing with both traditionalde re (relational) andde dicto (notional) construals. The Paradox of the Knower and the like do not appear formulatable against the author''s approach. (section 5). The author also argues against the basic principles behind the Church-Langford translation argument (section 6). (shrink)

Determiner phrases embedded under a propositional attitude verb have traditionally been taken to denote answers to implicit questions. For example, 'the capital of Vermont' as it occurs in 'John knows the capital of Vermont' has been thought to denote the proposition which answers the implicit question 'what is the capital of Vermont?' Thus, where 'know' is treated as a propositional attitude verb rather than an acquaintance verb, 'John knows the capital of Vermont' is true iff John knows that Montpelier is (...) the capital of Vermont. The traditional view lost its popularity long ago, because it was thought to rest on the controversial assumption that determiner phases embedded under a propositional attitude verb function semantically in the same way as the corresponding wh-clauses. Here we defend the traditional assumption against objections. We then argue that wh-clauses are not to be given a uniform treatment as indirect questions. When occurring under a propositional attitude verb, wh-clauses are better treated as having a predicate-type semantic value. We conclude by considering some possible objections to the predicate view. (shrink)

Attitude reports are reports about people’s states of mind. They are reports about what people think, believe, know, know a priori, imagine, hate, wish, fear, and the like. So, for example, I might report that s knows p, or that she imagines p, or that she hates p, where p specifies the content to which s is purportedly related. One lively current debate centers around the question of what sort of specification is involved when such attitude reports are successful. Some (...) hold that it is specification of the precise content of a mental state; others hold that it is specification of the content of a mental state only relative to a mode of presentation; yet others hold that it is merely a description or characterization of the content of a mental state. After providing a brief introduction to the traditional debate on attitude reports, this entry argues that for certain kinds of knowledge reports and for so-called de re attitude reports, descriptive theories emerge as the most plausible. The entry concludes with a discussion of how the characterizing relation between attitude reports and mental states might be construed. (shrink)

In this article I explore some implications of the correspondence that went on between Ludwig Wittgenstein and the logician and mathematician Gottlob Frege. Part of this exchange was focused on the envisaged publication of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and on the philosophical or literary character of that work. The problem discussed concerned the question of whether the Tractatus should be seen not as a scientific but as an artistic achievement. My first goal is to present what, given Frege’s writings, his phrase (...) “an artistic rather than a scientific achievement” could be understood to mean in terms of the Tractatus itself. Secondly, I seek to determine the extent to which traces of Frege’s understanding of such terms as “mock thoughts,” “fiction,” “elucidation,” “paintings” and “colouring” are to be found in the language of the Tractatus. This should then make it possible to show how Wittgenstein’s work, viewed from a Fregean perspective, can be seen as furnishing a logic and semantics not only for the languages of logic and natural science, but also for something that is “an artistic rather than a scientific achievement”, while also indicating that the content of the Tractatus as a whole could not have been captured independently of the unified form Wittgenstein himself gave it. (shrink)

People often speak loosely, uttering sentences that are plainly false on their most strict interpretation. In understanding such speakers, we face a problem of underdetermination: there is often no unique interpretation that captures what they meant. Focusing on the case of incomplete definite descriptions, this paper suggests that speakers often mean bundles of propositions. When a speaker means a bundle, their audience can know what they mean by deriving any one of its members. Rather than posing a problem for the (...) interpretation of loose talk, the underdetermination of a uniquely correct interpretation allows for various ways in which the audience can grasp the speaker’s meaning. (shrink)

This paper articulates a formal theory of belief incorporating three key theses: (1) belief is a dyadic relation between an agent and a property; (2) this property is not the belief's truth condition (i.e., the intuitively self-ascribed property which the agent must exemplify for the belief to be true) but is instead a certain abstract property (a "thought-content") which contains a way of thinking of that truth condition; (3) for an agent a to have a belief "about" such-and-such items it (...) is necessary that a possesses a language of thought, $M_{a}$ , and that a (is disposed as one who) inwardly affirms a sentence of $M_{a}$ in which there are terms that denote those objects. Employing an extended version of E. Zalta's system ILAO, the proffered theory locates thought-contents within a typed hierarchy of "senses" and their "modes of presentation", the provisional definitions of which (suppressing complications added later to accommodate the contents of beliefs about beliefs) are as follows. A mode of presentation of e is a ternary relation of the sort [λxyz z is a name in $M_{y}$ that denotes x, and $D_{e}yz$ ] in which $D_{e}$ is an e-determiner - a relation between agents and their mental expressions imposing a syntactico-semantic condition sufficient for such an expression to denote e therein. A sense of an entity e is an abstract property that "contains" a mode of presentation $R_{e}$ of e by dint of encoding its property-reduct [λx(∃y)(∃z) $R_{e}xyz$ ]. In particular, a thought-content is a sense T of an ordinary first-order property P containing a mode of presentation whose P-determiner $D_{P}$ is such that, for any y and z, $D_{P}yz$ entails that z is a λ-abstract [λv S] of $M_{y}$ in which S is a sentence whose non-logical parts stand in appropriate semantic relations to the constituents of T's (some of which may themselves be senses). Where $I_{a}$ is agent a's dedicated self-demonstrative and |T| is the mode of presentation contained in a thought-content T, the belief relation itself is then characterized as obtaining between a and T iff a( is disposed as one who) inwardly affirms the substitution instance $S(I_{a}/v)$ of a sentence S in $M_{a}$ such that |T|(P, a, [λv S]). The aforementioned "constituents" and "appropriate semantic relations" are formally characterized so as to permit a system of canonical descriptions for thought-contents of arbitrary complexity. These canonical descriptions are then employed to chart the nature and interrelations of belief de re, de dicto and de se and to identify the source of opacity in belief ascription. (shrink)