This paper defends the view that philosophical propositions are merely relatively true, i.e. true relative to a doxastic perspective defined at least in part by a non-inferential belief-acquiring method. Here is the strategy: first, the primary way that contemporary philosophers defend their views is through the use of rational intuition, and this method delivers non-inferential, basic beliefs which are then systematized and brought into reflective equilibrium. Second, Christian theologians use exactly the same methodology, only replacing intuition with revelation. Third, intuition (...) and revelation yield frequently inconsistent output beliefs. Fourth, there is no defensible reason to prefer the dictates of intuition to those of Christian revelation. Fifth, the resulting dilemma means that there are true philosophical propositions, but we can't know them (scepticism), or there are no philosophical propositions and the naturalists are right (nihilism), or relativism is true. I suggest that relativism is the most palatable of these alternatives. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue, contra Perry, that the existence of locating beliefs does not require the abandonment of the analysis of belief as a relation between subjects and propositions. I argue that what the "problem of the essential indexical" reveals is that a complete explanation of behaviour requires both an explanation of the type of behaviour the agent engaged in and an explanation of why she engaged in it in the circumstances that she did. And I develop an account (...) of belief which encompasses both explanatory roles and which still treats belief as a two-place relation between subjects and propositions. (shrink)

We are confident of many of the judgements we make as to what sorts of alterations the members of nature's kinds can survive, and what sorts of events mark the ends of their existences. But is our confidence based on empirical observation of nature's kinds and their members? Conventionalists deny that we can learn empirically which properties are essential to the members of nature's kinds. Judgements of sameness in kind between members, and of numerical sameness of a member across time, (...) merely project our conventions of individuation. Our confidence is warranted because apart from those conventions there are no phenomena of kind-sameness or of numerical sameness across time. There is just 'stuff' displaying properties. This paper argues that conventionalists can assign no properties to the 'stuff' beyond immediate phenomenal properties. Consequently they cannot explain how each of us comes to be able to wield 'our conventions'. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that context sensitivity is crucial for a proper exegesis of Wittgenstein's remark that one can say of the standard metre rod neither that it is one metre long nor that it is not one metre long. I discuss cases in which we can meaningfully assert that the rod in question is one metre long and explain why these cases do not conflict with Wittgenstein's insight. I analyse Pollock's recent defence of Wittgenstein's remark, as well as (...) Kripke's objections to it, and show that, while their commentaries are helpful, blindness to context renders them unsatisfactory. (shrink)

The author, dismissing the feasibility of attaining the real facts of history, proposes to define historical truth as the set of all possible worlds that agree with all the sources available to the historian. He remarks that this conception is very close to that necessairly assumed today by cosmologists, when describing the evolution of the phisical universe.

Alison Simmons, in Simmons (1999), argues that Descartes in Meditation Six offered a teleological account of sensory representation. According to Simmons, Descartes’ view is that the biological function of sensations explains both why sensations represent what they do (i.e., their referential content) and why they represent their objects the way they do (i.e., their presentational content). Moreover, Simmons claims that her account has several advantages over other currently available interpretations of Cartesian sensations. In this paper, I argue that Simmons’ teleological (...) account cannot be sustained for both theoretical and textual reasons and that it does not have the advantages it is claimed to have. (shrink)

This paper raises concern with the use of theories of reference in philosophical discourse and then to consider the possibility of empirically validating this concern by reference to a novel sort of “quantitative” empirical approach suggested recently by Shaun Nichols (forthcoming). The concern is whether the particular theories of reference or reference relations employed in particular philosophical discussions are actually chosen with a view to entailing or accommodating a desired philosophical outcome. I argue that such dependent selections of assumptions about (...) reference give us little reason to think the assumptions are true. I go on to argue that if we became convinced that such assumptions really are chosen simply to ensure a desired outcome, it would give us reason for skepticism about arguments from reference since it would undermine our sense that such arguments tracked any independent truth about the reference of our words or concepts. (shrink)

Was ist das überhaupt – Bewußtsein? Beim Gebrauch des Substantivs „Bewußt- sein“ sollte man eine gewisse Vorsicht walten lassen. Die deutsche Sprache kennt dieses Substantiv nur innerhalb weniger Redewendungen – „Dann verlor er das Bewußtsein“, „Nach vielen Stunden kam er wieder zu Bewußtsein“, „Im Bewußtsein seiner schweren Verantwortung“ usw. Außerhalb dieser Redewen- dungen kommt das Wort dagegen praktisch nicht vor; und deshalb sollte man skeptisch werden, wenn Philosophen Sätze formulieren wie „Menschen haben ein Bewußtsein“. „Bei Bewußtsein sein“ ist gebräuchliches Deutsch, (...) „ein Be- wußtsein haben“ nicht.1 Diese Bemerkungen mahnen zwar zu besonderer Vor- sicht, helfen in der Sache jedoch nicht viel weiter. Wovon reden wir also, wenn wir fragen, ob Bewußtsein reduktiv erklärbar ist? Fragen wir vielleicht so: Was fehlt dem, der das Bewußtsein verloren hat? (shrink)

This excellent book is aptly titled, for in it Scott Soames systematically discusses and greatly extends the semantic views that Saul Kripke presented in Naming and Necessity . As Soames does this, he touches on a wide variety of semantic topics, all of which he treats with his characteristically high degree of clarity, depth, and precision. Anyone who is interested in the semantic issues raised by..

Blackburn argues that moral supervenience in conjunction with the lack of entailments from naturalistic to moral judgments poses a challenge to moral realism. Klagge and McFetridge try to avert the challenge by appealing to synthetically necessary connections between natural and moral properties. Blackburn rejoins that, even if there are such connections, the challenge still remains. We remain agnostic on the question whether there are such connections, but argue against Blackburn that, if there are indeed such connections, then the challenge to (...) moral realism, properly phrased, does not hold up. (shrink)

Those who favour an ontology based on dispositions are thereby able to provide a dispositional essentialist account of the laws of nature. In part 1 of this paper I sketch the dispositional essentialist conception of properties and the concomitant account of laws. In part 2, I characterise various claims about the modal character of properties that fall under the heading ‘quidditism’ and which are consequences of the categoricalist view of properties, which is the alternative to the dispositional essentialist view. I (...) argue that quidditism should be rejected. In part 3, I address a criticism of a strong dispositional essentialist view, viz. that ‘structural’ (i.e. geometrical, numerical, spatial and temporal) properties must be regarded as categorical. (shrink)

In 1955, Goodman set out to 'dissolve' the problem of induction, that is, to argue that the old problem of induction is a mere pseudoproblem not worthy of serious philosophical attention. I will argue that, under naturalistic views of the reflective equilibrium method, it cannot provide a basis for a dissolution of the problem of induction. This is because naturalized reflective equilibrium is -- in a way to be explained -- itself an inductive method, and thus renders Goodman's dissolution viciously (...) circular. This paper, then, examines how the old problem of induction crept back in while nobody was looking. (shrink)

Sciences able to identify appropriate analytical units for their domain, their natural kinds, have tended to be more progressive. In the biological sciences, evolutionary natural kinds are adaptations that can be identified by their common history of selection for some function. Human brains are the product of an evolutionary history of selection for component systems which produced behaviours that gave adaptive advantage to their hosts. These structures, behaviour production systems, are the natural kinds that psychology seeks. We argue these can (...) be identified deductively by classing behaviour first according to its level of behavioural control. Early animals in our lineage used only reactive production, Vertebrates evolved motivation, and later Primates developed executive control. Behaviour can also be classified by the type of evolutionary benefit it bestows: it can deliver either immediate benefits (food, gametes), improvements in the individual’s position with respect to the world (resource access, social status), or improvements in the ability to secure future benefits (knowledge, skill). Combining history and function implies the existence of seven types of behaviour production systems in human brains responsible for reflexive, instinctual, exploratory, driven, emotional, playful and planned behaviour. Discovering scientifically valid categories of behaviour can provide a fundamental taxonomy and common language for understanding, predicting and changing behaviour, and a way of discovering the organs in the brain––its natural kinds––that are responsible for behaviour. (shrink)

Zombies make trouble for physicalism. Intuitively, they seem conceivable, and many take this to support their metaphysical possibility – a result that, most agree, would refute physicalism. John Hawthorne (2002) [Philosophical Studies 109, 17–52] and David Braddon-Mitchell (2003) [The Journal of Philosophy 100, 111–135] have developed a novel response to this argument: phenomenal concepts have a conditional structure – they refer to non-physical states if such states exist and otherwise to physical states – and this explains the zombie intuition. I (...) argue that this strategy fails. The considerations Hawthorne and Braddon-Mitchell adduce in support of their analysis in fact do no such thing. Further, their main argument for the analysis is self-defeating: exactly similar reasoning would undermine the view it is meant to establish. Finally, on closer inspection the conditional analysis is incompatible with the zombie intuition. Thus, not only is the analysis incapable of explaining the intuition: the intuition’s plausibility indicates that the analysis is incorrect. I also suggest that the allure of the conditional-analysis strategy may derive from a questionable view about what explaining the intuition would require. (shrink)

One of the main strategies against conceivability arguments is the so-called phenomenal concept strategy, which aims to explain the epistemic gap between physical and phenomenal truths in terms of the special features of phenomenal concepts. Daniel Stoljar has recently argued that the phenomenal concept strategy has failed to provide a successful explanation of this epistemic gap. In this paper my aim is to defend the phenomenal concept strategy from his criticisms. I argue that Stoljar has misrepresented the resources of the (...) strategy, which can indeed accomplish the required explanatory task, once it is properly understood. (shrink)

Conceptual atomism is the view according to which most lexical concepts lack ‘internal’ or constituent structure. To date, it has not received much attention from philosophers and psychologists. A centralreason is that it is thought to be an implausible theory of concepts, resulting in untenable implications. The main objective of this paper is to present conceptual atomism as a viable alternative, with a view toachieving two aims: the first, to characterize and to elucidate conceptual atomism; and the second, to dispel (...) some misconceptions associated with it. My aim is to show that the prospect of conceptualatomism is a promising one. (shrink)

When I talk about the objects of belief I do not mean, e.g., the sun to which my thought that the sun will rise tomorrow refers; I do not mean the objects we think about. I take objects rather in a general philosophical sense; they simply are the bearers of properties and the relata of relations. I am thus concerned with the objects that are related by the belief relation „_a_ believes that _p_“. In this scheme „ _a _“ represents (...) a person or an epistemic subject; but I am not going to discuss what a person is. „ _p _“ or „that _p _“ represents an object, namely the object of belief; and I am going to discuss what this is. In other words, I am interested in belief contents – to use a less neutral, narrower and equally unclear term. (shrink)

I defend the view that strong psychophysical superveniences is necessary and sufficient to explain the causal efficacy of mental properties. I employ factual and counterfactual conditionals as defeasible criteria of causal efficacy. And I also deal with certain problems arising from disjunctive and conjunctive properties.

In his recent _The Rediscovery of the Mind_ John Searle tries to destroy cognitive science _and_ preserve a future in which a ``perfect science of the brain'' (1992, p. 235) arrives. I show that Searle can't accomplish both objectives. The ammunition he uses to realise the first stirs up a maelstrom of consciousness so wild it precludes securing the second.

That there is an epistemological difference between the mental and the physical is well- known. Introspection readily generates knowledge of one’s own conscious experience, but fails to yield evidence for the existence of anything physical. Conversely, empirical investigation delivers knowledge of physical properties, but neither finds nor requires us to posit conscious experience. In recent decades, a series of neo-Cartesian arguments have emerged that rest on this epistemological difference and purport to demonstrate that mind-brain identity is false and that consciousness (...) is not even realized by or supervenient on physical properties. Where Descartes argued he could clearly and distinctly conceive mind and body as existing separately, contemporary anti-physicalists hold that the conceivability of worlds in which actual world correlations between physical and phenomenological properties fail shows that these correlations are contingent rather than logically or metaphysically necessary. Together with Descartes, they conclude from conceivability that identity, as well as strong supervenience, is false. 1 If the argument of this paper is correct, however, then there is an argument for dualism that arises from the epistemological distinction, is grounded in the Meditations, and is yet distinct from the " 1 " conceivability arguments pursued both by Descartes and contemporary anti-physicalists. Furthermore, the argument is immune to the standard objections to conceivability arguments: its conclusion follows even if there are a posteriori identities between physical and phenomenal properties. (shrink)

A critical survey of recent work on the ontological status of colors supports the conclusion that, while some accounts of color can plausibly be dismissed, no single account can yet be endorsed. Among the remaining options are certain forms of color realism according which familiar colors are instantiated by objects in our extra-cranial visual environment. Also still an option is color anti-realism, the view that familiar colors are, at best, biologically adaptive fictions, instantiated nowhere.I argue that there is simply no (...) fact of the matter as to which of these remaining options is correct. I blame this indeterminacy on the fact that color vision exhibits several of the hallmarks of a modular input system, as described by Jerry Fodor in The Modularity of Mind. (shrink)

Anything is similar to anything, provided the respects of similarity are allowed to be gerrymandered or gruesome, as Goodman observed.2 But similarity in non-gruesome or—as I shall say—genuine respects is much less ecumenical. Colors, it seems, provide a compelling illustration of the distinction as applied to similarities among properties.3 For instance, in innumerable gruesome respects, blue is more similar to yellow than to purple. But in a genuine respect, blue is more similar to purple than to yellow (genuinely more similar, (...) as I shall sometimes put it). (shrink)

The ontological question of what there is, from the perspective of common sense, is intricately bound to what can be perceived. The above observation, when combined with the fact that nouns within language can be divided between nouns that admit counting, such as ‘pen’ or ‘human’, and those that do not, such as ‘water’ or ‘gold’, provides the starting point for the following investigation into the foundations of our linguistic and conceptual phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to claim (...) that such phenomena are facilitated by, on the one hand, an intricate cognitive capacity, and on the other by the complex environment within which we live. We are, in a sense, cognitively equipped to perceive discrete instances of matter such as bodies of water. This equipment is related to, but also differs from, that devoted to the perception of objects such as this computer. Behind this difference in cognitive equipment underlies a rich ontology, the beginnings of which lies in the distinction between matter and objects. The following paper is an attempt to make explicit the relationship between matter and objects and also provide a window to our cognition of such entities. (shrink)

In his Dewey Lectures,1 Hilary Putnam argues that contemporary philosophy cannot solve nor see its way past the traditional problem of how language or thought hooks on to.

(1) Harry believes that Twain is a writer. (2) Harry believes that Clemens is a writer. I say that this is Russellianism's most notorious consequence because it is so often used to argue against the view: many philosophers think that it is obvious that (1) and (2) can differ in truth value, and so they conclude that Russellianism is false. Let's call this the Substitution Objection to Russellianism.

Semantic holism has it that the semantic properties of an individual expression are determined by that expression.

I argue for three principle claims. First, philosophers who seek to integrate the semantic and the intentional into a naturalistic metaphysical worldview need to address a task that they have thus far largely failed even to notice: explaining into- level connections between the physical and the intentional in a naturalistically acceptable way. Second, there are serious reasons to think that this task cannot be carried out in a way that would vindicate realism about intentionality. Third, there is much to be (...) said for an irrealist, non-eliminativist, naturalistic approach to intentionality that I call "preservative irrealism". (shrink)

In his 'Why We Need A-Intensions', Frank Jackson argues that "representational content [is] how things are represented to be by a sentence in the communicative role it possesses in virtue of what it means," a type of content Jackson takes to be broadly descriptive. I think Jackson overstates his case. Even if we agree that such representational properties play a crucial reference-fixing role, it is much harder to argue the case for a crucial communicative role. I articulate my doubts about (...) Jackson's views on this point by contrasting them with the views of John Stuart Mill, usually regarded as an early believer in something like a direct reference account of content for names, but someone who, on my reading, teaches us a salutary lesson about the importance of separating the question of how reference is determined from the question of how we succeed in communicating. (shrink)

Kripke and Putnam have convinced most philosophers that we cannot do metaphysics of nature by analysing the senses of natural kind terms -- simply because natural kind terms do not have senses. Neo-descriptivists, especially Frank Jackson and David Chalmers, believe that this view is mistaken. Merging classical descriptivism with a Kaplan-inspired two-dimensional framework, neo-descriptivists devise a semantics for natural kind terms that assigns natural kind terms so-called 'primary intensions'. Since primary intensions are senses by other names, Jackson and Chalmers conclude (...) that we can and should do metaphysics of nature by analysing the natural kind concepts competent speakers possess. I argue that neo-descriptivism does not provide a suitable basis for doing this kind of metaphysics. I first of all give a detailed account of the neo-descriptivist semantics and deflate the intuitive support neo-descriptivists try to draw from their case of the XYZ-world. I then present three arguments -- the Argument from Ignorance, the Argument from Conceptual Analysis, and the Argument from Laziness. Taken together, these arguments undermine the neo-descriptivist analysis of natural kind terms. I conclude that natural kind terms do not have senses, that we cannot do metaphysics of nature by analysing the senses of our kind terms, and that the Kripke-Putnam account still provides the best semantics for natural kind terms we have. (shrink)

A content of a subject's mental state is narrow when it is determined by the subject's intrinsic properties: that is, when any possible intrinsic duplicate of the subject has a corresponding mental state with the same content. A content of a subject's mental state is..

To sum up, then, both kinds of Putnam's arguments established externalism, though they suffer from several defects. Yet, I think Searle's discussion of these arguments contributes to our understanding of what makes externalism true, and forces us to accept a moderate version of externalism. Searle's own account of the TE story shows us, within a solipsistic outline, how two identical mental states can be directed towards different objects, and further, that the content-determination of indexical thoughts does not necessarily involve external (...) factors. We are thus led to search elsewhere (i.e., not in the nature of indexical thoughts nor in the mere fact of there being identical thoughts with different intentionalities) for what makes the thoughts in question ‘external’. Searle formulates the thesis that intension determines extension as asserting that intension sets certain conditions that anything has to meet in order to fall under its extension. I showed that this is a trivial and implausible understanding of that thesis. Yet, it leads us to distinguish between an intension's setting conditions for falling under its extension and its fully determining such conditions, and thus to see in what sense externalism is true: in the sense that there are intensions that do not fully determine the conditions for falling under their extensions. Rather, they leave indeterminacies. This version of externalism is a moderate one, since though the intensions do not fully determine extensions, they, so to speak, determine their indeterminacies, by specifying the possible external facts that can complete the determination of extension. (The intensions, as I said, function like open sentences, and can be viewed as narrow contents.) So what's in the head plays a much more important role in determining content than Putnam takes it to play. Searle's pointing out that Hilary's concepts ‘elm’ and ‘beech’ are different also contributes to seeing this phenomenon: we realize that in that case the difference between the concepts is what is responsible for the fact that the completions of the extension-determinations are different. I think that this way of viewing the facts shows that ‘the externalist turn’ is not a great revolution, and that with the help of the concept of narrow content we can accept it without abandoning the traditional views about the mind as the source of content, and without being embarrassed by the very idea of (realistic) belief-desire psychology. (shrink)

Critics of wide functionalism have traditionally sought to attack the theory by exposing weaknesses in its account of the qualitative content of experience. Wide functionalist theories of intentional content, however, were spared philosophical scrutiny. I propose that wide functionalist accounts of the intentional content are equally susceptible to attack. I will attempt to demonstrate this by enlisting the functionalist's old foe from the qualia wars - the inverted spectrum hypothesis - in a new way. If the argument is sound, not (...) only will I have shown that the inverted spectrum hypothesis may have more use than philosophical literature recognizes, I will have also exposed a weakness in a dominant philosophical theory: the wide functionalist theory of intentional content. (shrink)