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 (...) even if we think doing so requires stipulative revisions in the meanings of our concepts. I then use this normative authority to argue that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis also has what I call descriptive authority : when we understand concept-meaning in the way we ought to understand it (in the way licensed by the normative authority of Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis) we see that, rather than being revisionary, Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis is a semantically conservative tool that uncovers (what we should think of as being) the meanings our concepts already have. (shrink)

Intuitions play an important role in contemporary philosophy. It is common for theories in epistemology, morality, semantics and metaphysics to be rejected because they are inconsistent with a widely and firmly held intuition. Our goal in this paper is to explore the role of epistemic intuitions in epistemology from a naturalistic perspective. Here is the question we take to be central: (Q) Ought we to trust our epistemic intuitions as evidence in support of our epistemological theories? We will understand this (...) question as employing an epistemic ‘ought’ – insofar as we aim at developing a correct epistemological theory, ought we to trust our epistemic intuitions as evidence for or against our epistemological theories? As it stands, (Q) needs further clarification. Whether something is trustworthy is relative to what (a) what it is and (b) what we’re asking it to do. Sam might trust Marie but not George to care for his children, while he might trust both to care for his pet fish. So in order to address (Q), we first need to explore two questions: What are epistemic intuitions? And what sort of epistemological theories do we want? We will take up each of these questions in the following sections. (shrink)

Explicatures are not cancellable. Theoretical considerations.

In this paper, we pursue three general aims: (I) We will define a notion of fundamental opacity and ask whether it can be found in High Energy Physics (HEP), given the involvement of machine learning (ML) and computer simulations (CS) therein. (II) We identify two kinds of non-fundamental, contingent opacity associated with CS and ML in HEP respectively, and ask whether, and if so how, they may be overcome. (III) We address the question of whether any kind of opacity, contingent (...) or fundamental, is unique to ML or CS, or whether they stand in continuity to kinds of opacity associated with other scientific research. (shrink)

cal practice: the enterprise of specifying information about the world for use in computer systems. Knowledge representation as a field also encompasses conceptual results that call practitioners’ attention to important truths about the world, mathematical results that allow practitioners to make these truths precise, and computational results that put these truths to work. This chapter surveys this practice and its results, as it applies to the interpretation of natural language utterances in implemented natural language processing systems. For a broader perspective (...) on such technical practice, in all its strengths and weaknesses, see (Agre 1997). Knowledge representation offers a powerful general tool for the science of language. Computational logic, a prototypical formalism for representing knowledge about the world, is also the model for the level of logical form that linguists use to characterize the grammar of meaning (Larson and Segal 1995). And researchers from (Schank and Abelson 1977) to (Shieber 1993) and (Bos to appear) have relied crucially on such representations, and the inference methods associated with them, in articulating accounts of semantic relations in language, such as synonymy, entailment, informativeness and contradiction. The new textbooks (Blackburn and Bos 2002a, Blackburn and Bos 2002b) provide an excellent grounding in this research, and demonstrate how deeply computational ideas from knowledge representation can inform pure linguistic study. In this short chapter, I must leave much of.. (shrink)

well-known arguments dispute the meaningfulness of language use in specific extant systems; the symbols they use..

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 (...) intended to mirror the conceptual apparatus behind ordinary modal talk. The individual-driven picture is distinct from two views inspired by Kripke, direct reference theory and Millianism. The former covers only the first half of the picture, while the latter explicitly gives up on that half even, opting to remain neutral about what expectation expressions impose on the nature of their referents. (shrink)

This paper recalls the motivation for a normative account of the conceptual content of our beliefs, namely the problem of rule-following. It employs Brandom’s social, inferential semantics as a paradigmatic example of such an account of conceptual content. The conceptual content of our beliefs – and the meaning of the sentences that we use – is normative in the sense that it is determined by social, normative practices. Nevertheless, a description of content and meaning is possible. The paper argues that (...) the purpose of a normative account of conceptual content is a rational reconstruction in the sense of a conceptual analysis. (shrink)

[Draft substantially revised, September 2021] David Lewis acclimated us to talk of “nonactual concreta that exist,” regarding talking donkeys and the like. I shall argue that this was not for the best, and try to normalize a way of describing them as “actual concreta that do not exist.” The basis of this is a defense of the Meinongian thesis “there are objects of which it is true that there are no such objects,” re: fictitious and illusory objects. I first formulate (...) the problem of negative existentials in a novel way, and discuss why this new version is more forceful against anti-Meinongians. Additional data is also pressed against anti-Meinongians--e.g., the truth of ‘Pegasus is imaginary’, and a reading of ‘There actually are illusory objects’ where it comes out true. The Meinongian, in contrast, easily and uniformly explains the same data, by allowing the existence Pegasus, pink elephants, and the like. But contra Meinong, these cases suggest that the nonexistent objects are mind-dependent objects, and I clarify and defend this suggestion from several objections. The resulting Meinongianism is thus “conservative” in that it merely acknowledges the sense in which there are mind-dependent objects, imaginary and illusory objects being prime examples. Of special note, the “ideology” is conservative as well in that the typical Meinongian jargon of “nuclear” or “encoded” properties is paraphrased away. New suggestions about the ontology of abstracta, mere possibilia, and impossibilia are sketched in light of this. Comparisons are also made with Thomasson, Crane, and McGinn, among others. (shrink)

A physicalist view of qualia labelled non-eliminative reductionism is outlined. If it is true, qualia and physicalism can co-exist without difficulty. First, qualia present no particular problem for reductionist physicalism - they are entirely physical, can be studied and explained using the standard scientific approach, and present no problem any harder than any other scientists face. Second, reductionist physicalism presents no particular problem for qualia – they can be encompassed within an entirely physicalist position without any necessity, either to reduce (...) them to non-existence, or to treat them as new fundamental properties. It is suggested that the position also has sufficient explanatory power to successfully deal with the 'why like anything – why does experience exist at all' question and to counter both Chalmers' Conceivability Argument and Jackson's Knowledge Argument. (shrink)

It is well established by now that computer science has a number of concerns in common with natural language understanding. Common themes show up in particular with algorithmic aspects of text processing. This chapter gives an overview of border crossings from NLP to CS and back. Starting out from syntactic analysis, we trace our route via a philosophical puzzle about meaning, Hoare correctness rules for dynamic semantics, error state analysis of presupposition, equational reasoning about state change, programming with frameworks originally (...) devised for natural language semantics, and the logic of incremental processing. In many cases methods and perspectives developed on one side of the border proved quite useful on the other side, although usually it becomes clear after a while that tools have to be redesigned to fit. The chapter ends with a sketch of the emerging contours of a ‘proper treatment of context in natural language’ that is more than just an application of a logic designed for program analysis. (shrink)

David Lewis proposed to deal with the semantics of sentences that state what is possible for an individual in terms of possible individuals that are in ways the first individual might have been, so called counterparts of the individual. In this book, I defend counterpart semantics as an approach to the semantics of modality and natural language semantics in particular. Counterpart semantics has a rival, the standard Kripkean semantics that deals with the same sentences in terms of an accessibility relation (...) between possible worlds. While counterpart semantics appears to be more flexible and carries less metaphysical presuppositions (it does not presuppose that I myself exist in various possible worlds, e.g.), Kripkean semantics has some advantages of its own. Most importantly, it incorporates the core assumptions of what may be called standard possible-worlds semantics; i.e. the core assumptions of the most successful framework within linguistic semantics. Counterpart semantics, on the other hand, does not conform to these assumptions, or so I will argue. In this book I opt for a synthesis of these two approaches that allows to combine their advantages. In Chap.1 I introduce the basic idea of counterpart semantics. I defend counterparts against the charge, made by Kripke, that counterparts are irrelevant for the analysis of modality. In Chap. 2 I present the classical version of counterpart semantics, i.e. David Lewis's translation of the language of quantified modal logic into counterpart theory. I discuss some well-known problems and opt for a revision of that translation that is able to solve the problems. Lewis's translation indirectly defines semantical values for expressions of quantified modal logic. In Chap.3 I evaluate counterpart semantics with respect to basic features of possible-worlds semantics. I conclude that the semantical values indirectly assigned to sentences by Lewis's translation are not sets of possible worlds, and that they do not meet certain intuitive demands on notions of meaning and content. (The revisions proposed in Chap.2 do not change this.) In Chap.4 I discuss various versions of a combination of counterpart semantics with Kripkean semantics found in the literature. But I conclude that here, the benefits of the latter are achieved by forfeiting the advantages of the former. Chap.5 finally contains my own proposal how to combine the two approaches in a more satisfactory way. The core semantical notion is truth according to a maximal complete representation, where representations now play the role of worlds. It is an important feature of the counterpart relation that it is qualitative, i.e. a relation in which things stand in virtue how they are. In Chap.1 I point out why it is qualitative, and why it ought to be. In Chap.6 I show how to make the notion of a qualitative property or relation precise. Finally, in Chap.7 I show how to extend this and related notions to predicates and propositions. For counterpart semantics to work at all we have to assume that everything that can be said at all can in principle be expressed in a language with qualitative predicates only (and perhaps, additionally, names, treated directly referentially). In Chap.7 I show how this assumption allows to maintain that the representations of our semantics deserve their name. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the meaning of color terms within the framework of Kaplan's character theory (which, when generalized to a treatment of hidden indexicality or dependence on the context world, can perfectly accommodate Kripke's notions of apriority and of (metaphysical) necessity). It explains this framework and why it might be fruitfully applied to color terms. Then it defends six theses: that (1) the predicate "is red" and (2) even the relation "appears red to" are hidden indexicals (i.e., have, as used (...) in English, different extensions in different context worlds), that (3) the phenomenal, the comparative, and the epistemic reading of "appears red to" are not three different readings, but reflect the context world dependence of this term, that (4) the statement "x is red iff x would appear red to most English-speaking people under normal conditions" is a priori in English, but analytic only in one reading and not in another, and that these observations account well for the epistemology of color terms and allow us to be metaphysically conservative by claiming that our context world is presumably such that (5) the statement "x appears red to y iff x (appropriately) causes y to be in a certain (disjunctive) neural state N" is necessarily true and (6) the statement "x is red iff the reflectance spectrum of the surface of x is of some (disjunctive) kind R" is necessarily true as well. (shrink)

The paper argues that the objects of belief should not be conceived as sets of possible worlds or propositions of set of centered possible worlds or egocentric propositions (this is the propositional conception), but rather as sets of pairs consisting of a centered world and a sequence of objects (this is the intentional conception of the objects of belief). The paper explains the deep significance of this thesis for the framework of two-dimensional semantics, indeed for any framework trying to adequately (...) relate semantics and epistemology (which is here construed as what I call the Congruence Principle). I give three arguments for this thesis, two preliminary indecisive ones by way of examples, and third theoretical one alluding to a deep principle of philosophical psychology (which I call the Invariance Principle). This paper is an improved and up-dated version of my paper No. 25. It will appear in Causation, Coherence, and Concepts. A Collection of Essays of mine. (shrink)

Consciousness often presents itself as a problem for materialists because no matter which physical explanation we consider, there seems to remain something about conscious experience that hasn't been fully explained. This gives rise to an apparent explanatory gap. The explanatory gulf between the physical and the conscious is reflected in the broader population, in which dualistic intuitions abound. Drawing on recent empirical evidence, this essay presents a dual-process cognitive model of consciousness attribution. This dual-process model, we suggest, provides an important (...) part of the explanation for why dualism is so attractive and the explanatory gap so vexing. (shrink)

For most us, learning which quantum theory correctly describes human bodies will not affect our attitudes towards our loved ones. On the other hand, a child’s discovery of the nature of meat (or an adult’s discovery of the nature of soylent green) can have a great effect. In still other cases, it is hard to say how one would, or should, react to new information about the underlying nature of what we value—think of how mixed our reactions are to evidence (...) of cultural determinism or atheism, or of how mixed our reactions would be to learning that we all live in the Matrix. (Indeed, maybe there is no objective fact about how we should react. Derek Par t’s ( , section ) fear of death diminished when he became convinced of certain theses about the metaphysics of personal identity. Perhaps there is no objective fact of the matter as to whether this was rational; perhaps it was rational for him but would not be for others.) What can metaphysics contribute to the question of the evil of death? It cannot, on its own, settle the question, since there is no simple rule telling us how to adjust value in light of new information about underlying nature. Given a clear view of the nature of death, there will remain the question of its disvalue. However, metaphysics can help us attain this clear view. Moreover, a clear conception of what metaphysical positions do and don’t say, and a clear conception of how metaphysics works in general, can remove impediments to a rational appraisal of the evil of death. (shrink)

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 – (...) the view that the truth-values of moral statements and beliefs do not vary in that way – and non-cognitivism – the view that moral judgements do not have truth-values, since they express affective or desire-like attitudes rather than beliefs. Almost the entire dissertation concerns the plausibility of standard relativism in contrast to absolutism. Part 1 examines first the two main arguments for standard relativism: that it accounts for the connection between moral judgements and motivation (chapter 2), and for the prevalence of diversity of moral opinion (chapter 3). Then the most common objection is considered: that it is inconsistent with the existence of genuine moral disagreements (chapter 4). I argue that these arguments are inconclusive. Both relativism and absolutism can account for the features discussed. Part 2 focuses on the fact that different people have different strongly held intuitions about the relative or absolute nature of morality. I argue that given a common methodological approach in philosophy and metaethics, which takes such intuitions as evidence of correct analyses, this difference in intuitions suggests that neither a relativist nor absolutist analysis can be correct for everyone’s moral judgements. I argue that this result holds both given semantic internalism (chapter 6) and given semantic externalism (chapter 7). To get one single analysis of everyone’s moral judgements we would have to abandon the intuitionbased methodology. In chapter 8, however, I argue that we can maintain this methodology if we accept analysis pluralism, the view that different analyses hold for different people’s moral judgements. (shrink)

This book contains a representationalist theory of self-consciousness and of the phenomenal first-person perspective. It draws on empirical data from the cognitive and neurosciences.

I defend a theory of mental representation that satisfies naturalistic constraints. Briefly, we begin by distinguishing (i) what makes something a representation from (ii) given that a thing is a representation, what determines what it represents. Representations are states of biological organisms, so we should expect a unified theoretical framework for explaining both what it is to be a representation as well as what it is to be a heart or a kidney. I follow Millikan in explaining (i) in terms (...) of teleofunction, explicated in terms of natural selection. -/- To explain (ii), we begin by recognizing that representational states do not have content, that is, they are neither true nor false except insofar as they both “point to” or “refer” to something, as well as “say” something regarding whatever it is they are about. To distinguish veridical from false representations, there must be a way for these separate aspects to come apart; hence, we explain (ii) by providing independent theories of what I call f-reference and f-predication (the ‘f’ simply connotes ‘fundamental’, to distinguish these things from their natural language counterparts). -/- Causal theories of representation typically founder on error, or on what Fodor has called the disjunction problem. Resemblance or isomorphism theories typically founder on what I’ve called the non-uniqueness problem, which is that isomorphisms and resemblance are practically unconstrained and so representational content cannot be uniquely determined. These traditional problems provide the motivation for my theory, the structural preservation theory, as follows. F-reference, like reference, is a specific, asymmetric relation, as is causation. F-predication, like predication, is a non-specific relation, as predicates typically apply to many things, just as many relational systems can be isomorphic to any given relational system. Putting these observations together, a promising strategy is to explain f-reference via causal history and f-predication via something like isomorphism between relational systems. -/- This dissertation should be conceptualized as having three parts. After motivating and characterizing the problem in chapter 1, the first part is the negative project, where I review and critique Dretske’s, Fodor’s, and Millikan’s theories in chapters 2-4. Second, I construct my theory about the nature of representation in chapter 5 and defend it from objections in chapter 6. In chapters 7-8, which constitute the third and final part, I address the question of how representation is implemented in biological systems. In chapter 7 I argue that single-cell intracortical recordings taken from awake Macaque monkeys performing a cognitive task provide empirical evidence for structural preservation theory, and in chapter 8 I use the empirical results to illustrate, clarify, and refine the theory. (shrink)

Es conocido que Kripke argumentó que la ilusión de contingencia en el caso de la conciencia no puede explicarse del modo en que se explica en el resto de casos familiares de enunciados necesarios a posteriori. En un artículo reciente, Pérez Otero (2002) argumenta que hay una explicación alternativa, en términos de mera aposterioridad. Argumento en contra de la corrección exegética y de la verdad de esta tesis.Kripke famously argued that the illusion of contingency cannot be explained away, in the (...) case of consciousness, in the way it is explained away in the rest of familiar cases of necessary aposteriori statements. In a recent paper, Pérez Otero (2002) argues that there is an alternative way of explaining it a way, in terms of mere aposteriority. I argue against the exegetical accuracy and the truth of this contention. (shrink)

In its approach to fiction and fictional discourse, pretense theory focuses on the behaviors that we engage in once we pretend that something is true. These may include pretending to name, pretending to refer, pretending to admire, and various other kinds of make-believe. Ordinary discourse about fictions is analyzed as a kind of institutionalized manner of speaking. Pretense, make-believe, and manners of speaking are all accepted as complex patterns of behavior that prove to be systematic in various ways. In this (...) paper, I attempt to show: (1) that this systematicity is captured in the basic distinctions and representations that are central to the formal theory of abstract objects, and (2) that this formal theory need not be interpreted platonistically, but may instead have an interpretation on which the `objects' of the theory are things that pretense theorists already accept, namely, complex patterns of linguistic behavior. The surprising conclusion, then, is that a certain Wittgensteinian approach to meaning (e.g., the meaning of a term like `Holmes' is constituted by its pattern of use) bears an interesting relationship to a formal metaphysical theory and the semantic analyses of discourse constructed in terms of that theory---the former offers a naturalized interpretation of the latter, yet the latter makes the former more precise. (shrink)

Applying good inductive rules inside the scope of suppositions leads to implausible results. I argue it is a mistake to think that inductive rules of inference behave anything like 'inference rules' in natural deduction systems. And this implies that it isn't always true that good arguments can be run 'off-line' to gain a priori knowledge of conditional conclusions.

What is the epistemological structure of situations where many small risks amount to a large one? Lottery and preface paradoxes and puzzles about quantum-mechanical blips threaten the idea that competent deduction is a way of extending our knowledge. Seemingly, everyday knowledge involves small risks, and competently deducing the conjunction of many such truths from them yields a conclusion too risky to constitute knowledge. But the dilemma between scepticism and abandoning MPC is false. In extreme cases, objectively improbable truths are known. (...) Safety is modal, not probabilistic, in structure, with closure and factiveness conditions. It is modelled using closeness of worlds. Safety is analogous to knowledge. It suggests an interpretation of possible worlds semantics for epistemic logic. To avoid logical omniscience, a relation of epistemic counterparthood between formulas is introduced. This supports a safety conception of knowledge and formalizes how extending knowledge by deduction depends on logical competence. (shrink)

There is a tension or even contradiction between mental causation - the belief that some mental events or properties are causally relevant for some physical events or properties - and the irreducibility of mental features to physical ones, the causal closure of the physical, and the assumption that there is no overdetermination of the physical. To reconcile these premises was a promise of nonreductive physicalism, but a closer inspection shows that it is, on the contrary, a source of the problem (...) - namely, the unintelligibility of mental causation. This has to do with the widely-held assumption that the mental supervenes on the physical. How can the mental be causally relevant, then? And what is the relationship of the mental and the physical? There are many options, including identity, realizationism, emergence, or some kind of reducibility. But they all have their own problems, e.g. they threaten mental reality, the causal closure of the physical, or scientific explanations. All these aspects are covered in Jaegwon Kim's book Mind in a Physical World. This paper is a detailed introduction to it, discussing and critically commenting it and those still intriguing, but also confusing and complicated issues of the mind-body problem, especially the ontology of mental causation. (shrink)

This thesis is about the metaphysics of logic. I argue against a view I refer to as ‘logical realism’. This is the view that the logical constants represent a particular kind of metaphysical structure, which I dub ‘logico-metaphysical structure’. I argue instead for a more metaphysically lightweight view of logic which I dub ‘logical expressivism’. -/- In the first part of this thesis (Chapters I and II) I argue against a number of arguments that Theodore Sider has given for logical (...) realism. In Chapter I, I present an argument of his to the effect that logico-metaphysical structure provides the only good explanation of the semantic determinacy of the logical constants. I argue that other explanations are possible. In Chapter II, I present another argument of his to the effect that logico-metaphysical structure is something that comes along with ontological realism: the view that there is a non-language-relative fact of the matter about what exists. I argue that the connection between logical and ontological realism is not as close as Sider makes it out to be. -/- In the second part of this thesis (Chapters III – V) I set out a positive view of the logical constants that can explain both why their meanings are semantically determinate, and why they form part of our vocabulary. On that view, the primary bearers of logical structure are propositional attitudes, and the logical constants are in our language as vehicles for the expression of logically complex propositional attitudes. In Chapter III, I set out an expressivist theory of propositional logic. In Chapter IV, I use this theory to explain how the logical connectives end up having determinate meanings. In Chapter V, I extend the expressivist theory to predicate logic. (shrink)

What is it for an utterance of an expression to lack meaning? In this paper I address the issue along the lines of Carnap’s seminal article “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology”. Carnap provides there an answer to the above question, which he then uses to argue that certain claims of metaphysics are meaningless. In the first section of the paper I present Carnap’s argument for the meaninglessness of certain metaphysical claims. In the second section I argue that, although the argument is (...) not compelling, the main virtue of Carnap’s proposal is the strategy he develops for generating meaningless uses of language. In the third section I propose an externalist criterion of meaningless uses of expressions that relies on semantic externalist considerations. This, I argue, bears significant resemblances to Carnap’s proposal. In the last section I discuss the applicability of the new criterion to the question concerning the meaning of metaphysical claims. (shrink)

Chapter 1 is devoted to taking care of some preliminary issues. I begin by distinguishing those states of awareness in virtue of which we’re acquainted with the phenomenal characters of our experiences from those states of awareness some claim are at the very nature of experience. Then I reconcile the idea that experience is transparent with the claim that we can be acquainted with phenomenal character. -/- In Chapter 2 I set up a dilemma that is the primary focus of (...) the dissertation. In the first part of this chapter I argue that phenomenal acquaintance has three key features, what I call its ‘directness’, ‘thickness’, and ‘infallibility’. In the second part I argue, however, that it’s really quite puzzling how thoughts about phenomenal character (or any thoughts, for that matter) could have them. In the next two chapters I consider how we might resolve the dilemma described above. -/- I begin in Chapter 3 by considering an account of phenomenal acquaintance inspired by Bertrand Russell’s discussion of acquaintance. The general idea here is to excise mental representation from phenomenal acquaintance, and I ultimately reject the proposal. -/- Chapter 4 is the core chapter of the dissertation. In it I propose an account of phenomenal acquaintance that doesn’t excise mental representation. My account is comprised of three theses. First, token experiences are complex and have instances of phenomenal properties as components. Second, instances of phenomenal properties are mental representations, and they represent themselves. Third, the attention relevant to phenomenal acquaintance is underwritten by self-representation. I argue that my account explains how phenomenal acquaintance is direct, thick, and infallible, thereby resolving our dilemma. -/- I argue in Chapter 5 that my account of phenomenal acquaintance explains why there is an explanatory gap between the phenomenal and non-phenomenal truths. Accordingly, I conclude that the explanatory gap doesn’t pose a problem for physicalism. Here I implement what has come to be called the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ for responding to the challenge posed by the explanatory gap. (shrink)

In this essay I try to give some overall statements in order to show that new realism is to be understood as a kind of positive philosophy. Against constructivism, I argue that there is a prevalence of the objects themselves on our understanding of them because reality offers a resistance to our attempt to grasp it depending on its level of dependence from our own understanding, which is different in the case of natural objects, ideal object and social object. This (...) negativity leads to an ontological necessity of facticity. In the second part of this paper I will describe – through the exposition of three key concepts of new realism, i.e. “unamendability”, “interaction” and “affordance” – an ascending path for which the negative and the resistance turn into positivity. (shrink)

A commentary on David Lewis's /On the Plurality of Worlds/.

In defending semantic externalism, philosophers of language have often assumed that there is a straightforward connection between scientific kinds and the natural kinds recognized by ordinary language users.1 For example, the claim that water is H2O assumes that the ordinary language kind water corresponds to a chemical kind, which contains all the molecules with molecular formula H2O as its members. This assumption about the coordination between ordinary language kinds and scientific kinds is important for the externalist program, because it is (...) what allows us to discover empirically the extensions of ordinary language kind terms. (shrink)

The thesis aims at analyzing the concepts of risk and safety as well as the class of concepts to which they belong, thick concepts, focusing in particular on the normative aspects involved. Essay I analyzes thick concepts, i.e. concepts such as cruelty and kindness that seem to combine descriptive and evaluative features. The traditional account, in which thick concepts are analyzed as the conjunction of a factual description and an evaluation, is criticized. Instead, it is argued that the descriptive and (...) evaluative aspects must be understood as a whole. Furthermore, it is argued that the two main worries evoked against non-naturalism – that non-naturalism cannot account for disagreement and that it is not genuinely explanatory – can be met. Essay II investigates the utilization of the Kripke/Putnam causal theory of reference in relation to the Open Question Argument. It is argued that the Open Question Argument suitably interpreted provides prima facie evidence against the claim that moral kinds are natural kinds, and that the causal theory, as interpreted by leading naturalist defenders, actually underscores this conclusion. Essay III utilizes the interpretation of the Open Question Argument argued for in the previous essay in order to argue against naturalistic reduction of risk, i.e. reduction of risk into natural concepts such as probability and harm. Three different normative aspects of risk and safety are put forward – epistemic uncertainty, distributive normativity and border normativity – and it is argued that these normative aspects cannot be reduced to a natural measure. Essay IV provides a conceptual analysis of safety in the context of societal decision-making, and argues for a notion that explicitly includes epistemic uncertainty, the degree to which we are uncertain of our knowledge of the situation at hand. Some formal versions of a comparative safety concept are also proposed. Essay V puts forward a normative critique against a common argument, viz. the claim that the public should follow the experts’ advice in recommending an activity whenever the experts have the best knowledge of the risk involved. The importance of safety in risk acceptance together with considerations from epistemic uncertainty makes the claim incorrect even after including plausible limitations to exclude ‘external’ considerations. Furthermore, it is shown that the scope of the objection covers risk assessment as well as risk management. Essay VI provides a systematized account of safety engineering practices that clarifies their relation to the goal of safety engineering, namely to increase safety. A list of 24 principles referred to in the literature of safety engineering is provided, divided into four major categories. It is argued that important aspects of these methods can be better understood with the help of the distinction between risk and uncertainty, in addition to the common distinction between risk and probability. (shrink)

Famous examples of conceivability arguments include (i) Descartes’ argument for mind-body dualism, (ii) Kripke's ‘modal argument’ against psychophysical identity theory, (iii) Chalmers’ ‘zombie argument’ against materialism, and (iv) modal versions of the ontological argument for theism. In this paper, we show that for any such conceivability argument, C, there is a corresponding ‘mirror argument’, M. M is deductively valid and has a conclusion that contradicts C's conclusion. Hence, a proponent of C—henceforth, a ‘conceivabilist’—can be warranted in holding that C's premises (...) are conjointly true only if she can find fault with one of M's premises. But M's premises are modelled on a pair of C's premises. The same reasoning that supports the latter supports the former. For this reason, a conceivabilist can repudiate M's premises only on pain of severely undermining C's premises. We conclude on this basis that all conceivability arguments, including each of (i)–(iv), are fallacious. (shrink)

I present a general metaphysical framework for any formal system that works with truth-values. To establish such a framework, I start with the notion of absolute nothingness, from which I construct a nothingness which is akin to the notion of an empty set in mathematics. Then I provide a formal system that its ability to produce symbols is an integral property and an inseparable part of its metaphysics.

Kaplan’s solution to the indexical version of Frege’s Puzzle in terms of the character of linguistic expressions has been greatly influential and much discussed. Many philosophers regard it as being correct, or at least as being on the right track. However, little has been said about how character is supposed to apply to proper names, and how it could account for the name version of the Puzzle. In this paper I want to fill this gap. I sketch some solutions to (...) the name version of Frege’s Puzzle in terms of character, and argue that all of them are flawed in some way: they are either semantically implausible or fail to account for all relevant phenomena. (shrink)

The question of ontological foundation has undergone a noteworthy revival in recent years: metaphysicians today quarrel about how exactly to understand the asymmetrical and hyperintensional relationship of grounding. One of the reasons for this revival is that the old quantificationalist meta-ontology inherited from Quine has been effectively criticised by leading philosophers favourable to a meta-ontology, the aim of which is to come to know “which facts/items ground (constitute the base of) which other facts/items”, thus to examine the relation of ontological (...) dependence between beings (e.g. chemical properties depend on physical properties, the economic situation on the behaviour of individuals etc.), i.e. to explore the hierarchical structure of reality. I shall not discuss here the relationship of grounding in itself, but make some historical-formal remarks on the properties of the ultimate ontological foundational item itself and its aporetic nature. To do so I explore various more or less exotic philosophical ecosystems in the following order: Heidegger (Seyn), Plato (ἕν), Wáng Bi (道, dào). On the way I shall propose a new interpretation both of certain hypotheses in the Parmenides and of the nature of the opposition between Wáng Bì and Guō Xiàng in regard to the logical grammar of the expression “nothing (無, wú)” (transl. J. Dudley). (shrink)

The main idea of this thesis is multi-descriptional physicalism. According to it, only physical entities are elements of our ontology, and there are different ways to describe them. Higher-level vocabularies (e.g., mental, neurological, biological) truly describe reality. Sentences about higher-level entities are made true by physical entities. Every chapter will develop multi-descriptional physicalism or defend it from objections. In chapter 1, I will propose a new conceptual reductive account that conceptually reduces higher-level entities to physical entities. This conceptual reductive account (...) combines resources from Heil’s truthmaker theory and either a priori physicalism or a posteriori physicalism. In chapter 2, I apply this conceptual reductive account to various debates. Physicalism, the multiple-realisability argument, the prototype theory of concepts, and truthmaker explanations will be discussed. In chapter 3, I will argue that a major aim of metaphysics should be to discover which entities are fundamental and explain why they suffice for the existence of derivative entities. In chapter 4, I will propose a new way to explain why sentences apparently about composite objects are true even though there are no composite objects. It combines resources from Cameron’s truthmaker theory and van Inwagen’s paraphrase strategy. In chapter 5, I will argue that the intuition that the mind and the body are very different does not show that the mind is distinct from the body. This intuition can be explained away by mentioning our dispositions to give non-physical explanations when we are ignorant of physical facts. In chapter 6, I will examine two arguments for the existence of a metaphysically independent level, and I will argue that only a modified version of one of them succeeds. I will argue that methodological principles support the view that there is a metaphysically independent level. (shrink)

A critical review of the main themes arising out of recent literature on the semantics of ordinary event talk. The material is organized in four sections: (i) the nature of events, with emphasis on the opposition between events as particulars and events as universals; (ii) identity and indeterminacy, with emphasis on the unifier/multiplier controversy; (iii) events and logical form, with emphasis on Davidson’s treatment of the form of action sentences; (iv) linguistic applications, with emphasis on issues concerning aspectual phenomena, the (...) telicity/atelicity distinction, the treatment of statives, and temporal quantification. (shrink)

It is common today to see the world as increasingly unpredictable, and to see that unpredictability as a major source of anxiety. Many of the proposed cures for that anxiety, such as systems like Memex and MyLifeBits, have sought solutions in systems that collect and store a thorough record of events, at a scale from the personal to the global. There the solution to anxiety lies in the ability to play back the record, to turn back the clock and be (...) there then. Both this anxiety and its solution are best seen not simply as remedies for an immediate problem-of terrorism, for example-but rather as evidence of a more deep-seated set of cultural changes, which emerged early in the twentieth century. Paradoxically, the technological solutions offered, whatever the scale, embody the very thing, a lack of a connection to a community, that is both the source of the anxiety and a fundamental impediment to its elimination. (shrink)

A reconstruction of Kant’s Copernican Revolution is given using the linguistic version of conceptual schemes together with mathematical tools from Model Theory. In response to Davidson’s criticisms against conceptual relativism, untranslatable conceptual schemes are shown to exist. Arguments from the Tractatus are used to formulate the conditions required for an isomorphism between a representation and the structure of reality. It is argued that the scientific accuracy of a representation does not require a structural isomorphism with reality. Finally, a conception of (...) the in-itself is articulated using the Yoneda embedding from Category Theory. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the debate concerning the kind of philosophical conclusions that can (or cannot) be derived from systematic empirical studies of intuitions about the reference of proper names. The focus of the paper is the famous study by Machery et al. (2004) in which intercultural differences in semantic intuitions between American and Chinese participants were observed. Machery et al. used the obtained results to question the usefulness of intuitions in philosophical discussions concerning the reference of proper (...) names. In this paper, I present the results of my own philosophical-experimental studies aimed at analyzing methods used in research dedicated to the problem of reference rather than semantic intuitions as such. These results indicate a significant instability of responses regarding the reference of proper names and their susceptibility to the impact of philosophically insignificant factors. Based on the collected data, I argue that methods used in experimental studies concerning the reference of proper names conducted to date do not guarantee the assessment of intuitions of the desired kind. (shrink)

Epistemic modal predicate logic raises conceptual problems not faced in the case of alethic modal predicate logic : Frege’s “Hesperus-Phosphorus” problem—how to make sense of ascribing to agents ignorance of necessarily true identity statements—and the related “Hintikka-Kripke” problem—how to set up a logical system combining epistemic and alethic modalities, as well as others problems, such as Quine’s “Double Vision” problem and problems of self-knowledge. In this paper, we lay out a philosophical approach to epistemic predicate logic, implemented formally in Melvin (...) Fitting’s First-Order Intensional Logic, that we argue solves these and other conceptual problems. Topics covered include: Quine on the “collapse” of modal distinctions; the rigidity of names; belief reports and unarticulated constituents; epistemic roles; counterfactual attitudes; representational vs. interpretational semantics; ignorance of co-reference vs. ignorance of identity; two-dimensional epistemic models; quantification into epistemic contexts; and an approach to multi-agent epistemic logic based on centered worlds and hybrid logic. (shrink)

This paper draws upon the works of Wilfred Sellars, Jerry Fodor, and Ruth Millikan to argue against epistemological holism and conceptual holism. In the first section, I content that contrary to confirmation holism, there are individual beliefs ("basic beliefs") that receive nondoxastic/noninferential warrant. In the earliest stages of cognitive development, modular processes produce basic beliefs about how things are. The disadvantage of this type of basic belief is that the person may possess information that should have defeated the belief but (...) that was not taken into account in the module's operations. For this reason, at more advanced stages of cognitive development, basic beliefs concern how things appear to be. These appearance beliefs are not formed holistically but should be checked against background beliefs before the person infers how things are. In the second section, I argue against functional-role/inferential-role semantics. Championing teleosemantics, I argue that many concepts' meanings are not determined by the meanings of other concepts. Rather, many concepts are skills of knowing how to identify of what the concept is. These skills can be developed independently of other beliefs or skills and are, in an important sense, theory-neutral. (shrink)