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  1. Confused Terms in Ordinary Language.Greg Frost-Arnold & James R. Beebe - 2020 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 29 (2):197-219.
    Confused terms appear to signify more than one entity. Carnap maintained that any putative name that is associated with more than one object in a relevant universe of discourse fails to be a genuine name. Although many philosophers have agreed with Carnap, they have not always agreed among themselves about the truth-values of atomic sentences containing such terms. Some hold that such atomic sentences are always false, and others claim they are always truth-valueless. Field maintained that confused terms can still (...)
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  • Schmidentity and informativity.Hannes Fraissler - 2020 - Synthese 198 (10):9963-9989.
    Although Kripke’s œuvre has had a major impact on analytic philosophy and nearly every aspect of his studies has been thoroughly examined, this does not hold for his schmidentity argument, which, so far, has been widely neglected. To the extent to which it has been treated at all, it has been for the most part radically misunderstood. I hold that this argument, in its correctly reconstructed form, has general relevance for a treatment of Frege’s Puzzle and points towards a fundamental (...)
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  • Are epistemic reasons perspective-dependent?Davide Fassio - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (12):3253-3283.
    This paper focuses on the relation between epistemic reasons and the subject’s epistemic perspective. It tackles the questions of whether epistemic reasons are dependent on the perspective of the subject they are reasons for, and if so, whether they are dependent on the actual or the potential perspective. It is argued that epistemic reasons are either independent or minimally dependent on the subject’s epistemic perspective. In particular, I provide three arguments supporting the conclusion that epistemic reasons are not dependent on (...)
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  • Names Are Predicates.Delia Graff Fara - 2015 - Philosophical Review 124 (1):59-117.
    One reason to think that names have a predicate-type semantic value is that they naturally occur in count-noun positions: ‘The Michaels in my building both lost their keys’; ‘I know one incredibly sharp Cecil and one that's incredibly dull’. Predicativism is the view that names uniformly occur as predicates. Predicativism flies in the face of the widely accepted view that names in argument position are referential, whether that be Millian Referentialism, direct-reference theories, or even Fregean Descriptivism. But names are predicates (...)
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  • Identifying implicit assumptions.Robert H. Ennis - 1982 - Synthese 51 (1):61 - 86.
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  • Demonstratives as individual concepts.Paul Elbourne - 2008 - Linguistics and Philosophy 31 (4):409-466.
    Using a version of situation semantics, this article argues that bare and complex demonstratives are interpreted as individual concepts.
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  • Negation and presupposition, truth and falsity.Marie Duží - 2018 - Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 54 (1):15-46.
    There are many kinds of negation and denial. Perhaps the most common is the Boolean negation not that applies to propositions-in-extension, i.e. truth-values. The others are, inter alia, the property of propositions of not being true which applies to propositions; the complement function which applies to sets; privation which applies to properties; negation as failure applied in logic programming; negation as argumentation ad absurdum, and many others. The goal of this paper is neither to provide a complete list, nor to (...)
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  • Testing the causal theory of reference.Filippo Domaneschi, Massimiliano Vignolo & Simona Di Paola - 2017 - Cognition 161 (C):1-9.
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  • The Sortal Dependence of Demonstrative Reference.Imogen Dickie - 2011 - European Journal of Philosophy 22 (1):34-60.
    : ‘Sortalism about demonstrative reference’ is the view that the capacity to refer to things demonstratively rests on the capacity to classify them according to their kinds. This paper argues for one form of sortalism. Section 1 distinguishes two sortalist views. Section 2 argues that one of them is false. Section 3 argues that the other is true. Section 4 uses the argument from Section 3 to develop a new response to the objection to sortalism from examples where we seem (...)
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  • The Essential Connection Between Epistemology and the Theory of Reference.Imogen Dickie - 2016 - Philosophical Issues 26 (1):99-129.
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  • How Proper Names Refer.Imogen Dickie - 2011 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111 (1pt1):43-78.
    This paper develops a new account of reference-fixing for proper names. The account is built around an intuitive claim about reference fixing: the claim that I am a participant in a practice of using α to refer to o only if my uses of α are constrained by the representationally relevant ways it is possible for o to behave. §I raises examples that suggest that a right account of how proper names refer should incorporate this claim. §II provides such an (...)
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  • Two sorts of biological kind terms: The cases of ‘rice’ and ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’.Michael Devitt & Brian Porter - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):479-505.
    Experiments have led some philosophers to conclude that the reference determination of natural kind terms is neither simply descriptive nor simply causal-historical. Various theories have been aired to account for this, including ambiguity, hybrid, and different-idiolects theories. Devitt and Porter (2021) hypothesized that some terms are covered by one theory, some another, with a place for all the proposed theories. The present paper tests hypotheses that the term ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’ is simply causal-historical but the term ‘rice’ is hybrid. (...)
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  • Experimental philosophy and the theory of reference.Max Deutsch - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (4):445-466.
    It is argued on a variety of grounds that recent results in 'experimental philosophy of language', which appear to show that there are significant cross-cultural differences in intuitions about the reference of proper names, do not pose a threat to a more traditional mode of philosophizing about reference. Some of these same grounds justify a complaint about experimental philosophy as a whole.
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  • A multi-dimensional treatment of quantification in extraordinary English.Paul Dekker - 2008 - Linguistics and Philosophy 31 (1):101-127.
    In this paper I revive two important formal approaches to the interpretation of natural language, that of Montague and that of Karttunen and Peters. Armed with insights from dynamic semantics (Heim, Krifka) the two turn out to stand up against age-old criticisms in an orthodox fashion. The plan is mainly methodological, as I only want to illustrate the technical feasibility of the revived proposals. Even so, there are illuminating and welcome empirical consequences on the subject of scope islands (as discussed (...)
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  • Knowledge claims and context: loose use.Wayne A. Davis - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 132 (3):395-438.
    There is abundant evidence of contextual variation in the use of “S knows p.” Contextualist theories explain this variation in terms of semantic hypotheses that refer to standards of justification determined by “practical” features of either the subject’s context (Hawthorne & Stanley) or the ascriber’s context (Lewis, Cohen, & DeRose). There is extensive linguistic counterevidence to both forms. I maintain that the contextual variation of knowledge claims is better explained by common pragmatic factors. I show here that one is variable (...)
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  • How well does direct reference semantics fit with pragmatics?David Lumsden - 1996 - Philosophical Papers 25 (2):139-148.
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  • Cogitative and cognitive speaker meaning.Wayne A. Davis - 1992 - Philosophical Studies 67 (1):71 - 88.
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  • Semantic Verbs Are Intensional Transitives.Justin D’Ambrosio - 2019 - Mind 128 (509):213-248.
    In this paper I show that we have strong empirical and theoretical reasons to treat the verbs we use in our semantic theorizing—particularly ‘refers to ’, ‘applies to ’, and ‘is true of ’—as intensional transitive verbs. Stating our semantic theories with intensional vocabulary allows us to partially reconcile two competing approaches to the nature and subject-matter of semantics: the Chomskian approach, on which semantics is non-relational, internalistic, and concerns the psychology of language users, and the Lewisian approach, on which (...)
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  • Indefinites and intentional identity.Samuel Cumming - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 168 (2):371-395.
    This paper investigates the truth conditions of sentences containing indefinite noun phrases, focusing on occurrences in attitude reports, and, in particular, a puzzle case due to Walter Edelberg. It is argued that indefinites semantically contribute the (thought-)object they denote, in a manner analogous to attributive definite descriptions. While there is an existential reading of attitude reports containing indefinites, it is argued that the existential quantifier is contributed by the de re interpretation of the indefinite (as the de re reading adds (...)
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  • Who Is I?Eros Corazza, William Fish & Jonathan Gorvett - 2002 - Philosophical Studies 107 (1):1-21.
    Whilst it may seem strange to ask to whom “I” refers, we show that there are occasionswhen it is not always obvious. In demonstratingthis we challenge Kaplan's assumptionthat the utterer, agent and referent of “I” arealways the same person.We begin by presenting what weregard to be the received view about indexicalreference popularized by David Kaplan in hisinfluential 1972 “Demonstratives” before goingon, in section 2, to discuss Sidelle'sanswering machine paradox which may be thoughtto threaten this view, and his deferredutterance method of (...)
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  • The Name-Notion Network: On How to Conciliate Two Approaches to Naming and Reference-Fixing.Eros Corazza - 2023 - Topoi 42 (4):961-974.
    In the last decade a new debate concerning the foundations of reference and semantics emerged, which mainly focuses on how to interpret Donnellan’s seminal works and, in particular, on _how_ it differs from Kripke’s influential contributions to so-called “direct reference”. In this paper, I focus on this “new” reading/understanding of Donnellan and how, as it is nowadays presented, differs from Kripke’s picture. I will discuss a Kripke-inspired picture and the way it differs from a Donnellan-inspired one and show that there (...)
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  • 'She' and 'he': Politically correct pronouns.Eros Corazza - 2002 - Philosophical Studies 111 (2):173 - 196.
    It is argued that the pronouns `she' and `he' are disguised complexdemonstratives of the form `that female/male'. Three theories ofcomplex demonstratives are examined and shown to be committed to theview that `s/he' turns out to be an empty term when used to refer toa hermaphrodite. A fourth theory of complex demonstratives, one thatis hermaphrodite friendly, is proposed. It maintains that complexdemonstratives such as `that female/male' and the pronoun `s/he' can succeed in referring to someone independently of his or her gender.This (...)
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  • On the alleged ambiguity of 'now' and 'here'.Eros Corazza - 2004 - Synthese 138 (2):289 - 313.
    It is argued that, in order to account for examples where the indexicals `now' and `here' do not refer to the time and location of the utterance, we do not have to assume (pace Quentin Smith) that they have different characters (reference-fixing rules), governed by a single metarule or metacharacter. The traditional, the fixed character view is defended: `now' and `here' always refer to the time and location of the utterance. It is shown that when their referent does not correspond (...)
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  • There are Kinds and Kinds of Kinds: Ben-Yami on the Semantics of Kind Terms.G. Contessa - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 136 (2):217-248.
    Hanoch Ben-Yami has argued that the theory of the semantics of natural kind terms proposed by Kripke and Putnam is false and has proposed an allegedly novel account of the semantics of kind terms. In this article, I critically examine Ben-Yami’s arguments. I will argue that Ben-Yami’s objections do not show that Kripke and Putnam’s theory is false, but at most that the specific versions of it held by Kripke and Putnam have some weaknesses. Moreover, I will argue that Ben-Yami’s (...)
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  • Replies to my commentators.Stewart Cohen - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (7-8):906-922.
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  • Indexicality and The Answering Machine Paradox.Jonathan Cohen & Eliot Michaelson - 2013 - Philosophy Compass 8 (6):580-592.
    Answering machines and other types of recording devices present prima facie problems for traditional theories of the meaning of indexicals. The present essay explores a range of semantic and pragmatic responses to these issues. Careful attention to the difficulties posed by recordings promises to help enlighten the boundaries between semantics and pragmatics more broadly.
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  • Referring as a collaborative process.Herbert H. Clark & Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs - 1986 - Cognition 22 (1):1-39.
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  • On sense and intension.David J. Chalmers - 2002 - Philosophical Perspectives 16:135-82.
    What is involved in the meaning of our expressions? Frege suggested that there is an aspect of an expression.
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  • Polysemy: Pragmatics and sense conventions.Robyn Carston - 2021 - Mind and Language 36 (1):108-133.
    Polysemy, understood as instances of a single linguistic expression having multiple related senses, is not a homogenous phenomenon. There are regular (apparently, rule‐based) cases and irregular (resemblance‐based) cases, which have different processing profiles. Although a primary source of polysemy is pragmatic inference, at least some cases become conventionalised and linguistically encoded. Three main issues are discussed: (a) the key differences between regular and irregular cases and the role, if any, of a “core meaning”; (b) the distinction between pragmatic polysemy and (...)
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  • Reference and incomplete descriptions.Antonio Capuano - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (5):1669-1687.
    In “On Referring” Peter Strawson pointed out that incomplete descriptions pose a problem for Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions. Howard Wettstein and Michael Devitt appealed to incomplete descriptions to argue, first, that Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions fails, and second, that Donnellan’s referential/attributive distinction has semantic bite. Stephen Neale has defended Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions against Wettstein’s and Devitt’s objections. In this paper, my aim is twofold. First, I rebut Neale’s objections to Wettstein’s and Devitt’s argument and argue that (...)
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  • On Referring: Donnellan versus Strawson.Antonio Capuano - 2019 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (4):1091-1110.
    In ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions', Keith Donnellan claimed that Bertrand Russell and Peter Strawson ignored referential uses of definite descriptions. The intense debate that followed Donnellan's paper focused on the contrast between Donnellan and Russell, leaving Strawson aside. In this paper, I focus on the contrast between Donnellan and Strawson. By focusing on this contrast, my aim is, first, to clarify the nature of Donnellan's distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions and, second, to argue that a proper (...)
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  • In Defense of Donnellan on Proper Names.Antonio Capuano - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (6):1289-1312.
    Kripke’s picture of how people use names to refer to things has been the dominant view in contemporary philosophy of language. When it is mentioned at all, Donnellan’s view of proper names is considered the same as Kripke’s. It is certainly true that both Donnellan and Kripke rejected descriptivism about proper names and appealed to historical facts to determine whom a speaker is referring to by using a proper name. However, the relevant historical facts Kripke and Donnellan appeal to are (...)
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  • A New Source of Data About Singular Thought.Mihnea D. I. Capraru - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (4):1159-1172.
    Philosophers have justified extant theories of singular thought in at least three ways: they have invoked wide-ranging theories motivated by data from other philosophical areas, they have elicited direct intuitions about which thoughts are singular, and they have subjected propositional attitude reports to tests such as Russellian substitution and Quinean exportation. In these ways, however, we haven’t yet been able to tell what it takes to have singular thoughts, nor have we been able to tell which of our thoughts they (...)
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  • Sarcasm, Pretense, and The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction.Elisabeth Camp - 2011 - Noûs 46 (4):587 - 634.
    Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...)
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  • On a derivation of the necessity of identity.John P. Burgess - 2014 - Synthese 191 (7):1-19.
    The source, status, and significance of the derivation of the necessity of identity at the beginning of Kripke’s lecture “Identity and Necessity” is discussed from a logical, philosophical, and historical point of view.
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  • Madagascar revisited.J. P. Burgess - 2014 - Analysis 74 (2):195-201.
    The history behind the ‘Madagascar’ example of Gareth Evans is traced, suggesting that the decisive reference-shift occurred in the 16th, not the 17, century. The difference between this example and the ‘Gödel’ example of Saul Kripke is explained in terms of the distinction between de re and de dicto beliefs and intentions.
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  • Biological taxon names are descriptive names.Jerzy A. Brzozowski - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (3):1-25.
    The so-called ‘type method’ widely employed in biological taxonomy is often seen as conforming to the causal-historical theory of reference. In this paper, I argue for an alternative account of reference for biological nomenclature in which taxon names are understood as descriptive names. A descriptive name, as the concept came to be known from the work of Gareth Evans, is a referring expression introduced by a definite description. There are three main differences between the DN and the causal account. First, (...)
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  • Knowledge-the and propositional attitude ascriptions.Berit Brogaard - 2008 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 77 (1):147-190.
    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 (...)
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  • Contextualism and warranted assertibility manoeuvres.Jessica Brown - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 130 (3):407 - 435.
    Contextualists such as Cohen and DeRose claim that the truth conditions of knowledge attributions vary contextually, in particular that the strength of epistemic position required for one to be truly ascribed knowledge depends on features of the attributor's context. Contextualists support their view by appeal to our intuitions about when it's correct (or incorrect) to ascribe knowledge. Someone might argue that some of these intuitions merely reflect when it is conversationally appropriate to ascribe knowledge, not when knowledge is truly ascribed, (...)
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  • Attitude Reports: Do You Mind the Gap?Berit Brogaard - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (1):93-118.
    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 (...)
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  • Adapt or die: The death of invariantism&quest.Jessica Brown - 2005 - Philosophical Quarterly 55 (219):263-285.
    Contextualists support their view by appeal to cases which show that whether an attribution of knowledge seems correct depends on attributor factors. Contextualists conclude that the truth-conditions of knowledge attributions depend on the attributor's context. Invariantists respond that these cases show only that the warranted assertability-conditions of knowledge attributions depend on the attributor's context. I examine DeRose's recent argument against the possibility of such an invariantist response, an argument which appeals to the knowledge account of assertion and the context-sensitivity of (...)
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  • A serpent in the garden?Mark Bowker - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper presents Elmar Unnsteinsson’s novel theory of Edenic Intentionalism, on which a speaker cannot refer to an object when the speaker is relevantly confused about its identity. A challenge to the theory is presented and several possible responses considered. The challenge is this: According to Edenic Intentionalism, reference often fails even when speakers seem to refer successfully. Elmar therefore supplements Edenic Intentionalism with an explanation of how communication can succeed without reference. If such an explanation is available, it isn’t (...)
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  • On Davidson Against Language as Conventional.Mayank Bora - 2023 - Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 40 (3):287-304.
    Davidson (in: LePore (ed), pp 433–46, 1986) uses the existence of malapropisms to motivate a model of linguistic communication where communication succeeds between conversational partners without their having to rely on conventional meanings. Davidson uses this model to then claim that there is no such thing as a conventional language shared by a linguistic community which must be known in advance for linguistic communication to succeed. However, for many cases, Davidson relies on there being standard lines of interpretation for communication (...)
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  • Semantics for clausally complemented verbs.Daniel Bonevac - 1984 - Synthese 59 (2):187 - 218.
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  • Modified occam's razor: Parsimony, pragmatics, and the acquisition of word meaning.Thomas D. Bontly - 2005 - Mind and Language 20 (3):288–312.
    Advocates of linguistic pragmatics often appeal to a principle which Paul Grice called Modified Occam's Razor: 'Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'. Superficially, Grice's principle seems a routine application of the principle of parsimony ('Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'). But parsimony arguments, though common in science, are notoriously problematic, and their use by Griceans faces numerous objections. This paper argues that Modified Occam's Razor makes considerably more sense in light of certain assumptions about the processes (...)
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  • Prehistoric cognition by description: A Russellian approach to the upper paleolithic.John Bolender - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (3):383-399.
    A cultural change occurred roughly 40,000 years ago. For the first time, there was evidence of belief in unseen agents and an afterlife. Before this time, humans did not show widespread evidence of being able to think about objects, persons, and other agents that they had not been in close contact with. I argue that one can explain this transition by appealing to a population increase resulting in greater exoteric (inter-group) communication. The increase in exoteric communication triggered the actualization of (...)
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  • Wittgenstein on Names.David Boersema - 2000 - Essays in Philosophy 1 (2):120-130.
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  • The anti-individualist revolution in the philosophy of language.Gregory Bochner - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (2):91-120.
    The canonical arguments against the description theory of names are usually taken to have established that the reference of a name as used on a given occasion is not semantically determined by the qualitative descriptions that the speaker may have in mind. The deepest moral of these arguments, on the received view, would be that the speaker’s narrow mental states play no semantic role in fixing reference. My central aim in this paper is to challenge this common understanding by highlighting (...)
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  • The Pessimistic Induction, the Flight to Reference and the Metaphysical Zoo.Michael A. Bishop - 2003 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 17 (2):161 – 178.
    Scientific realism says of our best scientific theories that (1) most of their important posits exist and (2) most of their central claims are approximately true. Antirealists sometimes offer the pessimistic induction in reply: since (1) and (2) are false about past successful theories, they are probably false about our own best theories too. The contemporary debate about this argument has turned (and become stuck) on the question, Do the central terms of successful scientific theories refer? For example, Larry Laudan (...)
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  • Meaning, translation and interpretation.John Biro - 1981 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 59 (3):267 – 282.
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