The paper presents a dilemma for both epistemic and non-epistemic versions of conceivability-based accounts of modal knowledge. On the one horn, non-epistemic accounts do not elucidate the essentialist knowledge they would be committed to. On the other, epistemic accounts do not elucidate everyday life de re modal knowledge. In neither case, therefore, do conceivability accounts elucidate de re modal knowledge.

In the course of developing a semantics with epistemological intent, Brandom claims that his inferentialism is Hegelian. This paper argues that, even on a charitable reading, Brandom is an anti-Hegelian.

Naturalized metaphysicians defend the thesis that science licenses meta- physics, such that only metaphysical results that are based on the best science are to be considered legitimate. This view is problematic, due to the fact that the reasons they identify for such license are apparently self-defeating. Chakravartty defends a revised approach to understanding the licensing relation. I argue that the proposed response is a step forward on behalf of naturalizing metaphysics, but still does not take seriously the contention that science (...) involves, inextricably, a contribution from the a priori. I conclude by considering what options the aspiring naturalized metaphysician is left with. (shrink)

In this philosophical memoir I trace out the part that Roy Bhaskar's philosophy of science played in the development of a non-reductive account of realism in art and cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s in the UK, and the part his Dialectic played in the theorization of the concept of the philistine developed by myself and Dave Beech between 1996 and 1998. Our de-positivization of the concept as a symptomatic negation of the bourgeois ‘aesthete’ drew extensively on Bhaskar's notion (...) of absence as a real absence. This in turn, allowed us to bring Bhaskar's realism and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into alignment, where the philistine plays a similar, if undeveloped and untheorized role. Overall, the article marks a recognition of the continuing possibilities of Dialectic for a theory of negation in contemporary art and cultural theory. (shrink)

It is commonplace in cognitive science that concepts are individuated in terms of the roles they play in the cognitive lives of thinkers, a view that Jerry Fodor has recently been dubbed ‘Concept Pragmatism’. Quinean critics of Pragmatism have long argued that it founders on its commitment to the analytic/synthetic distinction, since without such a distinction there is plausibly no way to distinguish constitutive from non-constitutive roles in cognition. This paper considers Fodor’s empirical arguments against analyticity, and in particular his (...) arguments against lexical decomposition and definitions, and argues that Concept Pragmatists have two viable options with respect to them. First, Concept Pragmatists can confront them head-on, and argue that they do not show that lexical items are semantically primitive or that lexical concepts are internally unstructured. Second, Pragmatists may accept that these arguments show that lexical concepts are atomic, but insist that this need not entail that Pragmatism is false. For there is a viable version of Concept Pragmatism that does not take lexical items to be semantically structured or lexical concepts to be internally structured. Adopting a version of Pragmatism that takes meaning relations to be specified by inference rules, or meaning postulates, allows one to accept the empirical arguments in favor of Concept Atomism, while at the same time deny that such arguments show that there are no analyticities. The paper concludes by responding to Fodor’s recent objection that such a version of Concept Pragmatism has unhappy consequences concerning the relation between concept constitution and concept possession. (shrink)

It has been claimed that kinetic energy is an objective physical quantity whilst at the same time maintaining that potential energy is not. However, by making use of the method of ‘inference to the best explanation’, it may be readily concluded that potential energy is indeed an objective physical quantity. This is done for an example drawn from the foundations of modern chemistry. In order to do so, the criteria of what counts as ‘most probable’ and ‘most reasonable’ are defined (...) and then employed for choosing the best explanation. (shrink)

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, philosophers of various sorts, including Helmholtz, Avenarius, Husserl, Russell, Carnap, Neurath, and Heidegger, were united in promulgating a new, “scientific” philosophy. This article documents some of the varieties of scientific philosophy and argues that the history of scientific philosophy is crucial to the development of analytic philosophy and the division between analytic and continental philosophy. Scientific philosophy defined itself via criticisms of old-fashioned systematic metaphysics and, in the twentieth century, of Lebensphilosophie. It (...) offered a modernist vision of philosophy participating in a progressive, problem-solving, piecemeal, and collaborative scientific ethos. The article argues that the rise of scientific philosophy indicates a change of the conception of science as well as philosophy in the late nineteenth century and notes some tensions in the accounts of science offered by scientific philosophers. The article offers some preliminary lessons for the interpretation of logical empiricism and phenomenology as episodes within a larger history of scientific philosophy. (shrink)

At the same time as a purported renewal of metaphysics is taking place in analytical philosophy, criticism of metaphysics has also increased. Criticism of metaphysics is usually made by naturalistic metaphysicians and is aimed at non-naturalistic metaphysics. Without endorsing any of the above schools, in this essay I undertake, not a criticism of metaphysics, but a criticism of the current criticism of metaphysics. I therefore review some of the most important issues at stake in this criticism, which merely recycles centuries-old (...) criticism of metaphysics in general: the alleged sterility and futility of metaphysics, its vagueness, the propensity for fantasy, the lack of imagination and foresight, its alleged dependence on intuition and, above all, its independence from experience. I conclude that all these criticisms supply an inaccurate image of metaphysics and a concomitant inaccurate image of science rooted in a refusal to recognize that a strict separation between a priori and a posteriori cannot be achieved. (shrink)

In recent years, many philosophers of science have rejected the “value-free ideal” for science, arguing that non-epistemic values have a legitimate role to play in scientific inquiry. However, this philosophical position raises the question of how to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate influences of values in science. In this paper, we argue that those seeking to address this “new” demarcation problem can benefit by drawing lessons from the “old” demarcation problem, in which philosophers tried to find a way of distinguishing (...) between science and non-science. Many of those who worked on this problem ultimately found that efforts to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for defining science failed, and most concluded that the best solution to the problem was to characterize scientific hypotheses, theories, and research programs in terms of some common norms. We suggest that those seeking to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate value influences on science would do well to adopt a similar approach. Rather than attempting to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for identifying appropriate value influences, it will be more fruitful to evaluate scientific activities based on their adherence to a set of epistemic and ethical norms that can be implemented in scientific practice by means of rules, conventions, policies, and procedures. (shrink)

At Tm. 47e, Timaeus steps back from his discussion of what came about through noûs and turns toward an account of what came about through anankê. Broadie, 2012, Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus, sketches out two routes for the interpretation of this ‘new beginning.’ The ‘metaphysical’ approach uses perceptibles qua imitations of intelligibles in order to glimpse the intelligibles (just as we look at our reflection in a mirror in order to view ourselves). The ‘cosmological’ reading assumes we use (...) the perceptible part of the cosmos in order to come to know the entire cosmos. Broadie openly favors the cosmological reading for understanding the Timeaus as a whole. However, she confines its utility to the Timaeus and does not recommend it for other dialogues. I use Broadie’s ‘cosmological reading’ to better understand what Plato distinguishes as anankê in his second beginning. This sets the stage for my argument that Broadie’s cosmological reading is a promising means for understanding the metaphysics and epistemology of the Forms. By making some comparisons to Sophist (251c–256a), I show that a refined understanding of anankê in the second beginning of the Timaeus clarifies what Plato thinks is involved in coming to know a Form. I argue that a close look at what was available to the Demiurge for cosmic creation by means of noûs yields three distinct ways in which his construction of the cosmos was limited by anankê. Clarifying these three ways in which anankê operates shows that the Demiurge’s manipulation of the foundational elements yields a perceptible world that brings out some potential relationships among Forms while suppressing others. In particular, the Demiurge’s geometricization of the elements leads him to make compromises concerning how Forms can combine in the Receptacle. These choices produce nomological relationships among the Forms with respect to where they can overlap in the Receptacle. This produces the law-like and reliable, but unnecessary, behavior of the perceptible world. I argue that our understanding of these limitations and their translation into where the Receptacle can partake in more than one Form simultaneously, figures importantly in the estimating the potential for human knowledge of the Forms. I question the use of ‘necessity’ as a translation for ‘anankê’ in the Timaeus. (shrink)

Fodor argues that our minds must have epistemic limitations because there must be endogenous constraints on the class of concepts we can acquire. However, his argument for the existence of these endogenous constraints is falsified by the phenomenon of the deferential acquisition of concepts. If we allow for the acquisition of concepts through deferring to experts and scientific instruments, then our conceptual capacity will be without endogenous constraints, and there will be no reason to think that our minds are epistemically (...) bounded. (shrink)

We propose a model of cognition grounded in ancient Greek philosophy which encompasses Aristotle’s categories. Taking for First Principles the brute facts of the mental actions of separation, aggregation and ordering, we derive Aristotle’s categories as follows. First, Separation lets us see single entities, giving the simple concept of an individual. Next, Aggregation lets us see instances of some kind, giving the basic concept of a particular. Then, Ordering lets us see both wholes-with-parts as well as parts-of-some-whole, giving the subtle (...) concept of a relational or Gestalt. The basic and the subtle concept give us the major and minor categories. The categories constitute a top-level ontology and describe universal usage so that any other category necessarily describes particular or domain usage. (shrink)

In the production of knowledge about social life, two social contexts come together: the context of investigation, consisting of the social world of the investigator, and the context of explanation, consisting of the social world of the actors who are the subject of study. The nature of, and relationship between, these contexts is imagined in philosophy; managed, rewarded, and sanctioned in graduate seminars, journal reviews, and tenure cases; and practiced in research. Positivism proposed to produce objective knowledge by suppressing the (...) nonlogical and nonobservational aspects of the contexts. Attacks on positivism disputed the effectiveness and rationality of this strategy. Thus " postpositivism " can be understood as a series of attempts to reconstitute the relation between the contexts as the basis for accurate social knowledge. Two of the most important of these attempts—grounded theory and postmodern anthropology—are considered, and a synthesis, which draws from the insights of cultural sociology, is proposed. (shrink)

The connection between theories of truth and meaning is explored. Theories of truth and meaning are connected in a way such that differences in the conception of what it is for a sentence to be true are engendered by differences in the conception of how meanings depend on each other, and on a base of underlying facts. It is argued that this view is common ground between Davidson and Dummett, and that their dispute over realism is really a dispute in (...) the theory of meaning over holism and molecularism. The view offered is contrasted with influential pragmatist and modest views. (shrink)

In componential analysis, word meanings are (partly) decomposed into other meanings, and semantic and syntactic markers. Although a theory of word meaning based on such semantic decompositions remains compatible with the linguistic labor division thesis, it is not compatible with Kripke/Putnam-style indexical externalism. Instead of abandoning indexical externalism, a Separation Thesis is defended according to which lexical meaning need not enter the truth-conditional content of an utterance. Lexical meaning reflects beliefs about word meaning shared in a speaker community, and these (...) may rest on possibly erroneous world-level theories. It is argued that this type of lexical meaning is indispensable for explaining word composition processes and the rationality of metalinguistic disputes. (shrink)

Epistemic rationality seems to permit a more steadfast response to disagreements over our fundamental convictions than it does for our ordinary beliefs. Why is this? This essay explores three answers to this question: web-of-belief conservatism, moral encroachment, and hinge theories, and argues that hinge theories do a better job than the alternatives at vindicating the intuition that there is a rationally permissible asymmetry in our responses to disagreements over ordinary beliefs and fundamental convictions. The essay also shows how hinge theorists (...) can explain the existence of moral hinge propositions, which enables them to account for the rational permissibility of being steadfast in response to disagreements over fundamental moral convictions. (shrink)

The paper proposes a practical answer to Duhem's problem within the framework of experimental psychology. First, this problem is briefly discussed; second, two studies in psychology are presented illustrating how theories are tested. Thirdly, based on the foregoing, an approach called the “Empirical Reasoning” is developed and justified. It is shown that the ER approach can successfully cope with Duhem's problem. Finally, the ER approach and the Error Statistics approach of Mayo are critically compared with regard to Duhem's problem.

Agents can think using concepts they do not fully understand. This paper investigates the question “Under what conditions does a thinker fully understand, or have mastery of, a concept?” I lay out a gauntlet of problems and desiderata with which any theory of concept mastery must cope. I use these considerations to argue against three views of concept mastery, according to which mastery is a matter of holding certain beliefs, being disposed to make certain inferences, or having certain intuitions. None (...) of these attitudes is either necessary or sufficient for mastery. I propose and respond to objections to my own recognition view of the conditions under which a thinker has mastery of a concept. (shrink)

Standard approaches to possible-world semantics allow us to define necessity and logical truth, but analyticity is considerably more difficult to account for. The source of this difficulty lies in the received model-theoretical conception of a language interpretation. In intuitive terms, analyticity amounts to truth in virtue of meaning alone, i.e. solely in virtue of the interpretation of linguistic expressions. In other words, an analytic sentence should remain true under all variations of ‘extralinguistic reality’ as long as the interpretation is kept (...) constant. However, the received conception of an interpretation as a mapping from language to a model frame hinders keeping the interpretation constant while varying other components of the model. To make room for analyticity, the concept of an interpretation should therefore be revised. The latter should be made richer in content than it has usually been assumed. As a by-product, this revision also gives us a one-dimensional analogue of the influential two-dimensional account of a priori. We are thus able to map out the network of formal connections between the notions of analyticity, apriority, logical truth and necessity. (shrink)

For example, Cheryl Misak in her book-length examination of verificationism writes that ‘the holist [such as Quine] need not reject verificationism, if it is suitably formulated. Indeed, Quine often describes himself as a verificationist’.[iii] Misak concludes that Quine ‘can be described as a verificationist who thinks that the unit of meaning is large’;[iv] and when comparing Dummett and Quine, Misak states that ‘both can be, and in fact are, verificationists’.[v].

A critical notice of David J. Chalmers, Constructing the World (Oxford University Press,2012).

The impact of science on ethics forms since long the subject of intense debate. Although there is a growing consensus that science can describe morality and explain its evolutionary origins, there is less consensus about the ability of science to provide input to the normative domain of ethics. Whereas defenders of a scientific normative ethics appeal to naturalism, its critics either see the naturalistic fallacy committed or argue that the relevance of science to normative ethics remains undemonstrated. In this paper, (...) we argue that current scientific normative ethicists commit no fallacy, that criticisms of scientific ethics contradict each other, and that scientific insights are relevant to normative inquiries by informing ethics about the options open to the ethical debate. Moreover, when conceiving normative ethics as being a nonfoundational ethics, science can be used to evaluate every possible norm. This stands in contrast to foundational ethics in which some norms remain beyond scientific inquiry. Finally, we state that a difference in conception of normative ethics underlies the disagreement between proponents and opponents of a scientific ethics. Our argument is based on and preceded by a reconsideration of the notions naturalistic fallacy and foundational ethics. This argument differs from previous work in scientific ethics: whereas before the philosophical project of naturalizing the normative has been stressed, here we focus on concrete consequences of biological findings for normative decisions or on the day-to-day normative relevance of these scientific insights. (shrink)

Whether people possess free will has been a long-lasting philosophical debate. Recent attention in social psychology has been given to the behavioral consequences of believing in free will. Research has demonstrated that manipulating free will beliefs has implications for many social behaviors. For example, free will belief manipulations have been associated with cheating, aggressiveness, and prejudice. Despite this work, some of these findings have failed to replicate. Testing theoretical predictions, such as whether believing in free will influences behavior, depends on (...) theoretical, auxiliary, statistical, and inferential assumptions (TASI). In this paper we apply the TASI category of assumptions to the free will belief debate. In doing so we demonstrate why these assumptions should be considered when appraising the influence of free will belief manipulations on free will beliefs and behavior. To provide a nuanced view of free will beliefs, we believe researchers should pay careful attention to these critical assumptions. (shrink)

As far as disputes in the philosophy of pure mathematics goes, these are usually between classical mathematics, intuitionist mathematics, paraconsistent mathematics, and so on. My own view is that of a mathematical pluralist: all these different kinds of mathematics are equally legitimate. Applied mathematics is a different matter. In this, a piece of pure mathematics is applied in an empirical area, such as physics, biology, or economics. There can then certainly be a disputes about what the correct pure mathematics to (...) apply is. Such disputes may be settled by the standard criteria of scientific theory selection (adequacy of empirical predications, simplicity, etc.) But what, exactly is it to apply a piece of pure mathematics? How is mathematics applied? By and large, philosophers of mathematics have cared more about pure mathematics than applied mathematics, and not a lot of thought has gone into this question. In this paper I will address the issue and some of its implications. (shrink)

Habermas's transcendentalism in Knowledge and Human Interests ( KHI) deserves to be reappraised for a number of reasons. Prevailing conceptions of strong transcendental arguments, which inform many of his critics, cannot be sustained. The analytic reception of Kant suggests a more modest role for them that is remarkably similar to Habermas's claims for the paradigm of rational reconstruction. Hence a reinterpretation of transcendentalism provides a new basis for establishing a continuity between his early and later work. Habermas's underlying argument structure (...) owes much, albeit unconsciously, to Kant's concept of a regulative idea. Only the "as if" status of regulative ideas allows one to make sense of the metacritical structure of KHI and Habermas's transcendental arguments emerge as deeply hermeneutic in character rather than logical in any formal sense. (shrink)

In “How Facts Make Law” and other recent work, Mark Greenberg argues that legal positivists cannot develop a viable constitutive account of law that meets what he calls the “the rational-relation requirement.” He argues that this gives us reason to reject positivism in favor of antipositivism. In this paper, I argue that Greenberg is wrong: positivists can in fact develop a viable constitutive account of law that meets the rational-relation requirement. I make this argument in two stages. First, I offer (...) an account of the rational-relation requirement. Second, I put forward a viable positivist account of law that I argue meets this requirement. The account that I propose is a version of Scott Shapiro’s Planning Theory of Law. The version of Shapiro’s account that I propose combines (1) the account of concepts and conceptual analysis put forward by David Chalmers and Frank Jackson with (2) the account of the concept LEGAL INSTITUTION (and its conceptual connections to the concept LEGAL NORM) that we get from a certain reading of Shapiro’s Planning Theory. In addition to providing a compelling response to Greenberg’s argument in “How Facts Make Law,” I argue that the explanation for why my response to Greenberg works underscores one of the central problems facing legal antipositivism: namely, its lack of a convincing account of the nature of legal institutions. (shrink)

The situationist experiments demonstrate that most people's behaviour is influenced by environmental factors much more than we expect, and that ordinary people can be led to behave very immorally. A number of philosophers have investigated whether these experiments demonstrate that subjects' responsibility-relevant capacities are impeded. This paper considers how, in practice, we can assess when agents have a reduced capacity to avoid wrongdoing. It critiques some previously offered strategies including appeals to the reasonable person standard, appeals to counterfactuals and understandability (...) of behaviour, and appeals to base rates of wrongdoing. It then proposes we should think a certain factor impeded capacities when this is the best explanation of a change in patterns of responses. With this approach in hand, I then argue that subjects in many of the situationist experiments are (mostly) excused for their actions. (shrink)

The issue of proper functioning of operative computing and the utility of program verification, both in general and of specific methods, has been discussed a lot. In many of those discussions, attempts have been made to take mathematics as a model of knowledge and certitude achieving, and accordingly infer about the suitable ways to handle computing. I shortly review three approaches to the subject, and then take a stance by considering social factors which affect the epistemic status of both mathematics (...) and computing. I use the analogy between mathematics and computing in reverse—that is to say, I consider operative computing as a form of making mathematics, and so attempt to learn from computing to mathematics in general. I conclude that mathematics engineering is a field to be both developed for practical improvement of doing mathematics and taken into consideration while philosophizing about mathematics as well. (shrink)

In order to reconnect Quine's views to the current debate on scientific realism, I reframe Quine's scientific realism into a semantic, a metaphysical, and an epistemological dimension. With this conceptual background, I review the historical development of Quine's scientific realism from the late 1940s until his death in 2000. I challenge Soames's view that Quine is a phenomenalist at the time of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) and show that he remains agnostic between a realist and an anti‐realist conceptual scheme (...) instead. I also argue that Quine's early views on regimentation are incompatible with a strong formulation of semantic realism. I proceed in reconstructing how he becomes a metaphysical and epistemological realist in the mid‐1950s and argue against the view of Keskinen and Fogelin that interprets Quine as being a metaphysical anti‐realist. Contrary to Davidson, I defend the view that he never gave up normative epistemology and really is a proper epistemological realist. Finally, I discuss how he tries to reconcile his realism with his thesis of ontological relativity and how this necessitates the switch to a stronger form of semantic realism. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders the relation between Kantian transcendental reflection and 20th century philosophy of science. As has been pointed out by Michael Friedman and others, the notion of a "relativized a priori" played a central role in Rudolf Carnap's, Hans Reichenbach's and other logical empiricists' thought. Thus, even though the logical empiricists dispensed with Kantian synthetic a priori judgments, they did maintain a crucial Kantian doctrine, viz., a distinction between the level of establishing norms for empirical inquiry and the level (...) of norm-governed inquiry itself. Even though Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions is often taken to be diametrically opposed to the received view of science inherited from logical empiricism, a version of this basically Kantian distinction is preserved in Kuhn's thought. In this respect, as Friedman has argued, Kuhn is closer to Carnap's theory of linguistic frameworks than, say, W.V. Quine's holistic naturalism. Kuhn, indeed, might be described as a "new Kant" in post-empiricist philosophy of science. This article examines, first, the relativization of the Kantian a priori in Reichenbach's work, arguing that while Reichenbach criticized "transcendentalism", he nevertheless retained, in a reinterpreted form, a Kantian-like transcendental method, claiming that the task of philosophy is to discover and analyze the presuppositions underlying the applicability of conceptual systems. Then, some reflections on Kuhn's views on realism are offered, and it is suggested that Kuhn can be reinterpreted as a Kantian transcendental idealist. Given the central importance of Kuhnian themes in contemporary philosophy of science, it is no exaggeration to claim that Kantian transcendental inquiry into the constitutive principles of empirical knowledge, and even transcendental idealism, still have a crucial role to play in this field and deserve further scrutiny. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Davidsonian analyses of action reports like ‘Alvin chased Theodore around a tree’ are often viewed as supporting the hypothesis that sentences of a human language H have truth conditions that can be specified by a Tarski-style theory of truth for H. But in my view, simple cases of adverbial modification add to the reasons for rejecting this hypothesis, even though Davidson rightly diagnosed many implications involving adverbs as cases of conjunct-reduction in the scope of an existential quantifier. I think the (...) puzzles in this vicinity reflect “framing effects,” which reveal the implausibility of certain assumptions about how linguistic meaning is related to truth and logical form. We need to replace these assumptions with alternatives, instead of positing implausible values of event-variables or implausible relativizations of truth to linguistic descriptions of actual events. (shrink)

A case study is presented of a recent proposal by the major metrology institutes to redefine four of the physical base units, namely kilogram, ampere, mole, and kelvin. The episode shows a number of features that are unusual for progress in an objective science: for example, the progress is not triggered by experimental discoveries or theoretical innovations; also, the new definitions are eventually implemented by means of a voting process. In the philosophical analysis, I will first argue that the episode (...) provides considerable evidence for confirmation holism, i.e. the claim that central statements in fundamental science cannot be tested in isolation; second, that the episode satisfies many of the criteria which Kuhn requires for scientific revolutions even though one would naturally classify it as normal science. These two observations are interrelated since holism can provide within normal science a possible source of future revolutionary periods. (shrink)

The present article is the first of a trilogy of papers, devoted to analysing the influence of semantic Platonism on contemporary philosophy of language. In the present article, I lay out the discussion by contrasting semantic Platonism with two other views of linguistic meaning: the socio-environmental conception of meaning and semantic anti-representationalism. Then, I identify six points in which the impregnation of semantic theory with Platonism can be particularly felt, resulting in shortcomings and inaccuracies of various kinds. These points are (...) the following: the limitations of regarding logico-philosophical analysis as the only working methodology; the tendency to avoid investigating a number of aspects of linguistic meaning; the recurring confusion between sentences, statements, and propositions; the weakness of transcendent assumptions about meaning; the weakness of meaning assumptions adopted on the basis of pure intuition; and inconsistencies caused by some over-eager attempts to escape semantic Platonism. (shrink)

The starting point of this paper is the idea that linguistic representation is the result of a global process: a process of interaction of a community of cognitive-linguistic agents, with one another and with the environment. I maintain that the study of truth, meaning and related notions should be addressed without losing perspective of this process, and I oppose the ‘static’ or ‘analytic’ approach, which is fundamentally based on our own knowledge of the conventional meaning of words and sentences, and (...) the ability of using them that we have as competent speakers. I argue that the analytic perspective is responsible for five recurring difficulties in truthmaker theory: (1) the lack of attention to the difference of explanatory role between the distinct notions proposed as primary truthbearer; (2) the adscription of purely extra-linguistic truthmakers to ‘synthetic truths’, ignoring the contribution of the linguistic factor; (3) the adscription of purely linguistic truthmakers to ‘logical’ and ‘analytic truths’, ignoring the contribution of the worldly factor; (4) the difficulties in the search for minimal truthmakers; (5) the problems in the treatment of ‘negative facts’ and of other ‘logically complex facts’. I do not provide an account of how to solve these difficulties, but I do show how the ‘process model’ helps to clear up confusion regarding them. (shrink)

In Constructing the World, Chalmers observes that our knowledge exceeds the core evidence provided by our senses and introspection. Thus, on the basis of core evidence, one also can know (S) that water covers the majority of the Earth. This knowledge, Chalmers suggests, requires a great deal of apriori knowledge. Chalmers argues that even if one suspends belief in one’s core evidence, one can nevertheless reason from a description of this evidence to an ordinary claim such as S. Chalmers concludes (...) that the ordinary claim must be apriori entailed by a description of the core evidence. However, I propose that careful thinking about belief suspension reveals that empirical information can contaminate the reasoning from the core evidence to the ordinary claim S, even if belief in the core evidence is suspended. One result is that empiricists and externalists may freely appeal to thought experiments without having to concede that there are substantive apriori truths. (shrink)

Each of our theories of mental representation provides some insight into how the mind works. However, these insights often seem incompatible, as the debates between symbolic, dynamical, emergentist, sub-symbolic, and grounded approaches to cognition attest. Mental representations—whatever they are—must share many features with each of our theories of representation, and yet there are few hypotheses about how a synthesis could be possible. Here, I develop a theory of the underpinnings of symbolic cognition that shows how sub-symbolic dynamics may give rise (...) to higher-level cognitive representations of structures, systems of knowledge, and algorithmic processes. This theory implements a version of conceptual role semantics by positing an internal universal representation language in which learners may create mental models to capture dynamics they observe in the world. The theory formalizes one account of how truly novel conceptual content may arise, allowing us to explain how even elementary logical and computational operations may be learned from a more primitive basis. I provide an implementation that learns to represent a variety of structures, including logic, number, kinship trees, regular languages, context-free languages, domains of theories like magnetism, dominance hierarchies, list structures, quantification, and computational primitives like repetition, reversal, and recursion. This account is based on simple discrete dynamical processes that could be implemented in a variety of different physical or biological systems. In particular, I describe how the required dynamics can be directly implemented in a connectionist framework. The resulting theory provides an “assembly language” for cognition, where high-level theories of symbolic computation can be implemented in simple dynamics that themselves could be encoded in biologically plausible systems. (shrink)

If Ned Block were a rockstar he would be Mick Jagger: sartorial, iconic, ever youthful, and still producing hit records after half a century. Fittingly, then, P.

Philosophers have alleged that paraphrases of metaphors are inadequate. They have presented this inadequacy as a datum predicted by, and thus a reason to accept, particular accounts of ‘metaphorical meanings.’ But to what, specifically, does this inadequacy claim amount? I argue that, if this assumption is to have any bearing on the metaphor debate, it must be construed as the comparative claim that paraphrases of metaphors are inadequate compared to paraphrases of literal utterances. But the evidence philosophers have offered does (...) not support the comparative inadequacy of paraphrases of metaphors. I offer my own empirical evidence against the inadequacy assumption. (shrink)

In Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke employs a handy philosophical trick: he invents the term ‘schmidentity’ to argue indirectly for his favored account of identity. Kripke says in a footnote that he wishes someday “to elaborate on the utility of this device”. In this paper, I first take up a general elaboration on his behalf. I then apply the trick to support an attractive but somewhat unorthodox picture of conceptual analysis—one according to which it is a process of forming intentions (...) for word use. This picture can recover a naturalistically respectable notion of the philosopher’s task, and can help resolve current debates that turn on the place of conceptual analysis. (shrink)