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  1. Buffon, Darwin, and the non-individuality of species – a reply to Jean Gayon.David N. Stamos - 1998 - Biology and Philosophy 13 (3):443-470.
    Gayon's recent claim that Buffon developed a concept of species as physical individuals is critically examined and rejected. Also critically examined and rejected is Gayon's more central thesis that as a consequence of his analysis of Buffon's species concept, and also of Darwin's species concept, it is clear that modern evolutionary theory does not require species to be physical individuals. While I agree with Gayon's conclusion that modern evolutionary theory does not require species to be physical individuals, I disagree with (...)
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  • How to Husserl a Quine — and a Heidegger, too.David Woodruff Smith - 1994 - Synthese 98 (1):153-173.
    Is consciousness or the subject part of the natural world or the human world? Can we write intentionality, so central in Husserl's philosophy, into Quine's system of ontological naturalism and naturalized epistemology — or into Heidegger's account of human being and existential phenomenology? The present task is to show how to do so. Anomalous monism provides a key.
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  • Of ghostly and mechanical events. [REVIEW]Jonathan Schaffer - 2004 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (1):230–244.
    Paul Pietroski, in Causing Actions (2000), aims to articulate a dualistic framework that 'makes room for persons'. What is especially intriguing about Pietroski's framework is that it denies both of the above assumptions: (i) it is resolutely non-naturalistic, and (ii) it is a dualism of events, said to steer between substance and property dualisms. If Pietroski is right then both naturalism and the three-part taxonomy are worse than mistaken: they are in..
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  • On 'what is said to be'.Robert Schwartz - 1993 - Synthese 94 (1):43 - 54.
    This paper reexamines an early article by Noam Chomsky and Israel Scheffler concerning the proper formulation and status of Quine's criterion for ontological commitment. ( What is Said to Be,' "Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society", 69, 1958-59; reprinted in Scheffler, "Inquiries".) Somewhat different formulations of the criterion are proposed and their implications explored. It is also argued that Chomsky and Scheffler's views may be seen to foreshadow and lead to some of Quine's later more radical doctrines regarding ontological commitment.
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  • Is there a fundamental level?Jonathan Schaffer - 2003 - Noûs 37 (3):498–517.
    ‘‘Thus I believe that there is no part of matter which is not—I do not say divisible—but actually divided; and consequently the least particle ought to be considered as a world full of an infinity of different creatures.’’ (Leibniz, letter to Foucher).
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  • A study in the cognition of individuals' identity: Solving the problem of singular cognition in object and agent tracking.Nicolas Bullot - 2007 - Consciousness and Cognition 16 (2):276-293.
    This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents. In order to elucidate the nature of agent-files, three views of the (...)
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  • Sensational sentences switched.Georges Rey - 1992 - Philosophical Studies 68 (3):289 - 319.
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  • Word and objects.Agustín Rayo - 2002 - Noûs 36 (3):436–464.
    The aim of this essay is to show that the subject-matter of ontology is richer than one might have thought. Our route will be indirect. We will argue that there are circumstances under which standard first-order regimentation is unacceptable, and that more appropriate varieties of regimentation lead to unexpected kinds of ontological commitment.
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  • The theory of truth in the theory of meaning.Gurpreet S. Rattan - 2004 - European Journal of Philosophy 12 (2):214–243.
    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 (...)
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  • Self-understanding in Kant's transcendental deduction.Derk Pereboom - 1995 - Synthese 103 (1):1 - 42.
    I argue that §§15–20 of the B-Deduction contain two independent arguments for the applicability of a priori concepts, the first an argument from above, the second an argument from below. The core of the first argument is §16's explanation of our consciousness of subject-identity across self-attributions, while the focus of the second is §18's account of universality and necessity in our experience. I conclude that the B-Deduction comprises powerful strategies for establishing its intended conclusion, and that some assistance from empirical (...)
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  • Quine and the problem of synonymy.Peter Pagin - 2003 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 66 (1):171-197.
    On what seems to be the best interpretation, what Quine calls 'the problem of synonymy' in Two Dogmas is the problem of approximating the extension of our pretheoretic concept of synonymy by clear and respectable means. Quine thereby identified a problem which he himself did not think had any solution, and so far he has not been proven wrong. Some difficulties for providing a solution are discussed in this paper.
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  • Proxy functions, truth and reference.R. J. Nelson - 1997 - Synthese 111 (1):73-96.
    Quines ontological relativity is related to Tarskis theory of truth in two ways: Quine repudiates term-by-term-correspondence, as does Tarskis rule of truth; and Quines proxy argument in support of relativity finds exact formulation in Tarskis truth definition.Unfortunately, relativity is threatened by the fact that the proxy argument doesnt comply with the rule of truth (Tarskis celebrated condition (T)). Despite Quines express allegiance to (T), use of proxy schemes does not generate all of the true sentences condition (T) requires.
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  • The metaphysics of quantity.Brent Mundy - 1987 - Philosophical Studies 51 (1):29 - 54.
    A formal theory of quantity T Q is presented which is realist, Platonist, and syntactically second-order (while logically elementary), in contrast with the existing formal theories of quantity developed within the theory of measurement, which are empiricist, nominalist, and syntactically first-order (while logically non-elementary). T Q is shown to be formally and empirically adequate as a theory of quantity, and is argued to be scientifically superior to the existing first-order theories of quantity in that it does not depend upon empirically (...)
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  • Does the quine/duhem thesis prevent us from defining analyticity?Olaf Mueller - 1998 - Erkenntnis 48 (1):85-104.
    Quine claims that holism (i.e., the Quine-Duhem thesis) prevents us from defining synonymy and analyticity (section 2). In Word and Object, he dismisses a notion of synonymy which works well even if holism is true. The notion goes back to a proposal from Grice and Strawson and runs thus: R and S are synonymous iff for all sentences T we have that the logical conjunction of R and T is stimulus-synonymous to that of S and T. Whereas Grice and Strawson (...)
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  • Zitierte Zeichenreihen.Olaf Müller - 1996 - Erkenntnis 44 (3):279 - 304.
    We use quotation marks when we wish to refer to an expression. We can and do so refer even when this expression is composed of characters that do not occur in our alphabet. That's why Tarski, Quine, and Geach's theories of quotation don't work. The proposals of Davidson, Frege, and C. Washington, however, do not provide a plausible account of quotation either. (Section I). The problem is to construct a Tarskian theory of truth for an object language that contains quotation (...)
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  • Propositional attitudes without propositions.Friederike Moltmann - 2003 - Synthese 135 (1):77 - 118.
    The most common account of attitude reports is the relational analysis according towhich an attitude verb taking that-clause complements expresses a two-placerelation between agents and propositions and the that-clause acts as an expressionwhose function is to provide the propositional argument. I will argue that a closerexamination of a broader range of linguistic facts raises serious problems for thisanalysis and instead favours a Russellian `multiple relations analysis' (which hasgenerally been discarded because of its apparent obvious linguistic implausibility).The resulting account can be (...)
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  • Inscrutability and its discontents.Vann McGee - 2005 - Noûs 39 (3):397–425.
    That reference is inscrutable is demonstrated, it is argued, not only by W. V. Quine's arguments but by Peter Unger's "Problem of the Many." Applied to our own language, this is a paradoxical result, since nothing could be more obvious to speakers of English than that, when they use the word "rabbit," they are talking about rabbits. The solution to this paradox is to take a disquotational view of reference for one's own language, so that "When I use 'rabbit,' I (...)
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  • Healthy Scepticism.James Franklin - 1991 - Philosophy 66 (257):305 - 324.
    The classical arguments for scepticism about the external world are defended, especially the symmetry argument: that there is no reason to prefer the realist hypothesis to, say, the deceitful demon hypothesis. This argument is defended against the various standard objections, such as that the demon hypothesis is only a bare possibility, does not lead to pragmatic success, lacks coherence or simplicity, is ad hoc or parasitic, makes impossible demands for certainty, or contravenes some basic standards for a conceptual or linguistic (...)
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  • On language and the passage of time.Ned Markosian - 1992 - Philosophical Studies 66 (1):1 - 26.
    Since the early part of this century there has been a considerable amount of discussion of the question 'Does time pass?'. A useful way of approaching the debate over the passage of time is to consider the following thesis: The space-time thesis (SPT): Time is similar to the dimensions of space in at least this one respect: there is no set of properties such that (i) these properties are possessed by time, (ii) these properties are not possessed by any dimension (...)
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  • “Just-so” stories about “inner cognitive Africa”: some doubts about Sorensen's evolutionary epistemology of thought experiments. [REVIEW]James Maffie - 1997 - Biology and Philosophy 12 (2):207-224.
    Roy Sorensen advances an evolutionary explanation of our capacity for thought experiments which doubles as a naturalized epistemological justification. I argue Sorensens explanation fails to satisfy key elements of environmental-selectionist explanations and so fails to carry epistemic force. I then argue that even if Sorensen succeeds in showing the adaptive utility of our capacity, he still fails to establish its reliability and hence epistemic utility. I conclude Sorensens account comes to little more than a just-so story.
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  • Naturalism, scientism and the independence of epistemology.James Maffie - 1995 - Erkenntnis 43 (1):1 - 27.
    Naturalists seek continuity between epistemology and science. Critics argue this illegitimately expands science into epistemology and commits the fallacy of scientism. Must naturalists commit this fallacy? I defend a conception of naturalized epistemology which upholds the non-identity of epistemic ends, norms, and concepts with scientific evidential ends, norms, and concepts. I argue it enables naturalists to avoid three leading scientistic fallacies: dogmatism, one dimensionalism, and granting science an epistemic monopoly.
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  • (In)Definiteness, Polarity, and the Role of wh-morphology in Free Choice.Anastasia Giannakidou & Lisa Cheng - 2006 - Journal of Semantics 23 (2):135-183.
    In this paper we reconsider the issue of free choice and the role of the wh-morphology employed in it. We show that the property of being an interrogative wh-word alone is not sufficient for free choice, and that semantic and sometimes even morphological definiteness is a pre-requisite for some free choice items (FCIs) in certain languages, e.g. in Greek and Mandarin Chinese. We propose a theory that explains the polarity behaviour of FCIs cross-linguistically, and allows indefinite (Giannakidou 2001) as well (...)
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  • Chomsky on the 'ordinary language' view of language.Francis Y. Lin - 1999 - Synthese 120 (2):151-191.
    There is a common-sense view of language, which is held by Wittgenstein, Strawson Dummett, Searle, Putnam, Lewis, Wiggins, and others. According to this view a language consists of conventions, it is rule-governed, rules are conventionalised, a language is learnt, there are general learning mechanisms in the brain, and so on. I shall call this view the ‘ ordinary language ’ view of language. Chomsky’s attitude towards this view of language has been rather negative, and his rejection of it is a (...)
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  • Spatial ontology and physical modalities.Hugh M. Lacey & Elizabeth Anderson - 1980 - Philosophical Studies 38 (3):261 - 285.
    Most relational theories assert both that spatial discourse is reducible to talk about physical objects and their spatial relations, and that the relation of congruence derives from a non-metrical relation which intervals bear or possibly bear to measuring instruments. We have shown that there are serious logical difficulties involved in maintaining both these positions and the thesis of the continuity of space. We have also shown that Grünbaum's motivating argument for the reduction of congruence is unsound, and, moreover, that the (...)
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  • Moral realism and metaphysical anti-realism.Joel J. Kupperman - 1987 - Metaphilosophy 18 (2):95–107.
    The essay has two purposes. One is to point out connections and parallels between, On one hand, The debates of metaphysical realists and anti-Realists, And on the other hand, The debates surrounding moral realism. The second is to provide the outlines of a case for a kind of position that would generally be classified as moral realism. One feature of this position is that it emerges as parallel to, And compatible with, A metaphysical position that would generally be classified as (...)
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  • The crooked path from vagueness to four-dimensionalism.Kathrin Koslicki - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 114 (1-2):107-134.
    In his excellent book, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (Sider, 2001), Theodore Sider defends a version of four-dimensionalism which he calls the ‘stage-theory’. This paper focuses on Sider's argument from vagueness and argues that, due to the problematic nature of the argument from vagueness, Sider’s case in favor of four-dimensionalism is in the end not successful.
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  • On the aim of the theory of verisimilitude.I. A. Kieseppä - 1996 - Synthese 107 (3):421 - 438.
    J. P. Z. Bonilla's methodological approach to truthlikeness is evaluated critically. On a more general level, various senses in which the theory of truthlikeness could be seen as a theory concerned with methodology are distinguished, and it is argued that providing speical sciences with methodological tools is unrealistic as an aim of the theory of verisimilitude. Rather, when developing this theory, one should rest contnet with the more modest aim of conceptual analysis, or of providing explications for the relational concept (...)
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  • Knowledge of arithmetic.C. S. Jenkins - 2005 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56 (4):727-747.
    The goal of the research programme I describe in this article is a realist epistemology for arithmetic which respects arithmetic's special epistemic status (the status usually described as a prioricity) yet accommodates naturalistic concerns by remaining fundamentally empiricist. I argue that the central claims which would allow us to develop such an epistemology are (i) that arithmetical truths are known through an examination of our arithmetical concepts; (ii) that (at least our basic) arithmetical concepts are accurate mental representations of elements (...)
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  • Idealisation, naturalism, and rationality: Some lessons from minimal rationality.C. A. Hooker - 1994 - Synthese 99 (2):181 - 231.
    In his bookMinimal Rationality (1986), Christopher Cherniak draws deep and widespread conclusions from our finitude, and not only for philosophy but also for a wide range of science as well. Cherniak's basic idea is that traditional philosophical theories of rationality represent idealisations that are inaccessible to finite rational agents. It is the purpose of this paper to apply a theory of idealisation in science to Cherniak's arguments. The heart of the theory is a distinction between idealisations that represent reversible, solely (...)
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  • Minimalism, Psychological Reality, Meaning and Use.Henry Jackman - 2007 - In Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Context-sensitivity and semantic minimalism: new essays on semantics and pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press.
    A growing number of philosophers and linguists have argued that many, if not most, terms in our language should be understood as semantically context sensitive. In opposition to this trend, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore defend a view they call "Semantic Minimalism", which holds that there are virtually no semantically context sensitive expressions in English once you get past the standard list of indexicals and demonstratives such as "I", "you", "this", and "that". While minimalism strikes many as obviously false, it (...)
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  • Self-locating belief and the sleeping beauty problem.Adam Elga - 2000 - Analysis 60 (2):143–147.
    In addition to being uncertain about what the world is like, one can also be uncertain about one’s own spatial or temporal location in the world. My aim is to pose a problem arising from the interaction between these two sorts of uncertainty, solve the problem, and draw two lessons from the solution.
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  • Wittgenstein's builders and Perry's objection to sentence priority.Eli Dresner - 2002 - Dialectica 56 (1):49–63.
    In the first section of this paper I present a view of linguistic meaning that I label 'Sentence Priority’: the position that semantically primitive language‐world contact is made at the level of complete sentences . Then, in the main part of the paper, I consider and reject an objection against Sentence Priority raised by John Perry, an objection that appeals to Wittgenstein's builders parable. Perry argues that the builder's utterances are utterances of self‐standing nouns, and that therefore they constitute a (...)
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  • Quine and the limit assumption in Peirce's theory of truth.Richard Creath - 1998 - Philosophical Studies 90 (2):109-112.
    Quine rejects Peirce's theory of truth because, among other things, its notion of a limit of a sequence of theories is defective in that the notion of a limit depends on that of nearer than which is defined for numbers but not for theories. This paper shows that the missing definition of nearer than applied to theories can be supplied from within Quine's own epistemology. The upshot is that either Quine's epistemology must be rejected or Peirce's pragmatic theory of truth (...)
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  • Objects, properties and states of affairs. An aristotelian ontology of truth making.Arkadiusz Chrudzimski - 2002 - Axiomathes 13 (2):187-215.
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  • Ontological commitment and reconstructivism.Massimiliano Carrara & Achille C. Varzi - 2001 - Erkenntnis 55 (1):33-50.
    Some forms of analytic reconstructivism take natural language (and common sense at large) to be ontologically opaque: ordinary sentences must be suitably rewritten or paraphrased before questions of ontological commitment may be raised. Other forms of reconstructivism take the commitment of ordinary language at face value, but regard it as metaphysically misleading: common-sense objects exist, but they are not what we normally think they are. This paper is an attempt to clarify and critically assess some common limits of these two (...)
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  • Logic acquisition, usage and semantic realism (Reprinted in Callaway 2008, Meaning without Analyticity).H. G. Callaway - 1992 - Erkenntnis 37 (1):65 - 92.
    A chief aim of this paper is to provide common ground for discussion of outstanding issues between defenders of classical logic and contemporary advocates of intuitionistic logic. In this spirit, I draw upon (and reconstruct) here the relationship between dialogue and evidence as emphasized in German constructivist authors. My approach depends upon developments in the methodology of empirical linguistics. As a preliminary to saying how one might decide between these two versions of logic (this issue is most closely approached in (...)
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  • Semantic competence and truth-conditional semantics.Howard G. Callaway - 1988 - Erkenntnis 28 (1):3 - 27.
    Davidson approaches the notions of meaning and interpretation with the aim of characterizing semantic competence in the syntactically characterized natural language. The objective is to provide a truth-theory for a language, generating T-sentences expressed in the semantic metalanguage, so that each sentence of the object language receives an appropriate interpretation. Proceeding within the constraints of referential semantics, I will argue for the viability of reconstructing the notion of linguistic meaning within the Tarskian theory of reference. However, the view proposed here (...)
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  • Supervenience and neuroscience.Pete Mandik - 2011 - Synthese 180 (3):443 - 463.
    The philosophical technical term "supervenience" is frequently used in the philosophy of mind as a concise way of characterizing the core idea of physicalism in a manner that is neutral with respect to debates between reductive physicalists and nonreductive physicalists. I argue against this alleged neutrality and side with reductive physicalists. I am especially interested here in debates between psychoneural reductionists and nonreductive functionalist physicalists. Central to my arguments will be considerations concerning how best to articulate the spirit of the (...)
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  • Real possibilities.John C. Bigelow - 1988 - Philosophical Studies 53 (1):37 - 64.
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  • Carnap and Quine: Internal and external questions. [REVIEW]Graham H. Bird - 1995 - Erkenntnis 42 (1):41 - 64.
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  • Go figure: A path through fictionalism.Stephen Yablo - 2001 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 25 (1):72–102.
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  • Eligibility and inscrutability.J. Robert G. Williams - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (3):361-399.
    Inscrutability arguments threaten to reduce interpretationist metasemantic theories to absurdity. Can we find some way to block the arguments? A highly influential proposal in this regard is David Lewis’ ‘ eligibility ’ response: some theories are better than others, not because they fit the data better, but because they are framed in terms of more natural properties. The purposes of this paper are to outline the nature of the eligibility proposal, making the case that it is not ad hoc, but (...)
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  • Naturalism, fallibilism, and the a priori.Lisa Warenski - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 142 (3):403-426.
    This paper argues that a priori justification is, in principle, compatible with naturalism—if the a priori is understood in a way that is free of the inessential properties that, historically, have been associated with the concept. I argue that empirical indefeasibility is essential to the primary notion of the a priori ; however, the indefeasibility requirement should be interpreted in such a way that we can be fallibilist about apriori-justified claims. This fallibilist notion of the a priori accords with the (...)
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  • Dusting off educational studies: A methodology for implementing certain proposals of John Wilson's.J. C. Walker - 1984 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 18 (1):3–16.
    J C Walker; Dusting Off Educational Studies: a methodology for implementing certain proposals of John Wilson’s, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 18, I.
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  • Temporal adverbials, tenses and the perfect.Frank Vlach - 1993 - Linguistics and Philosophy 16 (3):231 - 283.
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  • Compositionality as supervenience.Zoltán Gendler Szabó - 2000 - Linguistics and Philosophy 23 (5):475-505.
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  • Serious actualism.Yannis Stephanou - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (2):219-250.
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  • Quine’s Eliminativism and the Crystal Spheres.Nathan Stemmer - 2007 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 38 (2):315 - 327.
    Quine’s eliminativist theory has largely been ignored by the philosophical community. This is highly regrettable because Quine’s theory is probably close to correct. Now, the probable correctness of Quine’s theory has an important consequence since, according to the theory, there are no mental entities (events, states, phenomena, properties, etc.) nor do such entities play any role in a scientific account of the relevant phenomena. But the hundreds or probably thousands of publications that deal with issues such as mental causation, the (...)
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  • Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism.Elliott Sober - 1980 - Philosophy of Science 47 (3):350-383.
    Ernst Mayr has argued that Darwinian theory discredited essentialist modes of thought and replaced them with what he has called "population thinking". In this paper, I characterize essentialism as embodying a certain conception of how variation in nature is to be explained, and show how this conception was undermined by evolutionary theory. The Darwinian doctrine of evolutionary gradualism makes it impossible to say exactly where one species ends and another begins; such line-drawing problems are often taken to be the decisive (...)
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  • Counting and the natural numbers.Jeffrey F. Sicha - 1970 - Philosophy of Science 37 (3):405-416.
    Early sections of the paper develop a view of the natural numbers and a view of counting which are suggested by the remarks of several modern philosophers. Further investigation of these views leads to one of the main theses of the paper: a special kind of quantifier, the "numerical quantifier" is essential to counting. The remainder of the paper suggests the rudiments of a new view of the natural numbers, a view which maintains that numerical quantifiers are one kind of (...)
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