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  1. (1 other version)Conceptual Ethics I.Alexis Burgess & David Plunkett - 2013 - Philosophy Compass 8 (12):1091-1101.
    Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...)
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  • Are Concepts Creatures of Darkness?Laura Schroeter - 2013 - Analytic Philosophy 54 (2):277-292.
    In Our Knowledge of the Internal World, Robert Stalnaker presents a sophisticated new defense of a radically externalist and contextualist approach to mental content. Stalnaker holds that unstructured propositions—sets of possible worlds—can provide a complete account of mental content, including Fregean cognitive significance phenomena. So there is no theoretical job for concepts to fulfill. Stalnaker sees concepts as ‘creatures of darkness’ that encourage theoretical confusion. Concepts are a vestige of the mistaken internalist picture of the mind: internal states that are (...)
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  • A verisimilitudinarian analysis of the Linda paradox.Gustavo Cevolani, Vincenzo Crupi & Roberto Festa - 2012 - VII Conference of the Spanish Society for Logic, Methodology and Philosphy of Science.
    The Linda paradox is a key topic in current debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. We present a novel analysis of this paradox, based on the notion of verisimilitude as studied in the philosophy of science. The comparison with an alternative analysis based on probabilistic confirmation suggests how to overcome some problems of our account by introducing an adequately defined notion of verisimilitudinarian confirmation.
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  • A third way in metaethics.Laura Schroeter & François Schroeter - 2009 - Noûs 43 (1):1-30.
    What does it take to count as competent with the meaning of a thin evaluative predicate like 'is the right thing to do'? According to minimalists like Allan Gibbard and Ralph Wedgwood, competent speakers must simply use the predicate to express their own motivational states. According to analytic descriptivists like Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit and Christopher Peacocke, competent speakers must grasp a particular criterion for identifying the property picked out by the term. Both approaches face serious difficulties. We suggest that (...)
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  • Illusion of transparency.Laura Schroeter - 2007 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (4):597 – 618.
    It's generally agreed that, for a certain a class of cases, a rational subject cannot be wrong in treating two elements of thought as co-referential. Even anti-individualists like Tyler Burge agree that empirical error is impossible in such cases. I argue that this immunity to empirical error is illusory and sketch a new anti-individualist approach to concepts that doesn't require such immunity.
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  • Naturalism Meets the Personal Level: How Mixed Modelling Flattens the Mind.Robert D. Rupert - manuscript
    In this essay, it is argued that naturalism of an even moderate sort speaks strongly against a certain widely held thesis about the human mental (and cognitive) architecture: that it is divided into two distinct levels, the personal and the subpersonal, about the former of which we gain knowledge in a manner that effectively insulates such knowledge from the results of scientific research. -/- An empirically motivated alternative is proposed, according to which the architecture is, so to speak, flattened from (...)
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  • Coordination, Content, and Conflation.Kyle Landrum - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):638-652.
    Coordination is the presumption that distinct representations have the same referential content. Philosophers have discussed ways in which the presence of coordination might bear on the metasemantic determination of content. One test case for exploring the relationship between coordination and content is the phenomenon of conflation — the situation in which representations are about distinct things but are nevertheless coordinated. In this paper, I use observations about conflation to develop an anaphoric metasemantics for some representations in which coordination plays an (...)
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  • Conceptual Ethics and The Methodology of Normative Inquiry.Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett - 2019 - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 274-303.
    This chapter explores two central questions in the conceptual ethics of normative inquiry. The first is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around folk normative concepts (like KNOWLEDGE or IMMORAL) or around theoretical normative concepts (like ADEQUATE EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION or PRO TANTO PRACTICAL REASON). The second is whether to orient one’s normative inquiry around concepts whose normative authority is especially accessible to us (such as OUGHT ALL THINGS CONSIDERED), or around concepts whose extension is especially accessible to us (such as (...)
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  • Private Investigators and Public Speakers.Alexander Sandgren - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (1):95-113.
    Near the end of 'Naming the Colours', Lewis (1997) makes an interesting claim about the relationship between linguistic and mental content; we are typically unable to read the content of a belief off the content of a sentence used to express that belief or vice versa. I call this view autonomism. I motivate and defend autonomism and discuss its importance in the philosophy of mind and language. In a nutshell, I argue that the different theoretical roles that mental and linguistic (...)
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  • A New Interpretivist Metasemantics for Fundamental Legal Disagreements.François Schroeter, Laura Schroeter & Kevin Toh - 2020 - Legal Theory 26 (1):62-99.
    What does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of (...)
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  • Co-filing and De Jure Co-referential Thought in the Mental Files Framework.Poong Shil Lee - 2019 - Erkenntnis 87 (1):309-345.
    In the mental files framework, mental files contain pieces of information. Then, how can we explain the fact that multiple pieces of information are stored in a single mental file? This fact can be called ‘co-filing’. Recanati recommends an account of co-filing as a way to avoid the circularity that can occur when one attempts to explain co-filing in terms of the fact that pieces of information are taken to be about the same object. I argue that his account is (...)
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  • Anti-individualism and transparency.Vojislav Bozickovic - 2020 - Synthese 197 (6):2551-2564.
    Anti-individualists hold that having a thought with a certain intentional content is a relational rather than an intrinsic property of the subject. Some anti-individualists also hold that thought-content serves to explain the subject’s cognitive perspective. Since there seems to be a tension between these two views, much discussed in the philosophical literature, attempts have been made to resolve it. In an attempt to reconcile these views, and in relation to perception-based demonstrative thoughts, Stalnaker (Our knowledge of the internal world, Oxford (...)
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  • Semantic Deference versus Semantic Coordination.Laura Schroeter & François Schroeter - 2016 - American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2):193-210.
    It's widely accepted that social facts about an individual's linguistic community can affect both the reference of her words and the concepts those words express. Theorists sympathetic to the internalist tradition have sought to accommodate these social dependence phenomena without altering their core theoretical commitments by positing deferential reference-fixing criteria. In this paper, we sketch a different explanation of social dependence phenomena, according to which all concepts are individuated in part by causal-historical relations linking token elements of thought.
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  • Negotiating the Meaning of “Law”: The Metalinguistic Dimension of the Dispute Over Legal Positivism.David Plunkett - 2016 - Legal Theory 22 (3-4):205-275.
    One of the central debates in legal philosophy is the debate over legal positivism. Roughly, positivists say that law is ultimately grounded in social facts alone, whereas antipositivists say it is ultimately grounded in both social facts and moral facts. In this paper, I argue that philosophers involved in the dispute over legal positivism sometimes employ distinct concepts when they use the term “law” and pick out different things in the world using these concepts. Because of this, what positivists say (...)
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  • Mental Files.François Recanati - 2012 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Over the past fifty years the philosophy of language and mind has been dominated by a nondescriptivist approach to content and reference. This book attempts to recast and systematize that approach by offering an indexical model in terms of mental files. According to Recanati, we refer through mental files, the function of which is to store information derived through certain types of contextual relation the subject bears to objects in his or her environment. The reference of a file is determined (...)
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  • Cruel Intensions: An Essay on Intentional Identity and Intentional Attitudes.Alexander Sandgren - 2016 - Dissertation, The Australian National University
    Some intentional attitudes (beliefs, fears, desires, etc.) have a common focus in spite of there being no object at that focus. For example, two beliefs may be about the same witch even when there are no witches, different astronomers had beliefs directed at Vulcan, even though there is no such planet. This relation of having a common focus, whether or not there is an actual concrete object at that focus, is called intentional identity. In the first part of this thesis (...)
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  • About Oneself: De Se Thought and Communication.Manuel García-Carpintero & Stephan Torre (eds.) - 2016 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Inspired by Castañeda (1966, 1968), Perry (1979) and Lewis (1979) showed that a specific variety of singular thoughts, thoughts about oneself “as oneself” – de se thoughts, as Lewis called them – raise special issues, and they advanced rival accounts. Their suggestive examples raise the problem of de se thought – to wit, how to characterize it so as to give an accurate account of the data, tracing its relations to singular thoughts in general. After rehearsing the main tenets of (...)
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  • Heidegger's Logico-Semantic Strikeback.Alberto Voltolini - 2015 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 22:19-38.
    In (1959), Carnap famously attacked Heidegger for having constructed an insane metaphysics based on a misconception of both the logical form and the semantics of ordinary language. In what follows, it will be argued that, once one appropriately (i.e., in a Russellian fashion) reads Heidegger’s famous sentence that should paradigmatically exemplify such a misconception, i.e., “the nothing nothings”, there is nothing either logically or semantically wrong with it. The real controversy as to how that sentence has to be evaluated—not as (...)
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  • Mental Files and Identity.François Recanati - 2011 - In Anne Reboul (ed.), Philosophical papers dedicated to Kevin Mulligan.
    Mental files serve as individual or singular concepts. Like singular terms in the language, they refer, or are supposed to refer. What they refer to is not determined by properties which the subject takes the referent to have (i.e. by the information stored in the file), but through relations to various entities in the environment in which the file fulfills its function. Files are based on acquaintance relations, and the function of the file is to store whatever information is made (...)
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  • Concept Possession, Cognitive Value and Anti-Individualism.Víctor M. Verdejo - 2014 - Dialogue 53 (1):1-25.
    Les conditions de possession permettant l’individuation des concepts, bien que peu étudiées, constituent l’un des lieux fondamentaux de la polémique opposant les points de vue frégéen et anti-individualiste. Dans cet article, je décris une théorie compatibiliste de la valeur cognitive qui réunit des conditions de possession anti-individualistes et individualistes. Je soutiens que cette approche générale de la compatibilité des explications frégéenne et anti-individualiste de la possession de concepts suffit à mettre en doute l’idée voulant que la déférence et la transparence (...)
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  • Perceptual concepts: in defence of the indexical model.François Recanati - 2013 - Synthese 190 (10):1841-1855.
    Francois Recanati presents the basic features of the *indexical model* of mental files, and defends it against several interrelated objections. According to this model, mental files refer to objects in a way that is analogous to that of indexicals in language: a file refers to an object in virtue of a contextual relation between them. For instance, perception and attention provide the basis for demonstrative files. Several objections, some of them from David Papineau, concern the possibility of files to preserve (...)
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  • Two‐Dimensional Semantics and Sameness of Meaning.Laura Schroeter - 2013 - Philosophy Compass 8 (1):84-99.
    In recent years, two-dimensional (2D) semantics has been used to develop a broadly descriptivist approach to meaning that seeks to accommodate externalists’ counterexamples to traditional descriptivism. The 2D possible worlds framework can be used to capture a speaker’s implicit dispositions to identify the reference of her words on the basis of empirical information about her actual environment. Proponents of 2D semantics argue that this aspect of linguistic understanding plays the core theoretical role of meanings: 2D semantics allows us to specify (...)
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  • Sharing Our Concepts with Machines.Patrick Butlin - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (7):3079-3095.
    As AI systems become increasingly competent language users, it is an apt moment to consider what it would take for machines to understand human languages. This paper considers whether either language models such as GPT-3 or chatbots might be able to understand language, focusing on the question of whether they could possess the relevant concepts. A significant obstacle is that systems of both kinds interact with the world only through text, and thus seem ill-suited to understanding utterances concerning the concrete (...)
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  • (1 other version)Conceptual Ethics I.David Plunkett Alexis Burgess - 2013 - Philosophy Compass 8 (12):1091-1101.
    Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...)
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  • Against Artifactual Epistemic Privilege.Víctor M. Verdejo - 2014 - Critica 46 (136):43-67.
    Las profundas raíces intencionales de los artefactos y sus tipos parecen apoyar intuitiva y filosóficamente una forma de privilegio epistémico de los hacedores con respecto a los objetos que crean. En este artículo examino críticamente la tesis del privilegio epistémico para los creadores de artefactos y presento un contraejemplo basado en el antiindividualismo. Se consideran diversas objeciones a las que se da respuesta. Concluyo que si el antiindividualismo es verdadero, entonces el supuesto privilegio epistémico de los creadores de artefactos o (...)
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  • Mental files, concepts, and bodies of information.Poong Shil Lee - 2018 - Synthese 195 (8):3499-3518.
    In this paper, I argue that mental files are both concepts and bodies of information, against the existing views proposed by Fodor and Recanati. Fodor argues that mental files are not concepts but memories of information because concepts are mental symbols. However, Fodor’s argument against the identification of mental files with concepts fails. Recanati disagrees with Fodor and argues that mental files are concepts. But Recanati’s view does not differ essentially from Fodor’s because Recanati holds that mental files are simple (...)
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  • Bootstrapping our way to samesaying.Laura Schroeter - 2012 - Synthese 189 (1):177-197.
    This paper articulates two constraints on an acceptable account of meaning: (i) accessibility: sameness of meaning affords an immediate appearance of de jure co-reference, (ii) flexibility: sameness of meaning tolerates open-ended variation in speakers' substantive understanding of the reference. Traditional accounts of meaning have trouble simultaneously satisfying both constraints. I suggest that relationally individuated meanings provide a promising way of avoiding this tension. On relational accounts, we bootstrap our way to de jure co-reference: the subjective appearance of de jure co-reference (...)
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  • Keeping track of what’s right.Laura Schroeter & François Schroeter - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3-4):489-509.
    In this paper, we argue that ordinary judgments about core normative topics purport to attribute stable, objective properties and relations. Our strategy is first to analyze the structures and practices characteristic of paradigmatically representational concepts such as concepts of objects and natural kinds. We identify three broad features that ground the representational purport of these concepts. We then argue that core normative concepts exhibit these same features.
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  • All that jazz: linguistic competence and improvisation.Niklas Möller - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (2):237-250.
    Recently, theorists have pointed to the role of improvisation in practical reasoning and in gaining new moral knowledge. Laura and François Schroeter have gone even further by suggesting an account of competence with evaluative terms based on holistic improvisation. I argue, however, that they fail in their task. Through a challenge of their key claim against Allan Gibbard’s alternative account, I demonstrate that Schroeter and Schroeter provide only partial constraints on competence, and thus that their account lacks the content to (...)
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  • Beyond Concepts.Laura Schroeter - 2019 - Analysis 79 (2):363-377.
    Ruth Garrett Millikan’s new book, Beyond Concepts,1 is a tour de force that integrates and refines the distinctive naturalistic accounts of mental representatio.
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  • Fully Understanding Concept Possession.Víctor M. Verdejo - 2018 - Crítica. Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía 50 (148):3-27.
    Can subjects genuinely possess concepts they do not understand fully? A simple argument can show that, on the assumption that possession conditions are taken to fully individuate concepts, this question must be answered in the negative. In this paper, I examine this negative answer as possibly articulated within Christopher Peacocke’s seminal theory. I then discuss four central lines of attack to the view that possession of concepts requires full understanding. I conclude that theorists should acknowledge the existence of indefinitely many (...)
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