In this paper I discuss a certain kind of 'type confusion' which involves use of expressions of the wrong grammatical category, as in the string 'runs eats'. It is (nearly) universally accepted that such strings are meaningless. My purpose in this paper is to question this widespread assumption (or as I call it, 'the last dogma'). I discuss a range of putative reasons for accepting the last dogma: in §II, semantic and metaphysical reasons; in §III, logical reasons; and in §IV, (...) syntactic reasons. I argue that none of these reasons is conclusive, and that consequently we should be willing to question this last dogma of type confusions. (shrink)

(1995). The taming of content: Some thoughts about domains and modules. Thinking & Reasoning: Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 324-333.

Contemporary orthodoxy affirms that singular terms cannot be predicates and that, therefore, ‘is’ is ambiguous as between predication and identity. Recent attempts to treat names as predicates do not challenge this orthodoxy. The orthodoxy was built into the structure of modern formal logic by Frege. It is defended by arguments which I show to be unsound. I provide a semantical account of atomic sentences which draws upon Mill's account of predication, connotation and denotation. I show that singular terms may be (...) predicates, that it is highly implausible that there is an ‘is’ of identity in natural languages, and that modern formal logic is deficient in that it cannot recognize sentences, including singular existentials, in which singular terms are predicates, or inferences which depend upon the logical role rather than the logical category of expressions. (shrink)

This paper illustrates the difficulties that context-dependence poses for defining the so-called logical fallacies of affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent. In particular, I question whether these fallacies can be identified with specific argument patterns. I argue that judging such patterns as fallacious is relative to a) the type of underlying reasoning, and b) the world-knowledge deemed relevant to the argumentation at hand. It is concluded that a more context-sensitive definition should be pursued.

The paper discusses what kind of truth bearer, or truth-ascription, a deflationist should take as primary. I first present number of arguments against a sententialist view. I then present a deflationary theory which takes propositions as primary, and try to show that it deals neatly with a wide range of linguistic data. Next, I consider both the view that there is no primary truth bearer, and the most common account of sentence truth given by deflationists who take propositions as primary, (...) and argue that they both attribute an implausible type of ambiguity to “true”. This can be avoided, however, if truth-ascriptions to sentences are taken as a certain form of pragmatic ellipses. I end by showing how this hypothesis accommodates a number of intuitions involving truth-ascriptions to sentences. (shrink)

My dissertation addresses the question "do desires provide reasons?" I present two independent lines of argument in support of the conclusion that they do not. The first line of argument emerges from the way I circumscribe the concept of a desire. Complications aside, I conceive of a desire as a member of a family of attitudes that have imperative content, understood as content that displays doability-conditions rather than truth-conditions. Moreover, I hold that an attitude may provide reasons only if it (...) has truth-evaluable content. Insofar as desires lack truth-evaluable content, I hold that the content of a desire has the wrong kind of logical structure to provide reasons. My second line of argument claims that even if a desire did have truth-evaluable content, it would not follow that desires provide reasons. This is because a desire has no more rational significance than a guess or coin-flip. My argument relies on what I call the non-substitutability principle, the thesis that (all things being equal) one cannot substitute something that lacks rational significance, relative to some attitude, A, for something that has rational significance, relative to A, and leave the rational standing of A unchanged. For example, one cannot substitute the guess that P (i.e., something that lacks rational significance relative to the belief that P) for the perception that P (i.e., something that is rationally significant relative to the belief that P) without altering the rational standing of the belief. I argue that when the non-substitutability principle is applied to a desire that gives rise to an intention, it turns out that one can always substitute a guess or coin-flip (i.e., something that lacks rational significance relative to the intention) for the desire, without altering the rational standing of the intention. I take this to show that desires are not rationally significant relative to the intentions to which they give. (shrink)

The problem which seems to remain with the Advaitin's non-realist account is that in giving up both the robust realist use of existenthood and the strong idealist use of cognitive verification, he seems to have weakened the connection between what must be the case and what is experienced. In explaining the nature of cognition, the realist says that existenthood (objects ontologically independent of cognition)must be the case; the idealist says that existenthoodmust not be the case. But in saying that existenthood (...) and non-existenthood are both outside the purview of the explanation of cognition, and then further, in saying that there is only a weak connection — of coherent assumption or best justification through confirmation — between objects and cognition, in other words, refusing to say whatmust be the case, is the non-realist not making his ontology acutely contingent on the current features of cognition? Is his ontology not, in this sense, provisional upon current cognition? As any reader even glancingly acquainted with Advaita would see straightaway, that understanding of ontology as aprovisional state (samv $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{r} $$ tti-sattā) is precisely what the Advaitin has striven to establish. We must leave the examination of the purpose of this effort for another occasion. (shrink)

It is easy to construct pairs of sentences X, Y that lead many people to ascribe higher probability to the conjunction X-and-Y than to the conjuncts X, Y. Whether an error is thereby committed depends on reasoners’ interpretation of the expressions “probability” and “and.” We report two experiments designed to clarify the normative status of typical responses to conjunction problems. © 2004 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.

There is a long-standing debate whether propositions, sentences, statements or utterances provide an answer to the question of what objects logical formulas stand for. Based on the traditional understanding of logic as a science of valid arguments, this question is firstly framed more exactly, making explicit that it calls not only for identifying some class of objects, but also for explaining their relationship to ordinary language utterances. It is then argued that there are strong arguments against the proposals commonly put (...) forward in the debate. The core of the problem is that an informative account of the objects formulas stand for presupposes a theory of formalization; that is, a theory that explains what formulas may adequately substitute for an inference in proofs of validity. Although such theories are still subject to research, some consequences can be drawn from an analysis of the reasons why the common accounts featuring sentences, propositions or utterances fail. Theories of formalization cannot refer to utterances qua expressions of propositions; instead they may refer to sentences and rely on additional information about linguistic structure and pragmatic context. (shrink)

I argue that the suppositional view of conditionals, which is quite popular for indicative conditionals, extends also to subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals. According to this view, conditional judgements should not be construed as factual, categorical judgements, but as judgements about the consequent under the supposition of the antecedent. The strongest evidence for the view comes from focusing on the fact that conditional judgements are often uncertain; and conditional uncertainty, which is a well-understood notion, does not function like uncertainty about matters (...) of fact. I argue that the evidence for this view is as strong for subjunctives as it is for indicatives. (shrink)

in Robin Le Poidevin (ed.) Being: Developments in Contemporary Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peter van Inwagen claims that there are no tables or chairs. He also claims that sentences such as ‘There are chairs here’, which seem to imply their existence, are often true. This combination of views opens van Inwagen to a charge of self-contradiction. I explain the charge, and van Inwagen’s response to it, which involves the claim that sentences like ‘There are tables’ shift their truth-conditions between (...) different contexts of utterance. I present an alternative response which involves the negation of that claim, and argue that it is preferable to van Inwagen’s. (shrink)

In “The Myth of Factive Verbs” (Hazlett 2010), I had four closely related goals. The first (pp. 497-99, p. 522) was to criticize appeals to ordinary language in epistemology. The second (p. 499) was to criticize the argument that truth is a necessary condition on knowledge because “knows” is factive. The third (pp. 507-19) – which was the intended means of achieving the first two – was to defend a semantics for “knows” on which <S knows p> can be true (...) even if p isn’t true. The fourth (Ibid.) – which seemed necessary for the success of the third – was to defend a pragmatic account of the fact that utterances of <S knows p> typically imply p, on which the implication in those cases is down to conversational implicature. In this paper I’ll go after these goals again, with an emphasis on the second. Our topic will be whether the factivity of “knows” (whatever this amounts to) supports the truth condition on knowledge. A new goal will be to defend my argument against some criticisms from John Turri (2011) and Savas Tsohatzidis (forthcoming). We’ll first look at the truth condition (§1) and factive presupposition (§§2 – 3), before turning to replies to Turri and Tsohatzidis (§§4 – 7). (shrink)

In the Twentieth Century, Logic and Philosophy of Language are two of the few areas of philosophy in which philosophers made indisputable progress. For example, even now many of the foremost living ethicists present their theories as somewhat more explicit versions of the ideas of Kant, Mill, or Aristotle. In contrast, it would be patently absurd for a contemporary philosopher of language or logician to think of herself as working in the shadow of any figure who died before the Twentieth (...) Century began. Advances in these disciplines make even the most unaccomplished of its practitioners vastly more sophisticated than Kant. There were previous periods in which the problems of language and logic were studied extensively (e.g. the medieval period). But from the perspective of the progress made in the last 120 years, previous work is at most a source of interesting data or occasional insight. All systematic theorizing about content that meets contemporary standards of rigor has been done subsequently. (shrink)

Dans le paradigme russellien, les termes dénotants ou termes quantifiés comme «plusieurs hommes», «quelques hommes», «tous les hommes», sont analysés à l'aide de quantificateurs, de variables, de prédicats et de connecteurs logiques à l'intérieur de phrases complètes exprimant des propositions générales. Les descriptions définies comme les descriptions indéfinies y sont aussi traitées comme des termes quantifiés.

in American Philosophical Quarterly 44 (3), July 2007, pp. 259-72. Argues that epistemically normative claims are made true by the same facts as, but do not mean the same as, certain natural-sounding claims.

It is notoriously difficult to spell out the norms of inductive reasoning in a neat set of rules. I explore the idea that explanatory considerations are the key to sorting out the good inductive inferences from the bad. After defending the crucial explanatory virtue of stability, I apply this approach to a range of inductive inferences, puzzles, and principles such as the Raven and Grue problems, and the significance of varied data and random sampling.

The paper offers a new understanding of induction in the empirical sciences, one which assimilates it to induction in geometry rather than to statistical inference. To make the point a system of notions, essential to logically sound induction, is defined. Notable among them are arbitrary object and particular property. A second aim of the paper is to bring to light a largely neglected set of assumptions shared by both induction and deduction in the empirical sciences. This is made possible by (...) appealing to the logic of common nouns and applying it to the logic of natural-kind terms.This strategy yields a new insight into the concept of natural kinds. While the strategy reveals deep affinity between empirical induction and deduction it also reveals two problems peculiar to induction. This helps to explain the intuition that induction is the more problematic of the two. The paper does not set out ‘to solve the problem of induction’. 1The paper has benefited from the support and critical comments of several friends: Steven Davis, Kevin Dunbar, Anil Gupta, Michael Hallett, Ray Jackendoff and Storrs McCall. Two friends, however, deserve special thanks, Michael Makkai and Gonzalo Reyes. Many of the points made in the paper, otherwise unacknowledged, are due to their generosity and patience. In fact, the paper can be seen as an application of the logic of kinds on which Gonzalo Reyes has been working for several years. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the ways in which natural language restricts the domains of quantifiers. Adverbs of quantification are analyzed as quantifying over situations. The domain of quantifiers is pragmatically constrained: apparent processes of "semantic partition" are treated as pragmatic epiphenomena. The introductory Chapter 1 sketches some of the background of work on natural language quantification and begins the analysis of adverbial quantification over situations. Chapter 2 develops the central picture of "semantic partition" as a side-effect of pragmatic processes of anaphora (...) resolution. I argue that the apparent effects of topic/focus articulation and presuppositional information on the interpretation of quantifiers are not the result of a direct and local mechanism of sentence grammar. Instead, I develop an analysis where the link is established via the anaphoric dependence of quantifier domains on the discourse context. Chapter 3 discusses the analysis of conditional clauses as quantifier restrictors, concentrating on the question whether conditional clauses restrict quantifiers directly or indirectly. A treatment is explored which has if-clauses constrain the value of the hidden domain variable of the restricted quantifier. Chapter 4, on unless-clauses, and Chapter 5, on only if- and even if-clauses, present some issues in the compositional analysis of complex conditional clauses. These chapters significantly expand the data coverage of the theory of A-quantification. Building on previous work of mine on exceptives, I analyze unless-clauses as exceptive operators on A-quantifiers. The analysis of only if-clauses, treated as conditional clauses that combine if with the focus adverb only, unearthes some interesting new properties. Chapter 6, finally, examines the phenomenon of donkey-anaphora in the light of the results of the previous chapters. I show that a solution to the proportion problem may become possible once we combine the situation-semantic approach to adverbial quantification with the pragmatic theory developed in Chapter 2 and further elaborated in the analysis of donkey anaphora in complex conditionals. (shrink)

I identify the special sort of stability (invariance, resilience, etc.) that distinguishes laws from accidental truths. Although an accident can have a certain invariance under counterfactual suppositions, there is no continuum between laws and accidents here; a law's invariance is different in kind, not in degree, from an accident's. (In particular, a law's range of invariance is not "broader"--at least in the most straightforward sense.) The stability distinctive of the laws is used to explicate what it would mean for there (...) to be multiple grades (or degrees) of physical necessity. Whether there are is for science to discover. (shrink)

The standard account of denying the antecedent (DA) is that it is a deductively invalid form of argument, and that, in a conditional argument, to argue from the falsity of the antecedent to the falsity of the consequent is always fallacious. In this paper, we argue that DA is not always a fallacious argumentative strategy. Instead, there is a legitimate usage of DA according to which it is a defeasible argument against the acceptability of a claim. The dialectical effect of (...) denying the antecedent is to shift the burden of proof back to the original proponent of a claim. We provide a model of this non-fallacious usage which is built upon pragmatic models of argumentation. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to work toward an account of how sensibility and understanding combine in perceptual judgments, with the emphasis on the role of sensibility in both the justification of such judgments and the explanation of how it is possible for them to apply to an objective world. I argue that in themselves sensory intuitions function as (animal level) beliefs about the environment, and that these beliefs have the status of perceptual judgments to the extent to (...) which they are embedded in and engaged with the high-level patterns of consciousness and reasoning characteristic of full-blown human judgment. In terms of this account, sensibility is seamlessly integrated with understanding in perceptual judgments. This does not, however, imply that its contribution to perceptual judgments cannot be separated analytically, for in my terms the basic justification and objective reference of perceptual judgments are directly inherited from the sensory intuitions (functioning as sensory beliefs) which constitute those judgments. I conclude by showing how this account can be used to undermine John McDowell’s claim that any attempt to assign a separable contribution to sensibility cannot avoid the Myth of the Given. (shrink)

The paper clarifies and defends the orthodox view that counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents are vacuously true against recent criticisms. It argues that apparent counterexamples to orthodoxy result from uncritical reliance on a fallible heuristic used in the processing of conditionals. A comparison is developed between such counterpossibles and vacuously true universal generalizations.

I offer an account of what trust is, and of what epistemic self-trust consists in. I identify five distinct arguments extracted from Chapter 2 of Zagzebski's Epistemic Authority for the rationality and epistemic legitimacy of epistemic self-trust. I take issue with the general account of human rational self-regulation on which one of her arguments rests. Zagzebski maintains that this consists in restoring harmony in the psyche by eliminating conflict and so ending. I argue that epistemic rationality is distinct from psychic (...) mechanisms aimed at eliminating dissonance, and these two sometimes pull in opposed directions. (shrink)

Recent work on conditional reasoning argues that denying the antecedent [DA] and affirming the consequent [AC] are defeasible but cogent patterns of argument, either because they are effective, rational, albeit heuristic applications of Bayesian probability, or because they are licensed by the principle of total evidence. Against this, we show that on any prevailing interpretation of indicative conditionals the premises of DA and AC arguments do not license their conclusions without additional assumptions. The cogency of DA and AC inferences rather (...) depends on contingent factors extrinsic to, and independent of, what is asserted by DA and AC arguments. arguments do not license their conclusions without additional assumptions. The cogency of DA and AC inferences rather depends on contingent factors extrinsic to, and independent of, what is asserted by DA and AC arguments. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Highlights of Past Literature Current Work Future Work.

This chapter probes the connections between the metaphysics of meaning and the investigation of human communication. It first argues that contemporary philosophy of mind has inherited most of its metaphysical questions from Brentano's puzzling definition of intentionality. Then it examines how intentionality came to occupy the forefront of pragmatics in three steps. By investigating speech acts, Austin and ordinary language philosophers pioneered the study of intentional actions performed by uttering sentences of natural languages. Based on his novel concept of speaker's (...) meaning and his inferential view of human communication as a cooperative and rational activity, Grice developed a three-tiered model of the meaning of utterances: the linguistic meaning of the uttered sentence; the explicit truth-conditional content of the utterance; the implicit content conveyed by the utterance. Finally, the new emerging truth-conditional trend in pragmatics urges that not only the implicit content conveyed by an utterance but its explicit content as well depends on the speaker's communicative intention. (shrink)

We argue that it is a mistake to approach goodman's new riddle of induction by demarcating projectible from non-Projectible predicates and hypotheses, And put forward an alternative way of looking at the whole question.

Since Kaplan : 81–98, 1979) first provided a logic for context-sensitive expressions, it has been thought that the only way to construct a logic for indexicals is to restrict it to arguments which take place in a single context— that is, instantaneous arguments, uttered by a single speaker, in a single place, etc. In this paper, I propose a logic which does away with these restrictions, and thus places arguments where they belong, in real world conversations. The central innovation is (...) that validity depends not just on the sentences in the argument, but also on certain abstract relations between contexts. This enrichment of the notion of logical form leads to some seemingly counter-intuitive results: a sequence of sentences may make up a valid argument in one sequence of contexts, and an invalid one in another such sequence. I argue that this is an unavoidable result of context sensitivity in general, and of the nature of indexicals in particular, and that reflection on such examples will lead us to a better understanding of the idea of applying logic to context sensitive expressions, and thus to natural language in general. (shrink)

I develop a formal logic in which quantified arguments occur in argument positions of predicates. This logic also incorporates negative predication, anaphora and converse relation terms, namely, additional syntactic features of natural language. In these and additional respects, it represents the logic of natural language more adequately than does any version of Frege’s Predicate Calculus. I first introduce the system’s main ideas and familiarize it by means of translations of natural language sentences. I then develop a formal system built on (...) these principles, the Quantified Argument Calculus or Quarc. I provide a truth-value assignment semantics and a proof system for the Quarc. I next demonstrate the system’s power by a variety of proofs; I prove its soundness; and I comment on its completeness. I then extend the system to modal logic, again providing a proof system and a truth-value assignment semantics. I proceed to show how the Quarc versions of the Barcan formulas, of their converses and of necessary existence come out straightforwardly invalid, which I argue is an advantage of the modal Quarc over modal Predicate Logic as a system intended to capture the logic of natural language. (shrink)

What counts as human rationality: reasoning processes that embody content-independent formal theories, such as propositional logic, or reasoning processes that are well designed for solving important adaptive problems? Most theories of human reasoning have been based on content-independent formal rationality, whereas adaptive reasoning, ecological or evolutionary, has been little explored. We elaborate and test an evolutionary approach, Cosmides' social contract theory, using the Wason selection task. In the first part, we disentangle the theoretical concept of a “social contract” from that (...) of a “cheater-detection algorithm”. We demonstrate that the fact that a rule is perceived as a social contract — or a conditional permission or obligation, as Cheng and Holyoak proposed — is not sufficient to elicit Cosmides' striking results, which we replicated. The crucial issue is not semantic, but pragmatic: whether a person is cued into the perspective of a party who can be cheated. In the second part, we distinguish between social contracts with bilateral and unilateral cheating options. Perspective change in contracts with bilateral cheating options turns P & not-Q responses into not-P & Q responses. The results strongly support social contract theory, contradict availability theory, and cannot be accounted for by pragmatic reasoning schema theory, which lacks the pragmatic concepts of perspectives and cheating detection. (shrink)

Philosophers have been attracted by the theory that an agreement consists of undertakings by the parties. But the theory faces objections from three sides: unconditional undertakings by both parties are insufficient for an agreement; if the parties give interconditional undertakings, both comply if neither does anything; and, if one party gives an unconditional undertaking and the other a conditional one, a condition of interdependence is breached. The options are to live with the breach, to produce an undertaking-based theory that avoids (...) the objections, or to analyse an agreement otherwise than in terms of undertakings. I consider each option and advocate the third: a better theory is that two people have an agreement where one makes an offer to the other that the other accepts. (shrink)

Informal logic began in the 1970s as a critique of then-current theoretical assumptions in the teaching of argument analysis and evaluation in philosophy departments in the U.S. and Canada. The last 35 years have seen significant developments in informal logic and critical thinking theory. The paper is a pilot study of the influence of these advances in theory on what is taught in courses on argument analysis and critical thinking in U.S. and Canadian philosophy departments. Its finding, provisional and much-qualified, (...) is that the theoretical developments and refinements have had limited impact on instruction in leading philosophy departments. (shrink)

Against the background of the fact that speakers not seldom intend to convey imports which deviate from the linguistically expressed meanings of linguistic items, the present article addresses some consequences of this phenomenon which appear to still be neglected in textual studies. It is suggested that understanding behaviour is in some respect a primary objective of exegesis and that due attention must be attributed to the high diversity of behaviour-related criteria by which interpretations of linguistic items are to be evaluated. (...) Although we intimate in addition that individual (meaningful) sentences occurring either in oral conversations or in written documents generally exhibit a multiplicity of contents of diverse types and that the circumstance that sometimes only a content equalling the linguistic significance of a pertinent unit matters for purposes of interpretation is caused by a material coincidence of different varieties of content, the tenets advocated in the paper do not essentially depend on that view. On the other hand, the following assumptions are relevant in the present connection: (a) A number of deviances between imports conveyed by linguistic utterances and literal meanings of expressions occur due to maxims of linguistic behaviour that are quite independent of lexical and syntactic features of individual natural languages. (b) It is by no means an exceptional phenomenon that imports not derivable by grammatical rules of a particular language alone possess primary importance for interpretation and textual exegesis. In view of significant affinities between understanding of sentences and of texts it is argued that the consideration of diverse aspects of behaviour possesses relevance for textual exegesis at least in the following respects: (1) By delivering a heuristic device for discerning problems affecting adopted interpretations it encourages searches for alternatives. (2) It provides means for evaluating the degree of acceptability of particular textual exegeses and possibly rejecting them on a more rational basis than mere intuition. (3) It offers possibilities for critically assessing the validity of explicit arguments advanced in favour of or in opposition to some interpretation. (4) It furnishes a background for assessing certain disputes about translation. The dimension of linguistic behaviour also attains importance in connection with questions of exegesis which are not concerned with assessments of (propositional) contents intended to be communicated, such as the ascertainment of the function which some argument possesses in a context. For substantiating the thesis that omission of raising relevant questions concerning behaviour is not an isolated phenomenon two examples will be employed: (1) A discussion concerning the exegesis of a crucial passage of Dignāga’s Pramāṇasamuccaya and the Pramāṇasamuccayavṛtti, (2) a critical appraisal of a recent publication dealing with the interpretation of the second chapter of Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā-s. (shrink)

First-order formalisations are often preferred to propositional ones because they are thought to underwrite the validity of more arguments. We compare and contrast the ability of some well-known logics—these two in particular—to formally capture valid and invalid arguments. We show that there is a precise and important sense in which first-order logic does not improve on propositional logic in this respect. We also prove some generalisations and related results of philosophical interest. The rest of the article investigates the results’ philosophical (...) significance. A first moral is that the correct way to state the oft-cited superiority of first-order logic vis-`a-vis propositional logic is more nuanced than often thought. The second moral concerns semantic theory; the third logic’s use as a tool for discovery. A fourth and final moral is that second-order logic’s transcendence of first-order logic is greater than first-order logic’s transcendence of propositional logic. (shrink)