Belgian law on child euthanasia uses the concept of discernment to bestow the right to die to minors. Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of oppositional logic grasps the ambiguity of this use of discernment and generally challenges the alleged force of a textual sign meaningfully to differentiate itself from its different and meaningless else. This alleged ability to discern the presence of discernment impinges the truth-value of the distinction between worthy/unworthy lives. The resulting undecidability morally suggests the respect for otherness and promotes (...) the moral value of the suspension of arbitrary judgment and, in so doing, de facto converges towards the praxis of the doctrine of the sanctity of life that embraces the ‘life is always quality’ argument. (shrink)

Plato's reflections on Forms have generally been overlooked, in contemporary Philosophy of Language, as a serious resource for illuminating the notion of word meaning. In part, this is due to the influence of Wittgenstein's critical reflections on looking for ‘something in common’ as explanatory for use of a general term. I argue that, far from being undermined, appeal to Forms can both help explain, and provide corrective critical insight into, Wittgenstein's observations. Plato's reflections provide insight into word meaning that is (...) relevant for contemporary research. Relevant considerations include an explanation as to why an item is F; looking to ‘what something is’; the compresence of opposites; whether participation in a Form involves approximation to the Form. (shrink)

The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...) into their design, and are, as such, dependent on human agents. As a consequence, AI systems cannot be held morally responsible, and responsibility attributions should take into account normative and social aspects involved in the design and deployment of the said AI. My argument falls in line with approaches critical of attributing moral agency to artificial agents, but draws from the philosophy of action, highlighting further philosophical underpinnings of current debates on artificial agency. (shrink)

Alice Crary claims that “the standard view of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics” is dominated by “inviolability interpretations”, which often underlie conservative readings of Wittgenstein. Crary says that such interpretations are “especially marked in connection with On Certainty”, where Wittgenstein is represented as holding that “our linguistic practices are immune to rational criticism, or inviolable”. Crary's own conception of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics, which I call the “intrinsically-ethical reading”, derives from the influential New Wittgenstein school (...) of exegesis, and is also espoused by James Edwards, Cora Diamond, and Stephen Mulhall. To my eyes, intrinsically-ethical readings present a peculiar picture of ethics, which I endeavour to expose in Part I of the paper. In Part II I present a reading of On Certainty that Crary would call an “inviolability interpretation”, defend it against New Wittgensteinian critiques, and show that this kind of reading has nothing to do with ethical or political conservatism. I go on to show how Wittgenstein's observations on the manner in which we can neither question nor affirm certain states of affairs that are fundamental to our epistemic practices can be fruitfully extended to ethics. Doing so sheds light on the phenomenon that I call “basic moral certainty”, which constitutes the foundation of our ethical practices, and the scaffolding or framework of moral perception, inquiry, and judgement. The nature and significance of basic moral certainty will be illustrated through consideration of the strangeness of philosophers' attempts at explaining the wrongness of killing. (shrink)

It is argued that conceptual analysis as practiced by the philosophers of ordinary language, is an empirical procedure that relies on a version of Garfinkel's ethnomethodological experiment. The ethnomethodological experiment is presented as a procedure in which the existence and nature of a social norm is demonstrated by flouting the putative convention and observing what reaction that produces in the social group within which the convention is assumed to operate. Examples are given of the use of ethnomethodological experiments, both in (...) vivo and as a thought experiment, in order to demonstrate the existence of otherwise invisible conventions governing human social behavior. Comparable examples are cited from the writings of ordinary language philosophers of ethnomethodological thought experiments designed to demonstrate the existence of linguistic conventions. (shrink)

In Culture and Value Wittgenstein remarks: ‘Thoughts that are at peace. That's what someone who philosophizes yearns for’. The desire for such conceptual tranquillity is a recurrent theme in Wittgenstein's work, and especially in his later ‘grammatical-therapeutic’ philosophy. Some commentators (notably Rush Rhees and C. G. Luckhardt) have cautioned that emphasising this facet of Wittgenstein's work ‘trivialises’ philosophy – something which is at odds with Wittgenstein's own philosophical ‘seriousness’ (in particular his insistence that philosophy demands that one ‘Go the bloody (...) hard way’). Drawing on a number of correlations between Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy and that of the Pyrrhonian Sceptics, in this paper I defend a strong ‘therapeutic’ reading of Wittgenstein, and show how this can be maintained without ‘trivialising’ philosophy. (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 some sections of On Certainty, Wittgenstein uses the term “persuasion,” pitting it, on the one hand, against “giving reasons”, and comparing it, on the other, to conversion, while, finally, defining it as “giving someone one's own picture of the world.” In this essay, I analyse these sections, in an effort to fit them into the broader context of On Certainty, and to clarify the meaning and the limits of the comparison between persuasion and conversion. My aim is to show (...) that persuasion as Wittgenstein understands it here is quite similar to what we could call “re-education.”. (shrink)

The theme of this paper is a philosophical theory of communication; more specifically, a theory about the understanding of language. It is an old theory, whose classical exponent was John Locke, and in the form that Locke expounded it the theory is now generally rejected by philosophers. But it is far from being a mere museum piece. The view about language that Locke put forward was a plausible one, and it has continued to be put forward in various forms. My (...) main concern here is with a very recent version of the theory, contained in a book published early in 1975; however, it will be helpful to begin with a brief account of Locke's version. This is not only classical, but is also simple and clear, and as such it may serve as a useful stepping-stone towards an understanding of the more modern version. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to illuminate the significance of thought insertion for debates about the first-person concept. My starting point is the often-voiced contention that thought insertion might challenge the thesis that introspection-based self-ascriptions of psychological properties are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person concept. In the first part of the paper I explain what a thought insertion-based counterexample to this immunity thesis should be like. I then argue that various thought insertion-involving scenarios do not give (...) rise to successful counterexamples to the immunity of the target class of self-ascriptions. In the second part of the paper I turn to defend a Metasemantic Explanation of why the immunity thesis holds. The Metasemantic Explanation rests on a reference-fixing story about the mental ‘I’ whose key contention is that introspective impressions play an essential role in fixing its reference. It is part of my argument in favour of the proposed reference-fixing story, as well as of the Metasemantic Explanation, that they respect the paradigmatic features of self-ascriptions of inserted thoughts. (shrink)

I distinguish three kinds of other minds problems—conceptual, epistemological and empirical. I argue that while Merleau-Ponty believes embodiment helps with tackling the conceptual and epistemological problems, he suggests that it is of no clear use in solving the empirical problem. I sketch some considerations that could lend support to Merleau-Ponty’s claims about the conceptual and epistemological problems, without claiming that these are conclusive. I then proceed to argue that Merleau-Ponty’s take on the empirical problem is essentially correct.

The financial crash of 2008 following the selling of fictitious derivatives was a crisis of both rationality and values whose aftermath has thrown the legitimation of deregulated markets, and governments, into question. This paper critiques the Becker metaphor of human capital and submits that human value is central to and the fulcrum of both economic and social values. It illustrates that Hume and Adam Smith directly countered the Hobbesian hypothesis that human nature is based only on self-interest, distinguishes market values (...) from social values, explicit from implicit values and parallels Sen in adopting an ordinal ranking of what people value rather than a search for cardinality. It draws on cognitive psychology, neural research, revealed preference theory and a principle of implicit verification. It also outlines implications for what Adam Smith centrally valued as concern for the welfare of the whole of society. (shrink)

Recent work on consciousness has distinguished between the qualitative character of an experience (what a particular experience is like) and its subjective character or subjectivity (the for-me-ness of any experience). It is often suggested that subjectivity is a characteristic inner awareness subjects enjoy of their own occurrent experiences. A number of thinkers have also suggested that not only is each subject aware of her own experiences, but that in having these experiences she is aware of them as her own. This (...) is the subjectivity-mineness thesis: necessarily, an experience which is given to its subject is given as the subject’s own experience. I shall argue against the subjectivity-mineness thesis. While I agree that experiences are characterised by inner awareness, it is questionable whether inner awareness entails an awareness of my experiences as mine. I shall offer an alternative account of inner awareness, the impersonal account. On this account the subject of the experience is not presented in the content of inner awareness, but the mode of inner awareness is such that necessarily, this awareness is an awareness of experiences which belong to this subject. This is what makes inner awareness a characteristically first-personal form of awareness. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we clarify the notion of immunity to error through misidentification with respect to the first-person pronoun. In particular, we set out to dispel the view that for a judgment to be IEM it must contain a token of a certain class of predicates. Rather, the importance of the IEM status of certain judgments is that it teaches us about privileged ways of coming to know about ourselves. We then turn to examine how (...) perception, as a state with nonconceptual content, can give rise to judgments that are IEM. On one view, the ‘inheritance model’ of immunity, perception gives rise to such judgments because perception itself is IEM. We argue that this model is misguided, and, instead, suggest and elucidate an alternative view: perception gives rise to judgments that are IEM by virtue of containing implicitly self-related or self-concerning information. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that we have a great deal of freedom to imagine what we choose. This paper explores a thesis—what we call “intentionalism (about the imagination)”—that provides a way of making this evident (if vague) truism precise. According to intentionalism, the contents of your imaginings are simply determined by whatever contents you intend to imagine. Thus, for example, when you visualize a building and intend it to be of King’s College rather than a replica of the college (...) you have imagined the former rather than the latter because you intended to imagine King’s College. This is so even if the visual image you conjure up equally resembles either. This paper proposes two kinds of counterexamples to intentionalism and discusses their significance. In particular, it sketches a positive account of how many sensory imaginings get to be about what they are about, which explains how the causal history of our mental imagery can prevent us from succeeding in imagining what we intended. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe notion of immunity to error through misidentification has played a central role in discussions of first-person thought. It seems like a way of making precise the idea of thinking about oneself ‘as subject’. Asking whether bodily first-person judgments can be IEM is a way of asking whether one can think about oneself simultaneously as a subject and as a bodily thing. The majority view is that one cannot. I rebut that view, arguing that on all the notions of IEM (...) that have so far been successfully defined, bodily first-person judgments can be IEM. (shrink)

John Perry offers an unusually substantive, and initially plausible, account of the conceptual role of first-person thought. This paper critiques Perry’s account, particularly in what it says about action explanation, and offers a partial alternative. It also identifies three high-level assumptions about what accounts of conceptual roles should look like that plausibly explain why Perry’s account goes off track in the ways that it does – this is the top-down distortion of the title. Identifying and arguing against the three assumptions (...) helps point in the direction of a better account. (shrink)

Subjects have various ways of thinking about themselves. Here are three examples: a subject can think of herself under an appropriate description (the hiker), d.

This essay is concerned with six linguistic moves that we commonly make, each of which is considered in turn. These are: stating rules of representation; representing things categorically; mentioning expressions; saying truly or falsely how things are; saying vaguely how things are; and stating rules of rules of representation. A common-sense view is defended of what is involved in our doing each of these six things against a much more sceptical view emanating from the idea that linguistic behavior is fundamentally (...) messy. Both the fifth move and the sixth move involve vague concepts, and much of the essay is concerned with developing an approach to various problems and puzzles that attach to such concepts, most notably the sorites paradoxes. (shrink)

Between the later views of Wittgenstein and those of connectionism 1 on the subject of the mastery of language there is an impressively large number of similarities. The task of establishing this claim is carried out in the second section of this paper.

This paper explores the prospects for using the notion of a primitive normative attitude in responding to the sceptical argument about meaning developed in chapter 2 of Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It takes as its stalking-horse the response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein developed in a recent series of important works by Hannah Ginsborg. The paper concludes that Ginsborg’s attempted solution fails for a number of reasons: it depends on an inadequate response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s ‘finitude’ objection to (...) reductive dispositionalism; it erroneously rejects the idea that a speaker’s understanding of an expression guides her use; it threatens to collapse into either full-blown non-reductionism or reductive dispositionalism; and there is no motive for accepting it over forms of non-reductionism such as those developed by Barry Stroud and John McDowell. (shrink)

According to an “orthodox” reading proposed by Dummett and more recently endorsed by Lugg and Price, the later Wittgenstein rejects the idea of grouping together certain utterances as a single class of assertions. We offer an alternative commentary on the Philosophical Investigations §§21–24, developing what we call a Wittgensteinian role‐based account of assertion. We then examine whether this role‐based account can solve the problem of on‐stage utterances. In the course of this, the merits of the account are shown and compared (...) to an alternative proposal offered by Searle. (shrink)

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, Volume 44, Issue 1, Page 92-116, December 2019.

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 4, Page 490-511, October 2022.

Frege distinguished the thought qua logical content from the assertoric force attached to it when judged to be true. The gist of this distinction is captured by the so-called Frege-Geach point. Recently, several authors have drawn inspiration from Wittgenstein to reject this point and the distinction it is based on. This article proceeds from the observation that Wittgenstein himself did not reject the force-content distinction but urged us to reformulate it in a non-dualistic way. While drawing on Wittgensteinian lessons about (...) thought and its expression, the overall purpose of this paper is systematic, not exegetic: it seeks to contribute to the contemporary debate aboute force and content by arguing that this distinction should be redrawn in such a way as to exhibit force as internal to thought, namely, as that which provides for the unity of thought. To this end, it is investigated what it is for a thought to occur as a forceless part of a propositionally complex assertion (e. g. for p to occur as a part of the assertion that not p). (shrink)

It has been claimed that a sense of us is presupposed for shared intentions to be possible. Searle introduced this notion together with the notion of the sense of the other. in joint action. It argues that the sense of the other is a necessary condition for a sense of us. Whereas thisarticle distinguishes between the “sense of the other” and the “sense of us” and elaborates on their role the sense of the other is immediate and automatic, the sense (...) of us can (but need not) arise between people and can (a) develop over time, (b) depend on the situation, and (c) involves several sufficient but not necessary processes. The article relies on research on core knowledge to better understand the sense of the other. It elaborates the sense of us using insights from cognitive science and social psychology. The article shows that the sense of the other and the sense of us can contribute to our understanding of the perception of possibilities for joint action and how individuals can come to experience actions and intentions as shared, even if the participants lack common knowledge. This leads to the conclusion that people are ordinarily socially oriented rather than individually. (shrink)

In his Dewey Lectures,1 Hilary Putnam argues that contemporary philosophy cannot solve nor see its way past the traditional problem of how language or thought hooks on to.

In this paper I outline and defend an introspectionist account of authoritative self-knowledge for a certain class of cases, ones in which a subject is both thinking and thinking about a current, conscious thought. My account is distinctive in a number of ways, one of which is that it is compatible with the truth of externalism.

This article discusses a kind of knowledge classifiable as knowledge-wh but which seems to defy analysis in terms of the standard reductive theory of knowledge-wh ascriptions, according to which they are true if and only if one knows that p, where this proposition is an acceptable answer to the wh-question ‘embedded’ in the ascription. Specifically, it is argued that certain cases of knowing what an experience is like resist such treatment. I argue that in some of these cases, one can (...) know that p, where an acceptable answer to the question ‘What’s the experience like?’ is that p, but where one does not know what the experience is like. This could point to the distinctiveness of this sort of knowledge. (shrink)

Within the strong branch of artificial intelligence, which is aimed at creating thinking machines with intellectual powers like those of man, the most explored research program is symbolic aI, defined as the attempt to use electronic computers to replicate the human mind, either assuming a structural and functional similarity between them, or trying to replicate the behavior produced by the human mind through computational processes that also have an intentional structure but are only instrumentally equivalent. In this paper we show (...) that strong symbolic aI, in either of its two variants, is impossible, since formal systems, that is what all computer programs ultimately are, are not sufficient to replicate in an intentional way four intellectual faculties of man that are essential to intelligent behavior: sense of the situation, common sense, procedural skills and theory abduction. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore Wittgenstein’s inheritance of one specific strand of Kant’s criticism, in the Critique of Pure Reason, of reason’s inherent pretensions to totality. This exploration reveals new critical possibilities in Wittgenstein’s own philosophical method, challenging existing interpretations of Wittgenstein’s political thought as “conservative” and exhibiting the closeness of its connection to another inheritor of Kant’s critique of totality, the Frankfurt school’s criticism of “identity thinking” and the reification of reason to which it leads. Additionally, it shows how (...) Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy offers to challenge and undermine, in a historically novel way, the metaphysical assumptions underlying some of our most characteristic and ubiquitous social practices. (shrink)

In trying to make clear whether understanding is a mental state Wittgenstein asks a series of questions about the timing and duration of understanding. These questions are awkward, and they have posed a great challenge for commentators. In this paper I review the interpretations by Mole and by Baker and Hacker, and point out their problems. I then offer a new interpretation which shows (1) that a “mental state” in this context means a state of consciousness, (2) that Wittgenstein's questions (...) are intended to elicit the grammars of the words “understand” and a “state of consciousness”, (3) that, in this way, he clearly shows that understanding is not a state of consciousness and (4) that he also provides a therapy to dissolve the problem. (shrink)

In this paper, I confront various conceptions of meaning and articulate them to anthropological styles of thought: W.V. Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning as use, Cavell’s philosophy of ordinary language, of ‘what we say’; Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables where I approached English terms as inherently untranslatable; attention to details and to human vulnerability through the ‘textures of the ordinary’ Veena Das teaches us to observe. All these approaches to meaning as agency, vs. meaning (...) as a determined entity shared and expressed by different languages, lead to renew our concept of the global. (shrink)

In this essay, I seek to demonstrate the interplay of philosophical voices – particularly, that of a platonist voice and a community-agreement-view voice – that drives Wittgenstein’s rule-following dialectic forward; and I argue that each voice succumbs to a particular form of dialectical oscillation that renders its response to the problem of rule-following philosophically inadequate. Finally, I suggest that, by seeing and taking stock of the dilemma in which these responses to the skeptical problem are caught, we can come to (...) appreciate Wittgenstein’s own view of what might constitute a proper a response to the so-called problem of rule-following. This view can be preliminarily characterized by saying that Wittgenstein’s aim is to dissolve the temptation to philosophically rebut the skeptical challenge posed by the rule-following dialectic, an aim he achieves by revealing the semantic emptiness of the apparent sentences that raise the skeptical problem. (shrink)

There is a consensus among philosophers that some “I”-thoughts are immune to error through misidentification. In some recent papers, this property has been formulated in the following deflationist way: an “I”-thought is immune to error through misidentification when it can misrepresent the mental or bodily property self-ascribed but cannot misrepresent the subject possessing that property. However, it has been put forward that the range of mental and bodily states that are immune in that limited sense cannot include nonconceptual forms of (...) self-representation. In this paper, I claim the opposite. I argue in favor of a theoretical framework inspired by semantic relativism that solves the problem of immune nonconceptual self-representations. In order to do so, I refute an argument against the relativist account which is based on the existence of shared representations. This argument, I contend, rests on a confusion between two conditions to which a relativist may appeal when considering whether a certain mental content is relative to the self: a strong invariance condition and a weak invariance condition. I then argue that even if we acknowledge the existence of shared representations, the weak invariance condition is still satisfied, and consequently the relativist framework can make sense of INSRs. I argue that this weak invariance condition is satisfied by a representational function that self-relativizes certain representations. I then provide an empirical instance of such a function by discussing some of the recent literature on motor representations and the sense of agency. In the last part of the paper, I answer several potential objections. These potential objections lead me to distinguish two fundamental kinds of error relative to the self: error through misidentification and error through misapplication. This distinction allows me to answer a fundamental question raised by the very idea of de facto immunity to error through misidentification. (shrink)

There are close parallels between Frank Jackson's case of black-and-white Mary and David Lewis's case of the two omniscient gods. This essay develops and defends what may be called “the ability hypothesis” about the knowledge that the gods lack, by adapting Lewis's ability hypothesis about the knowledge that Mary acquires. What the gods might lack despite their propositional omniscience is not any distinctive kind of information, but certain abilities of introspection. The motivating idea is that knowledge one acquires by exercising (...) introspective abilities cannot fail to be knowledge about oneself or indexical knowledge. So in order to envisage the gods' epistemic situation coherently, we need to assume that they lack those introspective abilities. But once we recognize that, it turns out that positing a special kind of information is a gratuitous addition. The two gods' ignorance simply consists in their lack of introspective abilities. (shrink)

Various theories suggest conscious phenomena are based exclusively on brain activity, while others regard them as a result of the interaction between embodied agents and their environment. In this paper, I will consider whether this divergence entails the acceptance of the fact that different theories can be applied in different scales (as in the case of physics), or if they are reconcilable. I will suggest that investigating how the term representation is used can reveal some hints, building upon which we (...) can bridge the gulf between the two poles in the long run. In my argumentation I will rely on some earlier philosophical insights, such as those of Descartes, James, Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, as well as research based on global workspace theory, and the conceptions of embodied and enacted cognition. I will suggest that within a wider horizon of investigation, the ambiguity as regards the term representation will decrease. (shrink)

I argue that the feeling that one is the owner of his or her mental states is not an intrinsic property of those states. Rather, it consists in a contingent relation between consciousness and its intentional objects. As such, there are (a variety of) circumstances, varying in their interpretive clarity, in which this relation can come undone. When this happens, the content of consciousness still is apprehended, but the feeling that the content “belongs to me” no longer is secured. I (...) discuss the implications of a mechanism enabling personal ownership for understanding a variety of clinical syndromes as well normal mental function. (shrink)

The present paper argues that there is an affinity between Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and Wittgenstein's philosophy. It is maintained, in particular, that Kuhn's notion of paradigm draws on such Wittgensteinian concepts as language games, family resemblance, rules, forms of life. It is also claimed that Kuhn's incommensurability thesis is a sequel of the theory of meaning supplied by Wittgenstein's later philosophy. As such its assessment is not fallacious, since it is not an empirical hypothesis and it does (...) not have the relativistic implications Kuhn's critics repeatedly indicated. Although concepts are indeed relative to a language game or paradigm, interparadigmatic intelligibility is preserved through the standard techniques of translation or praxis. The impossibility of radical translation which is captured by the claim of incommensurability lies with that which cannot be said but only shown. (shrink)

When you have a conscious experience—such as feeling pain, watching the sunset, or thinking about your loved ones—are you aware of the experience as your own, even when you do not reflect on, think about, or attend to it? Let us say that an experience has “mineness” just in case its subject is aware of it as her own while she undergoes it. And let us call the view that all ordinary experiences have mineness “typicalism.” Recently, Guillot has offered a (...) novel argument for typicalism by leveraging the relation between self-knowledge and self-awareness. She starts by arguing that all ordinary experiences give their subjects immediate justification to believe that their experiences are their own. She then argues that this can be explained by typicalism. In this paper, I argue that her argument fails. I start by clarifying the notion of mineness and giving more details about her argument. I then explain why her argument fails by raising doubts about whether typicalism explains the target explanandum. I close by considering some implications of our discussion for self-knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper I present how the normative inferentialist can make the distinction between sentence meaning and content of the utterance. The inferentialist can understand sentence meaning as a role conferred to that sentence by the rules governing inferential transitions and content of the utterance as just a part of sentence meaning. I attempt to show how such a framework can account for prominent scenarios presented by contextualists as a challenge to semantic minimalism/literalism. I argue that inferentialism can address contextualist (...) challenges in a simple and effective manner by understanding sentence meaning as broad, but invariant. (shrink)

Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of "woman" that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to delineate a "feminine" language is either groundlessly utopian or entails a biological essentialism.

This essay explores how moral discourse can have dogmatic tendencies. In exemplifying how it is possible to move beyond such tendencies, this essay turns to the Norwegian picture book Garmann's Summer. The essay not only suggests a vision of moral thinking, but also aims to demonstrate the role that literature, and particularly children's literature, can play in moral discourse, particularly in philosophy. The picture book's elaborations on the difficulties children can face when starting school show both what ethics beyond moral (...) concepts can be and the role that literature and art can have in moral thinking. The essay aims to show that moral work may consist in acknowledging difficulties and that all of their complexities have a role to play in the lives of real human beings. Accordingly, the essay is not a philosophical interpretation of a children's book, but an attempt to read a children's book to do philosophy. (shrink)