"Mente e mondo", il libro che raccoglie le tanto celebrate quanto discusse "John Locke Lectures" di John McDowell, appartiene ad un genere filosofico classico, quello dell'"indagine sui poteri della mente umana". Secondo McDowell, un'indagine di questo tipo è necessaria alla risoluzione di alcuni fra i principali problemi epistemologici e semantici. Attraverso una dettagliata analisi dei lavori di McDowell ed un'approfondita discussione del problema del "seguire una regola" e del connesso paradosso di Kripke-Wittgenstein, questo volume cerca di dimostrare che la posizione (...) di McDowell è la conseguenza di una concezione errata delle nozioni normative ed una forma di quello che Sellars chiamava "Il mito del dato". (shrink)

According to Paul Boghossian, the claim that the concept of linguistic meaning is normative has no plausibility whatever. In this paper, I criticize Boghossian's argument for this conclusion and maintain that there is a strong case for saying that the concept of meaning is normative. First, I sketch an easy to handle version of the argument in question. Then, I use MacFarlane's work on the significance of "true" to maintain that the argument relies on an illicit assumption. Finally, I show (...) what supports the claim that meaning is normative by reflecting on the structure of an explanation of a case of successful communication in terms of meaning. (shrink)

In his well-known essay on Wittgenstein, Saul Kripke maintains that dispositional analyses of meaning cannot work mainly because the concept of disposition is descriptive, whereas that of meaning is normative. Unfortunately, neither Kripke nor his followers have ever spelled out this “argument from normativity” in full detail. As a result, the argument does not have good press. This paper offers an explicit version of the argument. In particular, (1) I try to explain what the claim that meaning is normative amounts (...) to, (2) I try to clarify what supports it, and (3) I sketch a valid version of the argument. (shrink)

Reprint of paper first published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1984.

_Naming and Necessity_ has had a great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of naming, and of identity. This seminal work, to which today's thriving essentialist metaphysics largely owes its impetus, is here reissued in a newly corrected form with a new preface by the author. If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics, or in philosophy of language, this is (...) it. (shrink)

This paper employs some outcomes (for the most part due to David Lewis) of the contemporary debate on the metaphysics of dispositions to evaluate those dispositional analyses of meaning that make use of the concept of a disposition in ideal conditions. The first section of the paper explains why one may find appealing the notion of an ideal-condition dispositional analysis of meaning and argues that Saul Kripke’s well-known argument against such analyses is wanting. The second section focuses on Lewis’ work (...) in the metaphysics of dispositions in order to call attention to some intuitions about the nature of dispositions that we all seem to share. In particular, I stress the role of what I call "Actuality Constraint". The third section of the paper maintains that the Actuality Constraint can be used to show that the dispositions with which ideal-condition dispositional analyses identify my meaning addition by "+" do not exist (in so doing, I develop a suggestion put forward by Paul Boghossian). This immediately implies that ideal-condition dispositional analyses of meaning cannot work. The last section discusses a possible objection to my argument. The point of the objection is that the argument depends on an illicit assumption. I show (1) that, in fact, the assumption in question is far from illicit and (2) that even without this assumption it is possible to argue that the dispositions with which ideal-condition dispositional analyses identify my meaning addition by "+" do not exist. (shrink)

Written over the last two decades, John McDowell's papers, as a whole, deal with issues of philosophy. Specifically, separate groups of essays look at the ethical writings of Aristotle and Plato; moral questions regarding the Greek tradition; interpretations of Wittgenstein's work; and, finally, questions about personal identity and the character of first-person thought and speech.

A realist theory of truth for a class of sentences holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar, we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The core of our theory is the (...) account of truthmaking for atomic sentences, in which we expose a pervasive ‘dogma of logical form’, which says that atomic sentences cannot have more than one truthmaker. In contrast to this, we uphold the mutual independence of logical and ontological complexity, and the authors outline formal principles of truthmaking taking account of both kinds of complexity. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to make sense of relativism about truth. There are two key ideas. (1) To be a relativist about truth is to allow that a sentence or proposition might be assessment-sensitive: that is, its truth value might vary with the context of assessment as well as the context of use. (2) Making sense of relativism is a matter of understanding what it would be to commit oneself to the truth of an assessment-sensitive sentence or proposition.

Many years ago, C.B. Martin drew our attention to the possibility of ‘finkish’ dispositions: dispositions which, if put to the test would not be manifested, but rather would disappear. Thus if x if finkishly disposed to give response r to stimulus s, it is not so that if x were subjected to stimulus r, x would give response z; so finkish dispositions afford a counter‐example to the simplest conditional analysis of dispositions. Martin went on to suggest that finkish dispositions required (...) a theory of primitive causal powers; there, I think, he was mistaken. All that they require is an improved conditional analysis, and this improved analysis can be built upon whatever treatments of properties and of laws we may favour on other grounds. (shrink)

This is a short, and therefore necessarily very incomplete discussion of one of the great questions of modern philosophy. I return to a station at which an interpretative train of thought of mine came to a halt in a paper written almost 20 years ago, about Wittgenstein and Chomsky,[1] hoping to advance a little bit further down the track. The rule-following passages in the Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics in fact raise a number of distinct issues about (...) rules, meaning, objectivity, and reasons, whose conflation is encouraged by the standard caption, "the Rule-following Considerations".[2] So, let me begin by explaining my focus here. (shrink)

Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and ...

David Bloor's challenging new evaluation of Wittgenstein's account of rules and rule-following brings together the rare combination of philosophical and sociological viewpoints. Wittgenstein enigmatically claimed that the way we follow rules is an "institution" without ever explaining what he meant by this term. Wittgenstein's contribution to the debate has since been subject to sharply opposed interpretations by "collectivist" and "individualist" readings by philosophers; in the light of this controversy, Bloor argues convincingly for a collectivist, sociological understanding of Wittgenstein's later work. (...) Accessible and simply written, this book provides the first consistent sociological reading of Wittgenstein's work for many years. (shrink)

Semantic holists view what one's terms mean as function of all of one's usage. Holists will thus be coherentists about semantic justification: showing that one's usage of a term is semantically justified involves showing how it coheres with the rest of one's usage. Semantic atomists, by contrast, understand semantic justification in a foundationalist fashion. Saul Kripke has, on Wittgenstein's behalf, famously argued for a type of skepticism about meaning and semantic justification. However, Kripke's argument has bite only if one understands (...) semantic justification in foundationalist terms. Consequently, Kripke's arguments lead not to a type of skepticism about meaning, but rather to the conclusion that one should be a coherentist about semantic justification, and thus a holist about semantic facts. (shrink)

I. Recent years have witnessed a great resurgence of interest in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, especially with those passages roughly, Philosophical Investigations p)I 38 — 242 and Remarks on the Foundations of mathematics, section VI that are concerned with the topic of rules. Much of the credit for all this excitement, unparalleled since the heyday of Wittgenstein scholarship in the early IIJ6os, must go to Saul Kripke's I4rittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It is easy to explain why. (...) To begin with, the dialectic Kripke uncovered from Wittgenstein's.. (shrink)

This book presents an attempt to develop a theory of knowledge and a philosophy of mind using ideas derived from the mathematical theory of communication developed by Claude Shannon. Information is seen as an objective commodity defined by the dependency relations between distinct events. Knowledge is then analyzed as information caused belief. Perception is the delivery of information in analog form for conceptual utilization by cognitive mechanisms. The final chapters attempt to develop a theory of meaning by viewing meaning as (...) a certain kind of information-carrying role. (shrink)

A transcript of three lectures, given at Princeton University in 1970, which deals with (inter alia) debates concerning proper names in the philosophy of language.

Many of the most important questions about primitive certainty have to do with the distinction between primitive certainty as a practical attitude or disposition and primitive certainty as a psychological attitude and with the distinction between these and primitive, objective certainty.

This anthology of essays on the work of David Kaplan, a leading contemporary philosopher of language, sprang from a conference, "Themes from Kaplan," organized by the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University.

No other recent book in Anglophone philosophy has attracted as much criticism and has found so few friends as Saul Kripke's "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language". Amongst its critics, one finds the very top of the philosophical profession. Yet, it is rightly counted amongst the books that students of philosophy, at least in the Anglo-American world, have to read at some point in their education. Enormously influential, it has given rise to debates that strike at the very heart of (...) contemporary philosophy of mind and language. In this major new interpretation, Martin Kusch defends Kripke's account against the numerous weighty objections that have been put forward over the past twenty years and argues that none of them is decisive. He shows that many critiques are based on misunderstandings of Kripke's reasoning; that many attacks can be blocked by refining and developing Kripke's position; and that many alternative proposals turn out either to be unworkable or to be disguised variants of the view they are meant to replace. Kusch argues that the apparent simplicity of Kripke's text is deceptive and that a fresh reading gives Kripke's overall argument a new strength. (shrink)

A notion of truth as applicable to events of assertoric use ( utterances ) of a sentence token is arguably presupposed and required by our evaluative practices of the use of language. The truth of an utterance seems clearly to depend on what the utterance says . This fundamental dependence seems in turn to be captured by the schema that, if an utterance u says that P , then u is true iff P . Such a schema may thus be (...) thought to constitute a suitable basis for an adequate theory of utterance truth, so much so that it seems straightforwardly to avoid the problems arising from context dependence and the semantic paradoxes which notoriously beset theories of utterance truth based on a simple disquotational schema. The paper argues that appearances are deceptive in both cases. On the one hand, the schema cannot allow for plausible if not uncontroversial non-indexical forms of context dependence, arising from the possibility that what an utterance says can be the case or not relative to different situations and that the truth of an utterance u of a sentence φ arguably depends on the truth of φ at the situation "associated" with u . On the other hand, a quantified utterance-truth variation on the liar paradox shows that the schema entails some consequence φ and at the same time the untruth of any utterance of φ; moreover, a resilient quantified propositional variation on the contingent liar paradox is offered, which only relies on resources usually employed by theories of utterance truth based on the schema. (shrink)

John McDowell's contribution to philosophy has ranged across Greek philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and ethics. His writings have drawn on the works of, amongst others, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson. His contributions have made him one of the most widely read, discussed and challenging philosophers writing today. This book provides a careful account of the main claims that McDowell advances in a number of different areas of philosophy. The interconnections between the different (...) arguments are highlighted and Tim Thornton shows how these individual projects are unified in a post-Kantian framework that articulates the preconditions of thought and language. Thornton sets out the differing strands of McDowell's work prior to, and leading up to, their combination in the broader philosophical vision revealed in "Mind and World" and provides an interpretative and critical framework that will help shape ongoing debates surrounding McDowell's work. An underlying theme of the book is whether McDowell's therapeutic approach to philosophy, which owes much to the later Wittgenstein, is consistent with the substance of McDowell's discussion of nature that uses the vocabulary of other philosophers including, centrally, Kant. (shrink)

Saul Kripke’s much discussed Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language has, I believe, been widely misinterpreted. The purpose of this note is to offer a correction. As it happens, on my reading of Kripke’s text Kripke’s Wittgenstein begins to look recognisably like Wittgenstein himself. But I shall not be concerned here with the question of whether Kripke’s Wittgenstein is Wittgenstein. My only aim is to correct the misinterpretation.

Wittgenstein's role was vital in establishing mathematics as one of this century's principal areas of philosophic inquiry. In this book, the three phases of Wittgenstein's reflections on mathematics are viewed as a progressive whole, rather than as separate entities. Frascolla builds up a systematic construction of Wittgenstein's representation of the role of arithmetic in the theory of logical operations. He also presents a new interpretation of Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations - the `community view of internal relations'.