It's an achievement of the last couple of decades that people who work in linguistic semantics and people who work in the philosophy of language have arrived at a friendly, de facto agreement as to their respective job descriptions. The terms of this agreement are that the semanticists do the work and the philosophers do the worrying. The semanticists try to construct actual theories of meaning (or truth theories, or model theories, or whatever) for one or another kind of expression (...) in one or another natural language; for example, they try to figure out how the temperature could be rising compatibly with the substitutivity of identicals. The philosophers, by contrast, keep an eye on the large, foundational issues, such as: what's the relation between sense and denotation; what's the relation between thought and language; whether translation is determinate; and whether life is like a fountain. Every now and then the philosophers and the semanticists are supposed to get together and compare notes on their respective progress. Or lack thereof. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes two kinds of realist issue -- the issue of whether the propositions of a given domain are factual and the issue of whether they are fundamental. It criticizes previous accounts of what these issues come to and suggests that they are to be understood in terms of a basic metaphysical concept of reality. This leaves open the question of how such issues are to be resolved; and it is argued that this may be done through consideration of (...) what grounds the facts of a given domain, when fundamentality is in question, and what grounds our engagement with the putative facts, when factuality is in question. (shrink)

Consequence is at the heart of logic; an account of consequence, of what follows from what, offers a vital tool in the evaluation of arguments. Since philosophy itself proceeds by way of argument and inference, a clear view of what logical consequence amounts to is of central importance to the whole discipline. In this book JC Beall and Greg Restall present and defend what thay call logical pluralism, the view that there is more than one genuine deductive consequence relation, a (...) position which has profound implications for many linguists as well as for philosophers. We should not search for one true logic, since there are many. (shrink)

Philosophers from Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein to the recent realists and antirealists have sought to answer the question, What are concepts? This book provides a detailed, systematic, and accessible introduction to an original philosophical theory of concepts that Christopher Peacocke has developed in recent years to explain facts about the nature of thought, including its systematic character, its relations to truth and reference, and its normative dimension. Particular concepts are also treated within the general framework: perceptual concepts, logical concepts, and (...) the concept of belief are discussed in detail. The general theory is further applied in answering the question of how the ontology of concepts can be of use in classifying mental states, and in discussing the proper relation between philosophical and psychological theories of concepts. Finally, the theory of concepts is used to motivate a nonverificationist theory of the limits of intelligible thought. Peacocke treats content as broad rather than narrow, and his account is nonreductive and non-Quinean. Yet Peacocke also argues for an interactive relationship between philosophical and psychological theories of concepts, and he plots many connections with work in cognitive psychology. (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)

In this book Saul Kripke brings his powerful philosophical intelligence to bear on Wittgenstein's analysis of the notion of following a rule.

It's an achievement of the last couple of decades that people who work in linguistic semantics and people who work in the philosophy of language have arrived at a friendly, de facto agreement as to their respective job descriptions. The terms of this agreement are that the semanticists do the work and the philosophers do the worrying. The semanticists try to construct actual theories of meaning (or truth theories, or model theories, or whatever) for one or another kind of expression (...) in one or another natural language; for example, they try to figure out how the temperature could be rising compatibly with the substitutivity of identicals. The philosophers, by contrast, keep an eye on the large, foundational issues, such as: what's the relation between sense and denotation; what's the relation between thought and language; whether translation is determinate; and whether life is like a fountain. Every now and then the philosophers and the semanticists are supposed to get together and compare notes on their respective progress. Or lack thereof. (shrink)

When one encounters disagreement about the truth of a factual claim from a trusted advisor who has access to all of one's evidence, should that move one in the direction of the advisor's view? Conciliatory views on disagreement say "yes, at least a little." Such views are extremely natural, but they can give incoherent advice when the issue under dispute is disagreement itself. So conciliatory views stand refuted. But despite first appearances, this makes no trouble for *partly* conciliatory views: views (...) that recommend giving ground in the face of disagreement about many matters, but not about disagreement itself. (shrink)

The paper asks under what conditions deductive reasoning transmits justification from its premises to its conclusion. It argues that both standard externalist and standard internalist accounts of this phenomenon fail. The nature of this failure is taken to indicate the way forward: basic forms of deductive reasoning must justify by being instances of 'blind but blameless' reasoning. Finally, the paper explores the suggestion that an inferentialist account of the logical constants can help explain how such reasoning is possible.

Since Benacerraf’s “Mathematical Truth” a number of epistemological challenges have been launched against mathematical platonism. I first argue that these challenges fail because they unduely assimilate mathematics to empirical science. Then I develop an improved challenge which is immune to this criticism. Very roughly, what I demand is an account of how people’s mathematical beliefs are responsive to the truth of these beliefs. Finally I argue that if we employ a semantic truth-predicate rather than just a deflationary one, there surprisingly (...) turns out to be logical space for a response to the improved challenge where no such space appeared to exist. (shrink)

It is usually held that what distinguishes a good inference from a bad one is that a good inference is truth-preserving. Against this view, this paper argues that a logical inference is good or bad depending not on whether it is truth-preserving or not, but whether it belongs to a logical system the addition of which makes a deductively conservative extension of the derivation relations among the atomic statements. To so argue, the paper first contends that the meaning of the (...) logical operators of classical logic is determined not by their connections to truth, but by their inferential roles. It is claimed in conclusion that there is no genuine issue over which logic, classical or intuitionistic, is the correct logic, for they are both conservative in the relevant sense. (shrink)

Paul Horwich's main aim in Reflections on Meaning is to explain how mere noises, marks, gestures, and mental symbols are able to capture the world--that is, how words and sentences (in whatever medium) come to mean what they do, to stand for certain things, to be true or false of reality. His answer is a groundbreaking development of Wittgenstein's idea that the meaning of a term is nothing more than its use. While the chapters here have appeared as individual essays, (...) Horwich has edited them to make a continuous argument, focused on articulating and developing an important new conception of language. (shrink)

Mark Balaguer has written a provocative and original book. The book is as ambitious as a work of philosophy of mathematics could be. It defends both of the dominant views concerning the ontology of mathematics, Platonism and Anti-Platonism, and then closes with an argument that there is no fact of the matter which is right.

This book does three main things. First, it defends mathematical platonism against the main objections to that view (most notably, the epistemological objection and the multiple-reductions objection). Second, it defends anti-platonism (in particular, fictionalism) against the main objections to that view (most notably, the Quine-Putnam indispensability objection and the objection from objectivity). Third, it argues that there is no fact of the matter whether abstract mathematical objects exist and, hence, no fact of the matter whether platonism or anti-platonism is true.

The paper challenges the inferentialist account of concept possession that Paul Boghossian takes as a premise in his account of the transmission of justification by deductive reasoning in his paper 'Blind Reasoning'. Unorthodox speakers who reject the inferences in an alleged possession condition can still have the concept by understanding a word for it. In that sense, the inferences are not analytic. Inferentialist accounts of logical constants, theoretical terms (using the Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis method) and pejorative expressions such as 'Boche' are examined (...) and rejected. It is suggested that epistemological questions cannot be reduced to questions in the theory of thought and meaning. (shrink)

Carrie Jenkins presents a new account of arithmetical knowledge, which manages to respect three key intuitions: a priorism, mind-independence realism, and empiricism. Jenkins argues that arithmetic can be known through the examination of empirically grounded concepts, non-accidentally accurate representations of the mind-independent world.

Meaning, Understanding, and Practice is a selection of the most notable essays of leading contemporary philosopher Barry Stroud on a set of topics central to analytic philosophy. In this collection, Stroud offers penetrating studies of meaning, understanding, necessity, and the intentionality of thought. Throughout he asks how much can be expected from a philosophical account of one's understanding of the meaning of something, and questions whether such an account can succeed without implying that the person understands many other things as (...) well. Most of the essays work with ideas derived from Wittgenstein, and five of the essays focus specifically on Wittgenstein's philosophy. Stroud's helpful introduction draws out the recurring themes he pursues and explains how his ideas and aims have developed over the years. (shrink)

Understanding statements containing the past tense involves tacit knowledge of the generalization of such principles as this: ‘Yesterday it rained’ is true if and only if yesterday had the same property as today is required to have for a present‐tense thought ‘It is now raining’ to be true when evaluated with respect to today. This is a variant of the truth‐value link. This tacit knowledge integrates with realism about the past because present‐tense statements are as categorical as their past‐tense counterparts (...) and cannot be reduced to counterfactuals without circularity. An externalist model of the perception of temporal properties and relations can be given, one involving a constitutive sensitivity to instances of those temporal properties and relations themselves. This can contribute to an explanation of how memory supplies knowledge of the past. (shrink)

Mathematics tells us there exist infinitely many prime numbers. Nominalist philosophy, introduced by Goodman and Quine, tells us there exist no numbers at all, and so no prime numbers. Nominalists are aware that the assertion of the existence of prime numbers is warranted by the standards of mathematical science; they simply reject scientific standards of warrant.

Discussion of Wittgenstein's philosophy has suffered from a scarcity of commentators who understand his work well enough to explain it in their own words. Apart from certain notable exceptions, all too many advocates and critics alike have tended merely to repeat slogans, with approval or ridicule as the case may be. The result has been an unusual degree of polarization and acrimony—some philosophers abandoning normal critical standards, falling under the spell and becoming fanatical supporters; and others taking an equally extreme (...) opposite view, deriding the absence of analytic technique, and refusing to see anything of value in Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

Examines the notion of necessity and the special problems it poses for knowledge. The conventionalist response is to see necessary truth as the product of thinking and the decision to act in certain ways. Against this view, it is argued that the complex grammar of the notion of necessity can be appreciated without seeking a definition of it, let alone an explanation of its source. Even though contingent facts about the processes of human knowledge cannot hope to explain the necessary (...) truths, attention to those contingent facts might explain our acceptance of necessary truth and the role it plays in the ways we think about the world. (shrink)

The following values have no corresponding Zotero field: PB - Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc Mahwah, NJ.

The Realm of Reason develops a new, general theory of what it is for a thinker to be entitled to form a given belief. The theory locates entitlement in the nexus of relations between truth, content, and understanding. Peacocke formulates three principles of rationalism that articulate this conception. The principles imply that all entitlement has a component that is justificationally independent of experience. The resulting position is thus a form of rationalism, generalized to all kinds of content. To show how (...) these principles are realized in specific domains, Peacocke applies the theory in detail to several classical problems of philosophy, including the nature of perceptual entitlement, induction, and the status of moral thought. These discussions involve an elaboration of the structure of entitlement in ways that have applications in many other areas of philosophy. He also relates the theory to classical and recent rationalist thought, and to current issues in the theory of meaning, reference and explanation. In the course of these discussions, he proposes a general theory of the a priori. The focus of the work lies in the intersection of epistemology, metaphysics, and the theory of meaning, and will be of interest both to students and researchers in these areas, and to anyone concerned with the idea of rationality. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an alternative strategy, Platonized Naturalism, for reconciling naturalism and Platonism and to account for our knowledge of mathematical objects and properties. A systematic (Principled) Platonism based on a comprehension principle that asserts the existence of a plenitude of abstract objects is not just consistent with, but required (on transcendental grounds) for naturalism. Such a comprehension principle is synthetic, and it is known a priori. Its synthetic a priori character is grounded in the fact that it (...) is an essential part of the logic in which any scientific theory will be formulated and so underlies (our understanding of) the meaningfulness of any such theory (this is why it is required for naturalism). Moreover, the comprehension principle satisfies naturalist standards of reference, knowledge, and ontological parsimony! As part of our argument, we identify mathematical objects as abstract individuals in the domain governed by the comprehension principle, and we show that our knowledge of mathematical truths is linked to our knowledge of that principle. (shrink)

Crispin Wright offers an original perspective on the place of “realism” in philosophical inquiry. He proposes a radically new framework for discussing the claims of the realists and the anti-realists. This framework rejects the classical “deflationary” conception of truth yet allows both disputants to respect the intuition that judgments, whose status they contest, are at least semantically fitted for truth and may often justifiably be regarded as true. In the course of his argument, Wright offers original critical discussions of many (...) central concerns of philosophers interested in realism, including the “deflationary” conception of truth, internal realist truth, scientific realism and the theoreticity of observation, and the role of moral states of affairs in explanations of moral beliefs. (shrink)