In this fascinating work, Scott Soames offers a new conception of the relationship between linguistic meaning and assertions made by utterances. He gives meanings of proper names and natural kind predicates and explains their use in attitude ascriptions. He also demonstrates the irrelevance of rigid designation in understanding why theoretical identities containing such predicates are necessary, if true.

In epistemology, “contextualism” denotes a wide variety of more-or-less closely related positions according to which the issues of knowledge or justification are somehow relative to context. I will proceed by first explicating the position I call contextualism, and distinguishing that position from some closely related positions in epistemology, some of which sometimes also go by the name of “contextualism”. I’ll then present and answer what seems to many the most pressing of the objections to contextualism as I construe it, and (...) also indicate some of the main positive motivations for accepting the view. Among the epistemologists I’ve spoken with who have an opinion on the matter, I think it’s fair to say a majority reject contextualism. However, the resistance has to this point been largely underground, with little by way of sustained arguments against contextualism appearing in the journals,[i] though I have begun to see various papers in manuscript form which are critical of contextualism. Here, I’ll respond the criticism of contextualism that, in my travels, I have found to be the most pervasive in producing suspicion about the view. (shrink)

What follows is a taxonomy of arguments that regresses of inferential justification are vicious. They fall out into four general classes: conceptual arguments from incompleteness, conceptual arguments from arbitrariness, ought-implies-can arguments from human quantitative incapacities, and ought-implies can arguments from human qualitative incapacities. They fail with a developed theory of "infinitism" consistent with valuational pluralism and modest epistemic foundationalism.

Both Literalism and Contextualism come in many varieties. There are radical, and less radical, versions of both Literalism and Contextualism. Some intermediate positions are mixtures of Literalism and Contextualism. In this paper I describe several literalist positions, several contextualist positions, and a couple of intermediate positions. My aim is to convince the reader that the Literalism/Contextualism controversy is far from being settled. In the first section, I look at the historical development of Literalism. This development reveals a gradual weakening. The (...) question that naturally arises is: How far can we go in this direction? Where will this tendency ultimately lead us? And the obvious answer is: to Contextualism. In the second section I describe the steps which, from a critique of the currently dominant literalist position, can lead to Contextualism. In the last three sections I describe various contextualist positions, and I discuss possible literalist replies to the contextualist challenge. (shrink)

Once upon a time it was assumed that speaking literally and directly is the norm and that speaking nonliterally or indirectly is the exception. The assumption was that normally what a speaker means can be read off of the meaning of the sentence he utters, and that departures from this, if not uncommon, are at least easily distinguished from normal utterances and explainable along Gricean lines. The departures were thought to be limited to obvious cases like figurative speech and conversational (...) implicature. However, people have come to appreciate that the meaning of a typical sentence, at least one we are at all likely to use, is impoverished, at least relative to what we are likely to mean in uttering it. In other words, what a speaker normally means in uttering a sentence, even without speaking figuratively or obliquely, is an enriched version of what could be predicted from the meaning of the sentence alone. This can be because the sentence expresses a “minimal” (or “skeletal”) proposition or even because it fails to express a complete proposition at all.1 Indeed, it is now a platitude that linguistic meaning generally underdetermines speaker meaning. That is, generally what a speaker means in uttering a sentence, even if the sentence is devoid of ambiguity, vagueness, or indexicality, goes beyond what the sentence means. The question is what to make of this Contextualist Platitude, as I’ll call it. It may be a truism, but does it require a radical revision of the older conception of the relation between what sentences mean and what speakers mean in uttering them? Does it lead to a major modification, or perhaps even outright rejection, of the semantic-pragmatic distinction? I think.. (shrink)

When I examine contextualism there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a cogent theory that I examining, and not a cleverly stated piece of whacks. I can doubt whether there is any real theory there at all. Perhaps what I took to be a theory was really some reflections; perhaps I am even the victim of some cognitive hallucination. One thing however I cannot doubt: that there exists a widely read pitch of a round (...) and somewhat bulgy shape. (shrink)

W epistemologii aż do XX wieku, najbardziej rozpowszechniony pogląd dotyczący wiedzy głosił, że musi ona posiadać niepodważalne podstawy, w przeciwnym wypadku w jej uzasadnianiu popadlibyśmy w regres w nieskończoność. Takie stanowisko zostało nazwane fundamentalizmem i spotkało się z szeroką krytyką. W latach siedemdziesiątych w teorii poznania powstał nowy kierunek – eksternalizm. Jego twórcy odeszli od tradycyjnego rozumienia wiedzy i odrzucili podstawowe założenia przyjmowane przez fundamentalistów jak i niektórych z ich krytyków. Ciekawą krytykę fundamentalizmu zaprezentował John Langshaw Austin, który dominował na (...) filozoficznej scenie Oxfordu w latach pięćdziesiatych ubiegłego wieku. Z uwagi na to, że większość swojego krótkiego życia poświęcił nauczaniu, opublikował tylko kilka artykułów. Tekst Zmysły i przedmioty zmysłowe, na którym, w sporej mierze, opieram interpretację poglądów Austina, został opublikowany po jego śmierci i jest rekonstrukcją notatek filozofa do prowadzonych przez niego wykładów. Austin znany jest w Polsce przede wszystkim jako filozof języka, twórca teorii aktów mowy. Poruszał on jednak także niektóre z kluczowych zagadnień teorii poznania, o czym często się zapomina. W niniejszej pracy rekonstruuję poglądy Austina, przedstawiając je jako pewną wersję antyfundamentalizmu oraz wskazuję na niektóre wspólne cechy jego koncepcji i teorii eksternalizmu epistemologicznego. (shrink)