In the past decade, experimental philosophy---the attempt at making progress on philosophical problems using empirical methods---has thrived in a wide range of domains. However, only in recent years has aesthetics succeeded in drawing the attention of experimental philosophers. The present paper constitutes the first survey of these works and of the nascent field of 'experimental philosophy of aesthetics'. We present both recent experimental works by philosophers on topics such as the ontology of aesthetics, aesthetic epistemology, aesthetic concepts, and imagination, as (...) well as research from other disciplines that not only are relevant to philosophy of aesthetics but also open new avenues of research for experimental philosophy of aesthetics. Overall, we conclude that the birth of an experimental philosophy of aesthetics is good news not only for aesthetics but also for experimental philosophy itself, as it contributes to broaden the scope of experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Why is it that most fictions present one and only one ending, rather than multiple ones? Fictions presenting multiple endings are possible, because a few exist; but they are very rare, and this calls for an explanation. We argue that such an explanation is likely to shed light on our engagement with fictions, for fictions having one and only one ending seem to be ubiquitous. After dismissing the most obvious explanations for this phenomenon, we compare the scarcity of multiple endings (...) in traditional kinds of fiction to their profusion in the case of interactive fictions. This contrast poses a challenge to accounts of our engagement with fictions in terms of games of make-believe. We conclude that solving this puzzle is likely to improve our philosophical understanding of fictions. (shrink)

The growing proportion of elderly people in society, together with recent advances in robotics, makes the use of robots in elder care increasingly likely. We outline developments in the areas of robot applications for assisting the elderly and their carers, for monitoring their health and safety, and for providing them with companionship. Despite the possible benefits, we raise and discuss six main ethical concerns associated with: (1) the potential reduction in the amount of human contact; (2) an increase in the (...) feelings of objectification and loss of control; (3) a loss of privacy; (4) a loss of personal liberty; (5) deception and infantilisation; (6) the circumstances in which elderly people should be allowed to control robots. We conclude by balancing the care benefits against the ethical costs. If introduced with foresight and careful guidelines, robots and robotic technology could improve the lives of the elderly, reducing their dependence, and creating more opportunities for social interaction. (shrink)

This paper aims to better motivate the naturalization of metaphysics by identifying and criticizing a class of theories I call ’free range metaphysics’. I argue that free range metaphysics is epistemically inadequate because the constraints on its content—consistency, simplicity, intuitive plausibility, and explanatory power—are insufficiently robust and justificatory. However, since free range metaphysics yields clarity-conducive techniques, incubates science, and produces conceptual and formal tools useful for scientifically engaged philosophy, I do not recommend its discontinuation. I do recommend, however, ending the (...) discipline’s bad faith. That is, I urge that free range metaphysics not be taken to have fully satisfactory epistemic credentials over and above its pragmatic ones. (shrink)

This is a preprint draft. Please cite published version (DOI: 10.1111/mila.12385). The aim of this paper is to provide a novel analysis of anorexia nervosa (AN) in the context of the sense of agency literature. I first show that two accounts of anorexia nervosa that we ought to take seriously— i.e., the first personal reports of those who have experienced it firsthand as well as the research that seeks to explain anorexic behavior from an empirical perspective— appear to be thoroughly (...) in tension with one another in their descriptions of anorexic actions. Rather than proceeding at this point by way of disregarding anorexic testimony as meaningless or insincere, I instead offer a positive account of the sense of agency in anorexia nervosa that renders these two depictions compatible. The resultant picture of anorexic behavior is one that accommodates current empirical findings while also providing valuable insight into how it is that anorexics can sincerely report feeling fully in control over their food restriction. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim to show that the framework of embedded, distributed, or extended cognition offers new perspectives on social cognition by applying it to one specific domain: the psychology of memory. In making our case, first we specify some key social dimensions of cognitive distribution and some basic distinctions between memory cases, and then describe stronger and weaker versions of distributed remembering in the general distributed cognition framework. Next, we examine studies of social influences on memory in cognitive (...) psychology, and identify the valuable concepts and methods to be extended and embedded in our framework; we focus in particular on three related paradigms: transactive memory, collaborative recall, and social contagion. Finally, we sketch our own early studies of individual and group memory developed within our framework of distributed cognition, on social contagion of autobiographical memories, collaborative flashbulb memories, and memories of high school at a high school reunion. We see two reciprocal benefits of this conceptual and empirical framework to social memory phenomena: that ideas about distributed cognition can be honed against and tested with the help of sophisticated methods in the social cognitive psychology of memory; and conversely, that a range of social memory phenomena that are as yet poorly understood can be approached afresh with theoretically motivated extensions of existing empirical paradigms. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between dignity and robot care for older people. It highlights the disquiet that is often expressed about failures to maintain the dignity of vulnerable older people, but points out some of the contradictory uses of the word ‘dignity’. Certain authors have resolved these contradictions by identifying different senses of dignity; contrasting the inviolable dignity inherent in human life to other forms of dignity which can be present to varying degrees. The Capability Approach (CA) is introduced (...) as a different but tangible account of what it means to live a life worthy of human dignity. It is used here as a framework for the assessment of the possible effects of eldercare robots on human dignity. The CA enables the identification of circumstances in which robots could enhance dignity by expanding the set of capabilities that are accessible to frail older people. At the same time, it is also possible within its framework to identify ways in which robots could have a negative impact, by impeding the access of older people to essential capabilities. It is concluded that the CA has some advantages over other accounts of dignity, but that further work and empirical study is needed in order to adapt it to the particular circumstances and concerns of those in the latter part of their lives. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently highlighted substantial affinities between causation and grounding, which has inclined some to import the conceptual and formal resources of causal interventionism into the metaphysics of grounding. The prospect of grounding interventionism raises two important questions: exactly what are grounding interventions, and why should we think they enable knowledge of grounding? This paper will approach these questions by examining how causal interventionists have addressed (or might address) analogous questions and then comparing the available options for grounding interventionism. I (...) argue that grounding interventions must be understood in worldly terms, as adding something to or deleting something from the roster of entities, or making some fact obtain or fail to obtain. I consider three bases for counterfactual assessment: imagination, structural equation models, and background theory. I conclude that grounding interventionism requires firmer epistemological foundations, without which the interventionist's epistemology of grounding is incomplete and ineffectually rationalist. (shrink)

A naturalistic impulse has taken speculative analytic metaphysics in its critical sights. Importantly, the claim that it is desirable or requisite to give metaphysics scientific moorings rests on underlying epistemological assumptions or principles. If the naturalistic impulse toward metaphysics is to be well-founded and its prescriptions to have normative force, those assumptions or principles should be spelled out and justified. In short, advocates of naturalized or scientific metaphysics require epistemic infrastructure. This paper begins to supply it. The author first sketches (...) her conception of suitably naturalized or scientific metaphysics. She then lays out a number of candidate epistemic principles centring around the notion of theoretical constraint. The author offers several arguments for the principles, based on statistical likeliness, agreement, falsity avoidance, and methodological efficiency and inefficiency. Finally, she shows how scientific metaphysics satisfies the epistemic principles and is therefore preferable to its traditional rivals. (shrink)

It is possible that the world contains infinitely many agents that have positive and negative levels of well-being. Theories have been developed to ethically rank such worlds based on the well-being levels of the agents in those worlds or other qualitative properties of the worlds in question, such as the distribution of agents across spacetime. In this thesis I argue that such ethical rankings ought to be consistent with the Pareto principle, which says that if two worlds contain the same (...) agents and some agents are better off in the first world than they are in the second and no agents are worse off than they are in the second, then the first world is better than the second. I show that if we accept four axioms – the Pareto principle, transitivity, an axiom stating that populations of worlds can be permuted, and the claim that if the ‘at least as good as’ relation holds between two worlds then it holds between qualitative duplicates of this world pair – then we must conclude that there is ubiquitous incomparability between infinite worlds. I show that this is true even if the populations of infinite worlds are disjoint or overlapping, and that we cannot use any qualitative properties of world pairs to rank these worlds. Finally, I argue that this incomparability result generates puzzles for both consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories of objective and subjective permissibility. (shrink)

This chapter considers potential applications of grounding to the formulation of physicalism. I begin with an overview of competing conceptions of the physical and of physicalism. I then consider whether grounding physicalism overcomes well-known and seemingly fatal problems with supervenience physicalism. I conclude that while grounding physicalism improves upon supervenience physicalism in certain respects, it arguably falls victim to some of the same difficulties.

Enactivism and ecological psychology converge on the relevance of the environment in understanding perception and action. On both views, perceiving organisms are not merely passive receivers of environmental stimuli, but rather form a dynamic relationship with their environments in such a way that shapes how they interact with the world. In this paper, I suggest that while enactivism and ecological psychology enjoy a shared specification of the environment as the cognitive domain, on both accounts, the structure of the environment, itself, (...) is unspecified beyond that of contingent relations with the species-typical sensorimotor capacities of perceiving organisms. This lack of specification creates a considerable gap in theory regarding the organization of organisms as coupled with their environments. I argue that this gap can be filled by drawing from resources in developmental systems theory, namely, specifying the environmental state-space as a developmental niche that shapes and is shaped by individual organisms over developmental and, on a population scale, evolutionary time. Defining the environment as an organism’s developmental niche makes it clearer how and why certain contingencies have arisen, in turn, strengthening a joint appeal to both enactivism and ecological psychology as theories asserting complementarity between organisms and their environments. (shrink)

This paper surveys some of the grounding literature searching for points of contact between theories of ground and science. I find that there are some places where a would-be naturalistic grounding theorist can draw inspiration. I synthesize a list of recommendations for how science may be put to use in theories of ground. I conclude that the prospects for naturalizing the metaphysics of ground are bright.

The word ‘naturalism’ has a bewildering array of uses in philosophy. Roughly speaking, it connotes pro-scientific attitudes and approaches. This article introduces the subject of naturalism by sketching a history of pro-scientific attitudes and approaches in philosophy, from their origins in the early modern period through to the present day. It then distinguishes a number of distinct families of naturalism: metaphysical, logico-linguistic, epistemological, and methodological. The resulting taxonomy encompasses a plurality of loosely related views rather than a number of variations (...) on a single clear and unified theme. (shrink)

This chapter considers the assumptions required to make scientisms of different forms genuinely threatening to philosophers, where a genuine threat would consist of a concrete risk to their statuses, the value of their teaching and research, their livelihoods, their preferred research methods, or the health of the discipline. I will find that strong and weak forms of scientism alike require substantive assumptions to make them threatening in those regards. In particular, they require sometimes heavy-handed circumscriptions of philosophy and science, as (...) well as their epistemic credentials and achievements, methods, and subject matters. They also require restrictive pronouncements upon the epistemic and non-epistemic goods that are valuable, worth promoting in academic contexts, and relevant to disciplinary health. My aim in this chapter will not to be defeat those assumptions but rather to make them explicit and to emphasize their frequent strength and contentiousness. (shrink)

Concerns over medical paternalism are especially salient when there exists a conflict of values between patient and clinician. This is particularly relevant for psychiatry, the field of medicine for which the phenomenon of conflicting values is most present and for which the specter of medical paternalism looms large. Few cases are as glaring as that of anorexia nervosa (AN), a disorder that is considered to be egosyntonic (meaning its symptoms are reflectively endorsed by the patient) and maintained by the presence (...) of pathological values. One might think, given this, that an approach to medicine that foregrounds the role of values in clinical encounters would be particularly well suited to address the problem of medical paternalism in treating AN. As it happens, this is precisely the goal of values-based medicine, an approach to medicine that prioritizes the integration of patients’ unique values into the aims of treatment and that has been touted as being particularly applicable to psychiatric conditions such as AN. Although this strategy may initially appear promising, in this paper I will argue that the directive to incorporate patient values (as dictated by values-based medicine) cannot do the work of mitigating medical paternalism in the treatment of egosyntonic disorders such as AN. Rather than chalking this up as a failure due to AN being a particularly challenging case, I will instead conclude that the failure of values-based medicine in this context cuts to the heart of the limitations of rectifying medical paternalism within psychiatry as it currently exists. (shrink)

This article offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of Eric Heinze’s book Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2016). Heinze’s project is to formulate and defend a more theoretically complex version of the idea (also defended by people like Ronald Dworkin and James Weinstein) that general legal prohibitions on hate speech in public discourse compromises the state’s democratic legitimacy. We offer a detailed synopsis of Heinze’s view, highlighting some of its distinctive qualities and strengths. We then develop a (...) critical response to this view with three main focal points: (1) the characterisation of democratic legitimacy as something distinct from (and whose demands aren’t identical with those of) legitimacy per se; (2) the claim that the requirements of democracy are hypothetical, rather than categorical, imperatives; and relatedly (3) the question of how we should reconcile the requirements of democratic legitimacy with the costs that may follow from prioritising democratic legitimacy. We argue that there are significant difficulties for Heinze’s account on all three fronts. (shrink)

Insufficient attention has been paid to the use of robots in classrooms. Robot “teachers” are being developed, but because Kline ignores such technological developments, it is not clear how they would fit within her framework. It is argued here that robots are not capable of teaching in any meaningful sense, and should be deployed only as educational tools.

Many have offered moral objections to video games, with various critics contending that they depict and promote morally dubious attitudes and behaviour. However, few have offered moral arguments in favour of video games. In this chapter, we develop one such positive moral argument. Specifically, we argue that video games offer one of the only morally acceptable methods for acquiring some ethical knowledge. Consequently, we have (defeasible) moral reasons for creating, distributing, and playing certain morally educating video games.

Some philosophers challenge the advisability of naturalizing social metaphysics by appeal to social science. They argue that social science fails to meet criteria for realist commitment, such as unity and novel predictive power, and that social science would therefore be a poor basis for naturalization. These skeptical challenges are rooted in traditions in the philosophy of science that have held the social sciences in poor esteem. Through a case study that highlights the ways in which archaeology is methodologically converging on (...) hard science, I show that the philosophical bias against social science is outmoded. I suggest that at least some of the methodological advances of archaeology and other social sciences are epistemologically significant and are relevant to the question of realism. However, I conclude with the thought that realist commitment need not be a precondition for naturalization. The paper therefore accomplishes two main things: 1) it allays objections to using social science to naturalize social metaphysics, and 2) it motivates a higher estimation of the epistemological credentials of social science as compared with more skeptical traditions. (shrink)

I defend a Deferred Ostension view of quotation, on which quotation-marks are the linguistic bearers of reference, functioning like a demonstrative; the quoted material merely plays the role of a demonstratum. On this view, the quoted material works like Nunberg’s indexes in his account of deferred ostensión in general. The referent is obtained through some contextually suggested relation; in the default case the relation will be … instantiates the linguistic type __, but there are other possibilities. In this way, the (...) deferred ostension view deals with a problem I pointed out for the identity proposal in my earlier work, that we do not merely refer with quotations to expression-types, but also to other entities related in some way to the relevant token we use: features exhibited by the token distinct from those constituting its linguistic type, features exhibited by other tokens of the same type but not by the one actually used (as when, by using a graphic token, we refer to its phonetic type), or even other related tokens (see the examples on p. 261 of García-Carpintero 1994). (shrink)

n this paper I take up these proposals, giving reasons to incorporate semantic features associated with proper names over and above their referent in any (genuine) semantic account of natural language. I also argue that my proposal is compatible with the main points made in Naming and Necessity, by contending that not Millianism but externalism was the claim most forcefully argued for in that impressive piece of work.

In this paper I take up (what I call) the pregnancy loss objection to defenses of abortion that deny fetal moral status. Though versions of this objection have been put forth by others—particularly Lindsey Porter’s in a 2015 paper—I argue that the existing versions of the objection are unsuccessful in various ways: failing to explain the ground of moral considerability that would apply to embryos/fetuses in very early pregnancy, lack of clarity about what it means to take grief after miscarriage (...) seriously, and implausible implications regarding pre-embryo and infertility cases. I go on to offer a more plausible version of the objection, which I apply only to mid-pregnancy and fetuses, by drawing on personal narratives of later pregnancy loss and abortion and emphasizing practices that indicate the relevant kind of mourning. I then take up the question of how experience of the sort I have in mind can function as evidence, by situating my version of the objection in a pragmatist ethical view. Finally I consider and respond to some worries about the very idea of taking experience of pregnancy loss to be evidence regarding fetal moral status. (shrink)

I discuss an aspect of the relation between accounts of de se thought and the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. I will argue that a deflationary account of the latter—the Simple Account, due to Evans —will not do; a more robust one based on an account of de se thoughts is required. I will then sketch such an alternative account, based on a more general view on singular thoughts, and show how it can deal with the problems I (...) raise for the Simple Account. (shrink)

Since the publication of Hartry Field’s influential paper “Tarski’s Theory of Truth” there has been an ongoing discussion about the philosophical import of Tarski’s definition. Most of the arguments have aimed to play down that import, starting with that of Field himself. He interpreted Tarski as trying to provide a physicalistic reduction of semantic concepts like truth, and concluded that Tarski had partially failed. Robert Stalnaker and Scott Soames claimed then that Field should have obtained a stronger conclusion, namely that (...) Tarski’s failure in his allegedly intended physicalistic reduction was total. From another front, Hilary Putnam argued for an even more sweeping thesis: “[a]s a philosophical account of truth, Tarski’s theory fails as badly as it is possible for an account to fail.” Scott Soames followed suit also on this count, endorsing Putnam’s argument in section iii of the aforementioned paper; and John Etchemendy used a very similar argument to contend that “a Tarskian definition of truth [...] cannot possibly illuminate the semantic properties of the object language.” The paper argues that these contentions are based on several misunderstandings about the nature of a definition like Tarski’s. Regarding the Putnam-Soames-Etchemendy argument, we must apply a distinction Frege found natural to draw—and is natural to draw anyway—between what he called “constructive” definitions, definitions properly so called, which are mere stipulations, and what he described as “analytic” definitions, definitions which aim to make explicit the meaning of a term already in use. Regarding the Field-Soames-Stalnaker criticism, the paper contends that the true aims of a Tarskian truth definition are perfectly well fulfilled without Field’s amendments. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to contribute to the larger project of assessing the relative merits of different theories of substance. An important preliminary step in this project is assessing the explanatory resources of one main theory of substance, the so-called bundle theory. This article works towards such an assessment. I identify and explain three distinct explanatory challenges an adequate bundle theory must meet. Each points to a putative explanatory gap, so I call them the Gap Challenges. I consider (...) three bundle-theoretic strategies for meeting these challenges. I argue that none of them goes very far. The upshot is that, absent other strategies for meeting the challenges, bundle theory involves a significant amount of stipulation. This black box makes bundle theory relatively weak with respect to its explanatory power—unless, of course, rival theories of substance are unable to do better. (shrink)

Trope theory is an increasingly prominent contender in contemporary debates about the existence and nature of properties. But it suffers from ambiguity concerning the nature of a trope. Disambiguation reveals two fundamentally different concepts of a trope: modifier tropes and module tropes. These types of tropes are unequally suited for metaphysical work. Modifier tropes have advantages concerning powers, relations, and fundamental determinables, whereas module tropes have advantages concerning perception, causation, character-grounding, and the ontology of substance. Thus, the choice between modifier (...) tropes and module tropes is significant and divides the advantages of trope theory simpliciter. In addition, each resulting trope theory is unstable: modifier trope theory threatens to collapse into realism and module trope theory threatens to collapse into austere nominalism. This invites reflection on the stability of trope theory in general. (shrink)

Organisms live not as discrete entities on which an independent environment acts, but as members of a reproductive lineage in an ongoing series of interactions between that lineage and a dynamic ecological niche. These interactions continuously shape both systems in a reciprocal manner, resulting in the emergence of reliably co-occurring configurations within and between both systems. The enactive approach to cognition describes this relationship as the structural coupling between an organism and its environment; similarly, Developmental Systems Theory emphasizes the reciprocal (...) nature of structurally coupled systems in its analysis of organisms as developmental processes embedded within a developmental system. Through an enactive-developmental systems framing, this paper identifies the organizational features of cognizing systems in order to motivate a picture of how organism and environment co-determine and co-construct one another. I argue that organisms can be characterized as self-organizing, operationally closed, plastic systems ecologically embedded within a developmental system. In virtue of this organizational makeup, organisms actively engage in the modulation and assessment of their coupling with their environment: cognitive strategies that entail contextualized responses to variations across the web of interactions that comprises the developmental system. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Peacocke (2001) continues an ongoing debate with McDowell and others, providing renewed arguments for the view that perceptual experiences and some other mental states have a particular kind of content, nonconceptual content. In this article I want to object to one of the arguments he provides. This is not because I side with McDowell in the ongoing debate about nonconceptual content; on the contrary, given the way I understand it, my views are closer to Peacocke’s, and (...) have been strongly influenced by him. It is just that I am not persuaded by the particular argument I will be questioning here. (shrink)

Recalling autobiographical memories with others can influence the quality of recall, but little is known about how features of the group influence memory outcomes. In two studies, we examined how the products and processes of autobiographical recall depend on individual vs. collaborative remembering and the relationship between group members. In both studies, dyads of strangers, friends, and siblings recalled autobiographical events individually (elicitation), then either collaboratively or individually (recall). Study 1 involved typing memory narratives; Study 2 involved recalling aloud. We (...) examined shifts in vividness, emotionality, and pronoun use within memory narratives produced by different relationship types. In Study 2, we also coded collaborative dyads’ “collaborative processes” or communication processes. In Study 1, all relationships showed decreased positive emotion and I-pronouns and increased negative emotion within collaboratively-produced memory narratives. In Study 2, all relationships showed increased vividness, reduced emotionality and positive and negative emotion, and increased I- and we-pronouns within collaborativelyproduced memory narratives. However, strangers used collaborative processes differently from friends and siblings. Some collaborative processes were associated with memory qualities. Across studies, collaboration influenced memory quality more than did relationship type, but relationship type influenced dyads’ recall dynamics. These findings indicate the complexity of social influences on memory. (shrink)

There is a largely unrecognized ambiguity concerning the nature of a trope. Disambiguation throws into relief two fundamentally different conceptions of a trope and provides two ways to understand and develop each metaphysical theory that put tropes to use. In this paper I consider the relative merits that result from differences concerning a trope’s ability to ground the character of ordinary objects. I argue that on each conception of a trope, there are unique implications and challenges concerning character-grounding.

In recent decades, several theories have claimed to explain the teleological causality of organisms as a function of self-organising and self-producing processes. The most widely cited theories of this sort are variations of autopoiesis, originally introduced by Maturana and Varela. More recent modifications of autopoietic theory have focused on system organisation, closure of constraints and autonomy to account for organism teleology. This article argues that the treatment of teleology in autopoiesis and other organisation theories is inconclusive for three reasons: First, (...) non-living self-organising processes like autocatalysis meet the defining features of autopoiesis without being teleological; second, organisational approaches, whether defined in terms of the closure of constraints, self-determination or autonomy, are unable to specify teleological normativity, that is, the individuation of an ultimate beneficiary; third, all self-organised systems produce local order by maximising the throughput of energy and/or material (obeying the maximum entropy production (MEP) principle) and thereby are specifically organised to undermine their own critical boundary conditions. Despite these inadequacies, an alternative approach called teleodynamics accounts for teleology. This theory shows how multiple self-organising processes can be collectively linked so that they counter each other’s MEP principle tendencies to become codependent. Teleodynamics embraces – not ignoring – the difficulties of self-organisation, but reinstates teleology as a radical phase transition distinguishing systems embodying an orientation towards their own beneficial ends from those that lack normative character. (shrink)

Descriptive semantic theories purport to characterize the meanings of the expressions of languages in whatever complexity they might have. Foundational semantics purports to identify the kind of considerations relevant to establish that a given descriptive semantics accurately characterizes the language used by a given individual or community. Foundational Semantics I presents three contrasting approaches to the foundational matters, and the main considerations relevant to appraise their merits. These approaches contend that we should look at the contents of speakers’ intuitions; at (...) the deep psychology of users and its evolutionary history, as revealed by our best empirical theories; or at the personal‐level rational psychology of those subjects. Foundational Semantics II examines a fourth view, according to which we should look instead at norms enforced among speakers. The two papers aim to determine in addition the extent to which the approaches are really rival, or rather complementary. (shrink)

I argue racial injustice undermines the reliability of news source reports in the information domain of racial injustice. I argue that this in turn undermines subjects’ doxastic justification in inferences they base on these news sources in the racial injustice information domain. I explain that racial injustice does this undermining through the effect of racial prejudice on news organizations’ members and the effect of society's racially unjust structure on non-dominant racial group-controlled news sources.

In this paper I explore Michael Loux’s important distinction between “tropes” and “tropers”. First, I argue that the distinction throws into relief an ambiguity and discrepancy in the literature, revealing two fundamentally different versions of trope theory. Second, I argue that the distinction brings into focus unique challenges facing each of the resulting trope theories, thus calling into question an alleged advantage of trope theory—that by uniquely occupying the middle ground between its rivals, trope theory is able to recover and (...) preserve the insights of these views. Ultimately, the distinction suggests that trope theory is a divided house. (shrink)

Call ‘a substance’ a person who is at home in a relatively stable and unified sense-making framework: a social structure that to some degree specifies which categories are important for interpreting reality, which goals are worth pursing, which character traits are admirable, etc. Call ‘an accident’ a person who is not at home in one such framework. It is tempting to think that being a substance is preferable, but I present some considerations for thinking otherwise. Mexican philosophers Emilio Uranga and (...) Jorge Portilla, I argue, present notions of accidentality as decolonial tools. Uranga’s account enables Mexicans to have positive valuation of their being independently of the approving gaze of the colonizers and their standards of value. Portilla’s thought distinguishes between pernicious accidentality resulting from the disintegration of sense-making frameworks and authentic accidentality as a condition for freedom, self-creation, and ultimately for individual and communal liberation. (shrink)

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political (...) agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)

Critical notice of Richard Gaskin's "The Unity of the Proposition" (OUP 2008).

There is a relationship between touch and language at the heart of which lies the philosophical problem of the secret. As Derrida points out, since Aristotle touch has been qualified as ἄδηλον: secret, nocturnal, barely apparent. After some brief etymological remarks, in this article, I explore the mystery that touch represents for language through Levinas’ concept of the secret, thematizing two levels: first, that of the contemporary critique of ocularcentrism, then the level of the tactile experiences that can hardly be (...) put into words. (shrink)

The truth of a statement depends on the world in two ways: what the statement says is true if the world is as the statement says it is; on the other hand, what the expressions in the statement mean depends on what the world is like (for instance, on what conventions are in place). Each of these two kinds of dependence of truth on the world corresponds to one of the dimensions on the two-dimensional semantic framework, developed in the 1970’ (...) in the work of Evans, Kaplan, Kripke and Stalnaker. The introduction provides a systematic overview of the framework, the ideas of its earlier originators, recent developments and criticism. Finally, it gives a brief overview over the contributions to the volume. (shrink)

The paper defends a version of Direct Reference for indexicals on which reference-fixing material (token-reflexive conditions) plays the role of an ancillary presupposition.

Singular terms used in fictions for fictional characters raise well-known philosophical issues, explored in depth in the literature. But philosophers typically assume that names already in use to refer to “moderatesized specimens of dry goods” cause no special problem when occurring in fictions, behaving there as they ordinarily do in straightforward assertions. In this paper I continue a debate with Stacie Friend, arguing against this for the exceptionalist view that names of real entities in fictional discourse don’t work there as (...) they do in simple-sentence assertions, but rather as fictional names do. (shrink)

In the course of his discussion of perception, Searle criticizes representative theories in general. In this paper I will argue that, even though his criticisms may be adequate regarding a certain form of these theories, perhaps the most frequently defended by philosophers of perception, a version I will outline here scapes to them. A second issue I raise concerns Searle’s claim that his theory of perception is a form of direct realism. I will raise difficulties for Searle’s attempt to maintain (...) at the same time a “token-reflexive” theory of perception and the thesis of direct realism. (shrink)

The general concept of a trope – that of a non-shareable character-grounder – admits of a distinction between modifier tropes and module tropes. Roughly, a module trope is self-exemplifying whereas a modifier trope is not. This distinction has wide-ranging implications. Modifier tropes are uniquely eligible to be powers and fundamental determinables, whereas module tropes are uniquely eligible to play a direct role in perception and causation. Moreover, each type of trope theory faces unique challenges concerning character- grounding. Modifier trope theory (...) faces challenges concerning the inscrutability of predication and the incompatibility with bundle theory, whereas module trope theory faces challenges concerning character overdetermination and a collapse into austere nominalism. These differences indicate that the modifier/module distinction divides the advantages of general trope theory and thus presents the trope theorist with a pivotal choice. (shrink)

This paper discusses the proper taxonomy of the semantics-pragmatics divide. Debates about taxonomy are not always pointless. In interesting cases taxonomic proposals involve theoretical assumptions about the studied field, which might be judged correct or incorrect. Here I want to contrast an approach to the semantics-pragmatics dichotomy, motivated by a broadly Gricean perspective I take to be correct, with a contemporary version of an opposing “Wittgensteinian” view. I will focus mostly on a well-known example: the treatment of referential uses of (...) descriptions and descriptive uses of indexicals. The paper is structured as follows. I will start by characterizing in the first section the version of the Gricean approach I favor; in the second section, I will illustrate the differences between the two views by focussing on the example, and in the third section I will object to what I take to be the main Wittgensteinian consideration. (shrink)

Several philosophers advance substantive theories of propositions, to deal with several issues they raise in connection with a concern with a long pedigree in philosophy, the problem of the unity of propositions. The qualification ‘substantive’ is meant to contrast with ‘minimal’ or ‘deflationary’ – roughly, views that reject that propositions have a hidden nature, worth investigating. Substantive views appear to create spurious problems by characterizing propositions in ways that make them unfit to perform their theoretical jobs. I will present in (...) this light some critical points against Hanks’ (2015, 2019) act-theoretic view, and Recanati’s (2019) recent elaboration of Hanks’ notion of cancellation. Both Hanks and Recanati, I’ll argue, rely on problematic conceptions of fiction and pretense. (shrink)

In recent work, Williamson has defended a suggestive account of assertion. Williamson claims that the following norm or rule (the knowledge rule) is constitutive of assertion, and individuates it: (KR) One must ((assert p) only if one knows p) Williamson is not directly concerned with the semantics of assertion-markers, although he assumes that his view has implications for such an undertaking; he says: “in natural languages, the default use of declarative sentences is to make assertions” (op. cit., 258). In this (...) paper I will explore Williamson’s view from this perspective, i.e., in the light of issues regarding the semantics of assertion-markers. I will end up propounding a slightly different account, on which, rather than KR, what is constitutive and individuating of assertion is an audience-involving transmission of knowledge rule: (TKR) One must ((assert p) only if one’s audience comes thereby to be in a position to know p) I will argue that TKR, of which KR is an illocutionary consequence (but not the other way around), has all the virtues that Williamson claims for his account and no new defect. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Künne’s Modest Theory of truth, and develop a variation on a worry that Field expresses with respect to Horwich’s related view. The worry is not that deflationary accounts are false, but rather that, because they take propositions as truth-bearers, they are not philosophically interesting. Compatibly with the intuitions of ordinary speakers, we can understand proposition so that the proposals do account for a property that such truth-bearers have. Nevertheless, we saliently apply the truth-concept also to (...) entities such as utterances or assertions , and the de flationary accounts do not provide a similarly deflationary account for those applications. In fact, there are good reasons to suspect that no such account would be forthcoming; we need something more substantive or in flationary there. (shrink)

This paper delves into the character concept as applied to reproduction. Our argument is that the prevailing functional-adaptationist perspective falls short in explaining the evolution of reproductive traits, and we propose an alternative organismal-relational approach that incorporates the developmental and interactive aspects of reproduction. To begin, we define the functional individuation of reproductive traits as evolutionary strategies aimed at enhancing fitness, and we demonstrate how this perspective influences the classification of reproductive characters and modes, the comprehension of shared traits as (...) resulting from conflicts of evolutionary interest between individuals, and the explanation of reproductive diversity. After outlining the shortcomings of this framework, we introduce an organismal-relational approach grounded in evolutionary developmental studies of reproduction. This view provides a revised classification for reproductive characters and modes and offers a new understanding of interorganismal traits that takes into account their inherently relational nature. Lastly, we present the research agenda that emerges from this approach, which addresses the core explanatory gaps left by the adaptationist perspective, including the explanation of reproductive homologies and homoplasies, the developmental constraints associated with the evolution of reproductive modes, and the evolvability of reproductive characters. (shrink)

This paper defends a version of Davidson’s demonstrative theory of quotation and against against the Fregean identity theory (IT henceforth) as articulated and defended by Corey Washington (1992). On the Fregean view, when an expression is referred to by means of quotation the quoted material itself is a linguistic referring expression. Quotation-marks are not needed; when they are used, they serve to make clearer the shift in syntactic and semantic properties effected on the quoted material by its occupying that linguistic (...) context: whatever its usual syntactic function, the quoted material functions as a singular term; whatever its usual semantic function, in that linguistic environment the quoted material refers to itself. On DT, in contrast, quotation-marks themselves are the linguistic bearers of reference, functioning like a demonstrative; the quoted material merely plays the role of a demonstratum. In the version I argue for the referent is obtained through some contextually suggested relation; in the default case the relation will be: … instantiates the linguistic type __, but there are other possibilities. In this way, the view can deal with the fact that we do not merely refer with quotations to expression-types, but also to other entities related in some way to the relevant token we use: features exhibited by the token distinct from those constituting its linguistic type, features exhibited by other tokens of the same type but not by the one actually used (as when, by using a graphic token, we refer to its phonetic type), or even other related tokens. (shrink)