The fundamental problem for theoretical aesthetics is its inability to account for art’s meaning-value (Trimarchi, 2022). As previously argued, Art’s higher meaning is only found emerging from the artwork’s tacit dimensions, where empirical-historical intentionality is almost completely inconsequential (Trimarchi, 2024b). The latter’s interpretable ‘phenomenology of sequence’ produces a false theorising tendency, disconnecting art from the history of ideas and severing aesthetics from ethics and logic. Art appears ‘infinitely interpretable’, hence entirely subjective. Adapting Arnold’s (2011) actantial processual approach, I show (...) how Peircian semiotics, via ‘real Secondness’, uncovers art’s higher meaning. Peirce’s ‘diagrammatic thinking’ exposes art’s unique role of ‘objectifying’ the Person (in any subject, via appropriate propositions), without de-valuing this bearer of moral values. His ‘semiotic realism’ helps unveil Scheler’s anthropological (also termed ‘ethical’) phenomenology emerging from Merleau-Ponty’s ‘obscure zone’, to discern poetic from other speculation. Art’s ‘subject-objectivation’ (or, ethical intentionality) is thus able to be mapped phenomenologically to reveal any artwork’s meaning-value orientation. This paper combines Peirce’s ‘phenomenology of reason’ with Scheler’s hierarchy of values and Schelling’s ‘mythological categories’ (Trimarchi 2024b) to suggest a methodology for moving beyond neo-Kantian theoretical aesthetics (and analytical philosophy’s grip on the anti-art of ‘modernity’). That is, moving from the realm of perception to knowing, reviving art’s ontological connection to normative aesthetics. In conclusion, Peirce’s ‘science of ideals’ is thus revealed as Complexity Science, which – via his ‘suspended second’ (or, Ricoeur’s ‘second ontology’) - vindicates Schelling’s claim for how ‘aesthetics becomes objective’ (Trimarchi, 2024a). (shrink)

This paper sets out the felicity conditions for metalinguistic proposals, a type of directive illocutionary act. It discusses the relevance of metalinguistic proposals and other metalinguistic directives for understanding both small- and large-scale linguistic engineering projects, essentially contested concepts, metalinguistic provocations, and the methodology of ordinary language philosophy. Metalinguistic proposals are compared with other types of linguistic interventions, including metalinguistic negotiation, conceptual engineering, lexical warfare, and ameliorative projects.

Stanley Cavell’s account of aesthetic judgment has two components. The first is a feeling: the judge has to see, hear, ‘dig’ something in the object being judged, there has to be an ‘emotion’ that the judge feels and expresses. The second is the ‘discipline of accounting for [the judgment]’, a readiness to argue for one’s aesthetic judgment in the face of disagreement. The discipline of accounting for one’s aesthetic judgments involves what Nick Riggle has called a norm of convergence: the (...) judge aims to get one’s audience to taste see or hear what the judge tastes or sees or hears in the object being judged. Because of the unmistakable difficulty in reaching agreement in aesthetic judgment, Riggle has denied that aesthetic judgment requires a convergence norm and has proposed instead that it requires ‘a kind of harmony of individuality’ (which Riggle calls ‘vibing’). We argue that Cavell offers a version of the convergence norm that is distinct from those that Riggle criticizes, namely Kant’s demand for agreement and Andy Egan’s presupposition of similarity in dispositions in ‘non-defective’ aesthetic conversations. Cavell’s version of the convergence norm is ‘the hope of agreement’. One can hope that one’s audience will agree with one’s aesthetic judgments even when one isn’t in a position to demand agreement or to presuppose similarity in the dispositions that would make agreement more likely. Cavell’s distinct convergence norm avoids Riggle’s criticisms and contributes to a richer account of what’s going on when we disagree about aesthetic matters. (shrink)

We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in (...) their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin’s phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

This paper defends a challenge, inspired by arguments drawn from contemporary ordinary language philosophy and grounded in experimental data, to certain forms of standard philosophical practice. The challenge is inspired by contemporary philosophers who describe themselves as practicing “ordinary language philosophy”. Contemporary ordinary language philosophy can be divided into constructive and critical approaches. The critical approach to contemporary ordinary language philosophy has been forcefully developed by Avner Baz, who attempts to show that a substantial chunk of contemporary philosophy is fundamentally (...) misguided. I describe Baz’s project and argue that while there is reason to be skeptical of its radical conclusion, it conveys an important truth about discontinuities between ordinary uses of philosophically significant expressions (“know”, e.g.) and their use in philosophical thought experiments. I discuss some evidence from experimental psychology and behavioral economics indicating that there is a risk of overlooking important aspects of meaning or misinterpreting experimental results by focusing only on abstract experimental scenarios, rather than employing more diverse and more ecologically valid experimental designs. I conclude by presenting a revised version of the critical argument from ordinary language. (shrink)

Are color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.) relative adjectives or absolute adjectives? Existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives attempt to answer that question using informal ("armchair") judgments. The informal judgments of theorists conflict: it has been proposed that color adjectives are absolute with standards anchored at the minimum degree on the scale, that they are absolute but have near-midpoint standards, and that they are relative. In this paper we report two experiments, one based on entailment patterns and one based (...) on presupposition accommodation, that investigate the meaning of scalar adjectives. We find evidence confirming the existence of subgroups of the population who operate with different standards for color adjectives. The evidence of interpersonal variation in where standards are located on the relevant scale and how those standards can be adjusted indicates that the existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives are at best only partially correct. We also find evidence that paradigmatic relative adjectives ("tall", "wide") behave in ways that are not predicted by the standard theory of scalar adjectives. We discuss several different possible explanations for this unexpected behavior. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our findings for philosophical debates about the nature and extent of semantically encoded context sensitivity in which color adjectives have played a key role. (shrink)

Fred Polak’s futurology takes up where F. W. Schelling’s claims about the ‘modern mythology’ leaves off. Linking these, I argue Art and humanity’s joint meaning crisis originates in ‘symbolic idealism’, de-futurising both and crippling humanity’s attempts to develop a proper internal ‘narrative order of goods’ needed for our survival. Polak’s tracing of how various forms of Expressionism emerged from Impressionism in later modernism, transforming our images of reality and the future, vindicates Schelling’s earlier claims that our symbolic mode of ‘worlding’ (...) creates a materially positivistic idea of progress. And our modern repurposing of art has produced what Polak calls a disorienting ‘false and deluded realism’ partly responsible for the counter-utopian, post-humanist tendencies prevalent today in both the East and West. (shrink)

Following C. S. Peirce’s claim that aesthetics precedes ethics and logic, I argue for reconceiving aesthetics as a normative science. The deteriorated relations between these links in the ‘modern mythology’ is associated with art’s decline and apparent indistinguishability from the ‘general aesthetic’ (aided by ‘aesthetics as theory’). ‘Naturalizing’ art, according to F. W. Schelling’s system, is proposed to ameliorate this. Bringing together Peircian semiotics with Schelling’s ‘process metaphysics’ suggests how to restore the historicized split between Art ‘as principle’ and the (...) Person (two ‘perfect signs’) by attending to the ‘ethical phenomenology’ of artworks. An argument is then made for how modern ethics and ‘morals’ may be reconnected. (shrink)

This paper excavates a debate concerning the claims of ordinary language philosophers that took place during the middle of the last century. The debate centers on the status of statements about ‘what we say’. On one side of the debate, critics of ordinary language philosophy argued that statements about ‘what we say’ should be evaluated as empirical observations about how people do in fact speak, on a par with claims made in the language sciences. By that standard, ordinary language philosophers (...) were not entitled to the claims that they made about what we would say about various topics. On the other side of the debate, defenders of the methods of ordinary language philosophy sought to explain how philosophers can be entitled to statements about what we would say without engaging in extensive observations of how people do in fact use language. In this paper, I defend the idea that entitlement to claims about what we say can be had in a way that doesn’t require empirical observation, and I argue that ordinary language philosophers are engaged in a different project than linguists or empirically minded philosophers of language, which is subject to different conditions of success. (shrink)

J.L. Austin is regarded as having an especially acute ear for fine distinctions of meaning overlooked by other philosophers. Austin employs an informal experimental approach to gathering evidence in support of these fine distinctions in meaning, an approach that has become a standard technique for investigating meaning in both philosophy and linguistics. In this paper, we subject Austin's methods to formal experimental investigation. His methods produce mixed results: We find support for his most famous distinction, drawn on the basis of (...) his `donkey stories', that `mistake' and `accident' apply to different cases, but not for some of his other attempts to distinguish the meaning of philosophically significant terms (such as `intentionally' and `deliberately'). We critically examine the methodology of informal experiments employed in ordinary language philosophy and much of contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics, and discuss the role that experimenter bias can play in influencing judgments about informal and formal linguistic experiments. (shrink)

When experimental participants are given the chance to reflect and revise their initial judgments in a dynamic conversational context, do their responses to philosophical scenarios differ from responses to those same scenarios presented in a traditional static survey? In three experiments comparing responses given in conversational contexts with responses to traditional static surveys, we find no consistent evidence that responses differ in these different formats. This aligns with recent findings that various manipulations of reflectiveness have no effect on participants’ judgments (...) about philosophical scenarios. Although we did not find a consistent quantitative effect of format (conversation vs. static survey), conversational experiments still provide qualitative insights into debates about how participants are understanding (or misunderstanding) the scenarios they read in experimental studies, whether they are replacing difficult questions with questions that are more easily answered, and how participants are imagining the scenarios they read in ways that differ from what is explicitly stated by experimenters. We argue that conversational experiments—"Socratic questionnaires"—help show what is going on “under the hood” of traditional survey designs in the experimental investigation of philosophical questions. (shrink)

I describe a new, comparative, version of the argument from interpersonal variation to subjectivism about color. The comparative version undermines a recent objectivist response to standard versions of that argument (Gómez-Torrente 2014).

Keith DeRose has argued that context shifting experiments should be designed in a specific way in order to accommodate what he calls a ‘truth/falsity asymmetry’. I explain and critique DeRose's reasons for proposing this modification to contextualist methodology, drawing on recent experimental studies of DeRose's bank cases as well as experimental findings about the verification of affirmative and negative statements. While DeRose's arguments for his particular modification to contextualist methodology fail, the lesson of his proposal is that there is good (...) reason to pay close attention to several subtle aspects of the design of context shifting experiments. (shrink)

Schelling’s Principle of Art returns us to an ancient epic sensibility, laying the foundations for reversing the unrealistic ‘modern mythology’ arguably at the core of humanity’s ecological/existential crisis. This contribution examines how, by detailing his systematic approach to constructing art ‘in the particular’ (art-forms/works). ‘Particularity’ is subject only to the reason inherent in the potences (or consequences) of the affirmation of the whole unity (Principle). Hence Schelling’s ‘affirming principles’ determine boundary conditions for his ‘mythological categories’, revealing why their generalities inform (...) a ‘scientific sequence’ for explaining the features of the Formative and Verbal arts (ie., all artforms, ‘for all time’). Examining specific examples shows how Schelling resolves key difficulties (appearance/reality, form/non-form, intentionality, and purpose) for assessing art’s higher meaning-value directionality; why phenomenology is key to understanding it; and how we arrived at the problematic modern ‘epic’ reversal of ancient universalising focusing our attention on ‘efficient’ over ‘final’ causes in art-making/admiring. Explaining practical application of the Principle-in-action expands on why Schelling’s ‘dialectical aesthetics’ presents a hitherto unrecognised radical advance on Kant’s. My conclusion summarises what shifts in attendance to the art object Schelling’s system demands, and why his Philosophy of Art offers a suitable framework for collectively re-worlding the world. (shrink)

Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like 'racist', 'sexist', and 'homophobic' are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation, as well as responses to it, are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how 'racist' and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary language. Once we examine large linguistic corpora to see (...) how these expressions are actually used, we find that English speakers have a rich linguistic repertoire for qualifying the degree to which and dimensions along which something is racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. These facts about ordinary usage undermine the charge of conceptual inflation. Without awareness of facts about ordinary usage, theorists risk making linguistic prescriptions that are unnecessary or counterproductive. (shrink)

Alice Crary has recently developed a radical reading of J. L. Austin's philosophy of language. The central contention of Crary's reading is that Austin gives convincing reasons to reject the idea that sentences have context-invariant literal meaning. While I am in sympathy with Crary about the continuing importance of Austin's work, and I think Crary's reading is deep and interesting, I do not think literal sentence meaning is one of Austin's targets, and the arguments that Crary attributes to Austin or (...) finds Austinian in spirit do not provide convincing reasons to reject literal sentence meaning. In this paper, I challenge Crary's reading of Austin and defend the idea of literal sentence meaning. (shrink)

I argue that a certain type of naturalist should not accept a prominent version of the no-miracles argument (NMA). First, scientists (usually) do not accept explanations whose explanans-statements neither generate novel predictions nor unify apparently disparate established claims. Second, scientific realism (as it appears in the NMA) is an explanans that makes no new predictions and fails to unify disparate established claims. Third, many proponents of the NMA explicitly adopt a naturalism that forbids philosophy of science from using any methods (...) not employed by science itself. Therefore, such naturalistic philosophers of science should not accept the version of scientific realism that appears in the NMA. (shrink)

Since anonymous agents can spread misinformation with impunity, many people advocate for greater accountability for internet speech. This paper provides a veritistic argument that accountability mechanisms can cause significant epistemic problems for internet encyclopedias and social media communities. I show that accountability mechanisms can undermine both the dissemination of true beliefs and the detection of error. Drawing on social psychology and behavioral economics, I suggest alternative mechanisms for increasing the trustworthiness of internet communication.

The Pessimistic Induction over the history of science argues that because most past theories considered empirically successful in their time turn out to be not even approximately true, most present ones probably aren’t approximately true either. But why did past scientists accept those incorrect theories? Kyle Stanford’s ‘Problem of Unconceived Alternatives’ is one answer to that question: scientists are bad at exhausting the space of plausible hypotheses to explain the evidence available to them. Here, I offer another answer, which I (...) call the ‘Problem of Misleading Evidence.’ I argue that this proposal is, in important respects, superior to Stanford’s. (shrink)

Imagine that you and a duplicate of yourself are lying unconscious, next to each other, about to undergo a complete step-by-step exchange of bits of your bodies. It certainly seems that at no stage in this exchange of bits will you have thereby switched places with your duplicate. Yet it also seems that the end-result, with all the bits exchanged, will be essentially that of the two of you having switched places. Where will you awaken? I claim that one and (...) the same person possesses both bodies, occupies both places and will experience both awakenings, just as a person whose brain has been bisected must at once experience both of the unconnected fields of awareness, even though each of these will falsely appear to him as the entirety of his experience. I also claim that the more usual apparent boundaries of persons are as illusory as those in brain bisection; personal identity remains unchanged through any variation or multiplication of body or mind. In all conscious life there is only one person - I - whose existence depends merely on the presence of a quality that is inherent in all experience - its quality of being mine, the simple immediacy of it for whatever is having experience. One powerful argument for this is statistical: on the ordinary view of personhood it is an incredible coincidence for you (though not for others) that out of 200,000,000 sperm cells the very one required on each occasion for your future existence was first to the egg in each of the begettings of yourself and all your ancestors. The only view that does not make your existence incredible, and that is not therefore (from your perspective) an incredible view, is that any conscious being would necessarily have been you anyway. It is a consequence that self-interest should extend to all conscious organisms. (shrink)

Some philosophical theories of the nature of color aim to respect a "common sense" conception of color: aligning with the common sense conception is supposed to speak in favor of a theory and conflicting with it is supposed to speak against a theory. In this paper, we argue that the idea of a "common sense" conception of color that philosophers of color have relied upon is overly simplistic. By drawing on experimental and historical evidence, we show how conceptions of color (...) vary along several dimensions and how even supposedly "core" components of the contemporary "common sense" conception of color are less stable than they have been thought to be. (shrink)

Scientific anti-realists who appeal to the pessimistic induction (PI) claim that the theoretical terms of past scientific theories often fail to refer to anything. But on standard views in philosophy of language, such reference failures prima facie lead to certain sentences being neither true nor false. Thus, if these standard views are correct, then the conclusion of the PI should be that significant chunks of current theories are truth-valueless. But that is semantic anti-realism about scientific discourse—a position most philosophers of (...) science, anti-realists included, consider anathema today. Therefore, proponents of the PI confront a dilemma: either accept semantic anti-realism or reject common semantic views. I examine strategies (with particular emphasis on supervaluations) for the PI proponent to either lessen the sting of this argument, or learn to live with it. 1 Introduction2 Designation Failure 2.1 Designation failure leads to truth-valueless sentences2.1.1 Direct reference theory2.1.2 Fregeanism2.1.3 Accounts of reference-fixing: why ‘phlogiston’ fails to designate 2.2 Objection: sentences exhibiting designation failure are false not truth-valueless 2.3 Avoiding truth-valuelessness via controversial semantic positions3 What to do? Closing the Gaps4 Conclusion. (shrink)

Suppose one believes that the historical record of discarded scientific theories provides good evidence against scientific realism. Should one adopt Kyle Stanford’s specific version of this view, based on the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives? I present reasons for answering this question in the negative. In particular, Stanford’s challenge cannot use many of the prima facie strongest pieces of historical evidence against realism, namely: superseded theories whose successors were explicitly conceived, and superseded theories that were not the result of elimination-of-alternatives inferences. (...) Attempts to accommodate and within Stanford’s framework are incompatible with other commitments Stanford holds, such as anti-realism being piecemeal instead of global. As separate lines of criticism, I argue that there are problems with Stanford’s claim that the PUA is the most important challenge to realism, and with his view of instrumentalist theory endorsement. (shrink)

Recent scholarship indicates that Quine’s “Truth by Convention” does not present the radical critiques of analytic truth found fifteen years later in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” This prompts a historical question: what caused Quine’s radicalization? I argue that two crucial components of Quine’s development can be traced to the academic year 1940–1941, when he, Russell, Carnap, Tarski, Hempel, and Goodman were all at Harvard together. First, during those meetings, Quine recognizes that Carnap has abandoned the extensional, syntactic approach to philosophical (...) analysis, an approach espoused in Carnap’s 1934 Logical Syntax of Language, and which Quine endorsed his entire career. Second, Tarski presents Quine with a philosophically well-motivated reason to think that an apparently analytic discipline, arithmetic, could be synthetic; this reflects one of the central assertions found in “Two Dogmas” but not in “Truth by Convention.” I use this account of Quine’s development to resolve a dispute between Creath and Mancosu concerning the timeline for Quine’s evolving critiques of analyticity. (shrink)

Odd and memorable examples are a distinctive feature of Charles Travis's work: cases involving squash balls, soot-covered kettles, walls that emit poison gas, faces turning puce, ties made of freshly cooked linguine, and people grunting when punched in the solar plexus all figure in his arguments. One of Travis's examples, involving a pair of situations in which the leaves of a Japanese maple tree are painted green, has even spawned its own literature consisting of attempts to explain the context sensitivity (...) of color adjectives ("green", e.g.). For Travis, these examples play a central role in his arguments for occasion-sensitivity, which he takes to be a pervasive feature of how we understand natural language. But how, exactly, do these examples work? My aims in this paper are to put Travis’s examples under the microscope, using recent experimental studies of Travis-style cases to raise worries about aspects of the way Travis's cases are informally presented, but then show how his examples can be redesigned to respond to these doubts. (shrink)

The underdetermination of theory by data obtains when, inescapably, evidence is insufficient to allow scientists to decide responsibly between rival theories. One response to would-be underdetermination is to deny that the rival theories are distinct theories at all, insisting instead that they are just different formulations of the same underlying theory; we call this the identical rivals response. An argument adapted from John Norton suggests that the response is presumptively always appropriate, while another from Larry Laudan and Jarrett Leplin suggests (...) that the response is never appropriate. Arguments from Einstein for the special and general theories of relativity may fruitfully be seen as instances of the identical rivals response; since Einstein’s arguments are generally accepted, the response is at least sometimes appropriate. But when is it appropriate? We attempt to steer a middle course between Norton’s view and that of Laudan and Leplin: the identical rivals response is appropriate when there is good reason for adopting a parsimonious ontology. Although in simple cases the identical rivals response need not involve any ontological difference between the theories, in actual scientific cases it typically requires treating apparent posits of the various theories as mere verbal ornaments or computational conveniences. Since these would-be posits are not now detectable, there is no perfectly reliable way to decide whether we should eliminate them or not. As such, there is no rule for deciding whether the identical rivals response is appropriate or not. Nevertheless, there are considerations that suggest for and against the response; we conclude by suggesting two of them. (shrink)

Most people will agree that if my brain were made to have within it precisely the same pattern of activity that is in it now but through artificial means, as in its being fed all its stimulation through electrodes as it sits in a vat, an experience would result for me that would be subjectively indistinguishable from that I am now having. In ‘The Story of a Brain’ I ask whether the same subjective experience would be maintained in variations like (...) these: The hemispheres are in different vats but interacting with each other through radio transmission. Smaller chunks - and eventually the individual neurons - are interacting in this way. The hemispheres or the smaller chunks undergo internally the same pattern of activity but without interacting with each other. (shrink)

An epistemology of art has seemed problematic mainly because of arguments claiming that an essential element of a theory of knowledge, truth, has no place in aesthetic contexts. For, if it is objectively true that something is beautiful, it seems to follow that the predicate “is beautiful” expresses a property – a view asserted by Plato but denied by Hume and Kant. But then, if the belief that something is beautiful is not objectively true, we cannot be said to know (...) that something is beautiful and the path to an epistemology of art is effectively blocked. The article places the existence aesthetic properties in the proper context; presents a logically correct argument for the existence of such properties; identifies strategies for responding to this argument; explains why objections by Hume, Kant, and several other philosophers fail; and sketches a realization account of beauty influenced by Hogarth. (shrink)

The problem with how we mythologise reality is arguably at the core of humanity’s ecological/existential crisis. While others have pointed to this, F. W. Schelling produced a philosophy of art which both confirms it and lays the foundations for how it can be addressed. This involves reversing the polarities of the ‘modern mythology’, related directly to Art-and-Humanity’s joint meaning crisis which Schelling claimed originates in our alienation from Nature and the rise of ‘revealed religion’. Despite his resurgence (inspiring Complexity Science), (...) the relevance of Schelling’s aesthetics to resolving humanity’s long-standing ethical problems has been neglected. In this paper, I begin by framing Schelling’s view on religion, contextualising his ontological, cosmological approach to art. I then argue why his ‘dialectical aesthetics’, grounded in ‘process metaphysics’, presents a radical advance on Kant’s and Hegel’s ‘reflective’ standpoint featured in our dominant theoretical aesthetic paradigm (causing art’s sharpest decline via the evolving ‘modern’ suppression of metaphoric thinking by ‘symbolic idealism’, at the heart of our ‘worlding’ problems). Then, showing how Schelling’s Principle of Art leads us archetypally back to the normative sciences, I argue redirecting the self-destructive modern mythology means reorienting ‘final cause’ in our narratology. And why this firstly requires distinguishing proper metaphor from the symbolic constructions common in ‘conceptual art’. (In a subsequent paper, Schelling’s Art ‘in the Particular’ will be revealed to offer the practical application of his Principle to any artforms/works ‘for all time’ in praxis, advancing my argument here for why his system offers a suitable framework for collectively re-worlding the world). (shrink)

In the progress of globalisation, the human being is exposed to effects of cultural dominance. For the individual, this exposure can be the stronger, the more autonomous his or her culture of origin used to be before the confrontation. Global consent with regard to behaviour patterns and cogni¬tive styles leads to the obliteration of traditional knowledge and behaviour upon which identity has been defined. The loss of identity in favour of belonging to the global society brings about a number of (...) problems, which can be demonstrated in functional models. These models, in turn, may sup¬port the planning of interventional strategies and rescue work. (shrink)

There is a standard story told about the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy: it was a widespread, if not dominant, approach to philosophy in Great Britain in the aftermath of World War II up until the early 1960s, but with the development of systematic approaches to the study of language—formal semantic theories on one hand and Gricean pragmatics on the other—ordinary language philosophy more or less disappeared. In this paper we present quantitative evidence to evaluate the standard story (...) of the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy, building on the topic model of over 30,000 philosophy articles in Weatherson (2022). Using a combination of qualitative judgment and a topic-model-based measurement of similarity between individual articles, we find evidence that supports the first part of the standard story, according to which ordinary language philosophy arises in the 1940s, peaks between the early 1950s and the late 1960s, and then rapidly declines. But we argue that there is also evidence of a "new wave" of ordinary language philosophy in the early 21st century that defies the second part of the standard story. (shrink)

Many have tackled the question ‘What (if anything) is analytic philosophy?’ I will not attempt to answer this vexed question. Rather, I address a smaller, more manageable set of interrelated questions: first, when and how did people begin using the label ‘analytic philosophy’? Second, how did those who used this label understand it? Third, why did many philosophers we today classify as analytic initially resist being grouped together under the single category of ‘analytic philosophy’? Finally, for the first generation who (...) described themselves as analytic philosophers, what was their intended contrast class? Relatedly, when did ‘continental philosophy’ become the standard opposition? Some evidence I present justifies received answers to these questions; other evidence supports surprising and unorthodox answers to these questions. (shrink)

Many commentators on Alfred Tarski have, following Hartry Field, claimed that Tarski's truth-definition was motivated by physicalism—the doctrine that all facts, including semantic facts, must be reducible to physical facts. I claim, instead, that Tarski did not aim to reduce semantic facts to physical ones. Thus, Field's criticism that Tarski's truth-definition fails to fulfill physicalist ambitions does not reveal Tarski to be inconsistent, since Tarski's goal is not to vindicate physicalism. I argue that Tarski's only published remarks that speak approvingly (...) of physicalism were written in unusual circumstances: Tarski was likely attempting to appease an audience of physicalists that he viewed as hostile to his ideas. In later sections I develop positive accounts of: (1) Tarski's reduction of semantic concepts; (2) Tarski's motivation to develop formal semantics in the particular way he does; and (3) the role physicalism plays in Tarski's thought. (shrink)

Ecology has become a popular conceptual model in numerous fields of inquiry and it seems especially appropriate for environmental philosophy. Apart from its literal employment in biology, ecology has served as a useful metaphor that captures the interdependence of factors in a field of research. At the same time as ecology is suggestive, it cannot be followed literally or blindly. This paper considers the appropriateness of the uses to which ecology has been put in some recent discussions of architectural and (...) environmental aesthetics, and develops a critique of the differing ecological aesthetics of Jusuck Koh and Xiangzhan Cheng. (shrink)

Confused terms appear to signify more than one entity. Carnap maintained that any putative name that is associated with more than one object in a relevant universe of discourse fails to be a genuine name. Although many philosophers have agreed with Carnap, they have not always agreed among themselves about the truth-values of atomic sentences containing such terms. Some hold that such atomic sentences are always false, and others claim they are always truth-valueless. Field maintained that confused terms can still (...) refer, albeit partially, and offered a supervaluational account of their semantic properties on which some atomic sentences with confused terms can be true. After outlining many of the most important theoretical considerations for and against various semantic theories for such terms, we report the results of a study designed to investigate which of these accounts best accords with the truth-value judgments of ordinary language users about sentences containing these terms. We found that naïve participants view confused names as capable of successfully referring to one or more objects. Thus, semantic theories that judge them to involve total reference failure do not comport well with patterns of ordinary usage. (shrink)

This is the second book by Baz that aims to show that a big chunk of contemporary philosophy is fundamentally misguided. His first book, When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (2012) adopted a therapeutic approach (in the Wittgensteinian style) to problems in contemporary epistemology, arguing that when properly thought through, the way philosophers talk about ‘knowing’ that something is the case ultimately does not make sense. Baz’s goal in his second book is less therapeutic and (...) more constructive: he aims to start a methodological revolution (in the Kuhnian sense)—to shake contemporary philosophers out of the unconscious habits of normal science and provoke them into making a radical change in the methods they use to do philosophy and the basic assumptions that motivate those methods. (shrink)

I critically examine Nietzsche’s argument in The Will to Power that all the detailed events of the world are repeating infinite times (on account of the merely finite possible arrangements of forces that constitute the world and the inevitability with which any arrangement of force must bring about its successors). Nietzsche celebrated this recurrence because of the power of belief in it to bring about a revaluation of values focused wholly on the value of one’s endlessly repeating life. Belief in (...) recurrence would bring joy to those who had achieved excellence in this life and crush those who had not. I point out, however, that this significance of recurrence must be spoiled by the consideration that within each of the long cycles of recurrence there would have to be, as well, countless variations of this life. And I consider the issue of personal identity within such recurrences. Is it the same person or merely resembling but distinct persons in the recurrences or the variations? If it is the same person in precise recurrences, should the subjectively identical experience be thought of as really additional for that person? (shrink)

The Aesthetic Field develops an account of aesthetic experience that distinguishes four mutually interacting factors: the creative factor represented primarily by the artist; the appreciative one by the viewer, listener, or reader; the objective factor by the art object, which is the focus of the experience; and the performative by the activator of the aesthetic occurrence. Each of these factors both affects all the others and is in turn influenced by them, so none can be adequately considered apart from them. (...) Thus aesthetic appreciation, for example, has creative, objective, and performative aspects. This situation of four factors, together with social, cultural, technological, and historical influences on them, is called the aesthetic field. Although the factors are theoretically distinguishable, they are experienced as a unity. It is important, therefore, not to confound the theoretical explanation of aesthetic experience with the experience, itself. The aesthetic field has important implications for understanding the various individual arts, new developments in the arts, and the critical appraisal of the arts. Moreover, the concept transforms traditional issues in aesthetics. (shrink)

Strawson's view on punishment has been either neglected or recoiled from in contemporary scholarship on ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (FR). Strawson's alleged retributivism has made his view suspect and troublesome. In this article, we first argue, against the mainstream, that the punishment passage is an indispensable part of the main argument in FR (section 1) and elucidate in what sense Strawson can be called ‘a retributivist’ (section 2). We then elaborate our own hypothesis of symbolic retribution to explain the continuum between (...) moral reactive attitudes and punishment that Strawson only adumbrates (section 3). After this justification of the punitive response to wrongdoing, we compare and contrast our specific kind of retributivist hypothesis with other positions in the so-called ‘new retributivism’ (section 4). Our hypothesis differs from other subvarieties of expressive retributivism in putting centre stage the idea of punishment as taking up a reverential stance towards the victim. (shrink)

Aesthetics is fundamentally a theory of sensible experience. Its scope has expanded greatly from an initial centering on the arts and scenic nature to the full range of appreciative experience. Expanding the range of aesthetics raises challenging questions about the experience of appreciation. Traditional accounts are inadequate in their attempt to identify and illuminate the perceptual experiences that these new applications evoke. Considering the range of environmental and everyday occasions aesthetically changes aesthetics into a descriptive and not necessarily celebratory study (...) of sensible experience, for it must now accommodate a complete range of negative as well as positive values. Th is paper develops an analysis of the multiple dimensions of environmental sensibility. (shrink)

This paper proposes a radical re-examination of the foundations of modern aesthetics. It urges that we replace the tradition of eighteenth century aesthetics, with its insistence on disinterestedness and the separateness of the aesthetic, and its problematic oppositions, such as the separation of sense from cognition. In their place it appeals to a more process-oriented, pluralistic account, one that takes note of varying cultural traditions in aesthetics, that recognizes the aesthetic as a complex of many forces and factors, and that (...) considers the aesthetic as part of a complexity of values, including moral, practical, social, and political ones. It urges, further, an aesthetic-based criticism, not only of the arts, but of culture and knowledge. Central to this account is the idea of aesthetic engagement, which not only recognizes and extends the many connections of and in aesthetic experience, but invites our total involvement as active participants. (shrink)

Definitions I presented in a previous article as part of a semantic approach in epistemology assumed that the concept of derivability from standard logic held across all mathematical and scientific disciplines. The present article argues that this assumption is not true for quantum mechanics (QM) by showing that concepts of validity applicable to proofs in mathematics and in classical mechanics are inapplicable to proofs in QM. Because semantic epistemology must include this important theory, revision is necessary. The one I propose (...) also extends semantic epistemology beyond the ‘hard’ sciences. The article ends by presenting and then refuting some responses QM theorists might make to my arguments. (shrink)

The idea of aesthetic disinterestedness has been a central concept in aesthetics since the late eighteenth century. This exchange offers a contemporary reconsideration of disinterestedness from different sides of the question.

This paper tries to answer the question why the epistemic value of so many social simulations is questionable. I consider the epistemic value of a social simulation as questionable if it contributes neither directly nor indirectly to the understanding of empirical reality. To examine this question, two classical social simulations are analyzed with respect to their possible epistemic justification: Schelling’s neighborhood segregation model and Axelrod’s reiterated Prisoner’s Dilemma simulations of the evolution of cooperation. It is argued that Schelling’s simulation is (...) useful because it can be related to empirical reality, while Axelrod’s simulations and those of his followers cannot and thus that their scientific value remains doubtful. I relate this findingto the background beliefs of modelers about the superiority of the modeling method as expressed in Joshua Epstein’s keynote address “Why model?”. (shrink)

By definition, pain is a sensory and emotional experience that is felt in a particular part of the body. The precise relationship between somatic events at the site where pain is experienced, and central processing giving rise to the mental experience of pain remains the subject of debate, but there is little disagreement in scholarly circles that both aspects of pain are critical to its experience. Recent experimental work, however, suggests a public view that is at odds with this conceptualisation. (...) By demonstrating that the public does not necessarily endorse central tenets of the “mental” view of pain (subjectivity, privacy, and incorrigibility), experimental philosophers have argued that the public holds a more “body-centric” view than most clinicians and scholars. Such a discrepancy would have important implications for how the public interacts with pain science and clinical care. In response, we tested the hypothesis that the public is capable of a more “mind-centric” view of pain. Using a series of vignettes, we demonstrate that in situations which highlight mental aspects of pain the public can, and does, recognize pain as a mental phenomenon. We also demonstrate that the public view is subject to context effects, by showing that the public’s view is modified when situations emphasizing mental and somatic aspects of pain are presented together. (shrink)

In a recent Philosophy of Science article Gerhard Schurz proposes meta-inductivistic prediction strategies as a new approach to Hume's. This comment examines the limitations of Schurz's approach. It can be proven that the meta-inductivist approach does not work any more if the meta-inductivists have to face an infinite number of alternative predictors. With his limitation it remains doubtful whether the meta-inductivist can provide a full solution to the problem of induction.

Employing computer simulations for the study of the evolution of altruism has been popular since Axelrod's book "The Evolution of Cooperation". But have the myriads of simulation studies that followed in Axelrod's footsteps really increased our knowledge about the evolution of altruism or cooperation? This book examines in detail the working mechanisms of simulation based evolutionary explanations of altruism. It shows that the "theoretical insights" that can be derived from simulation studies are often quite arbitrary and of little use for (...) the empirical research. In the final chapter of the book, therefore, a set of epistemological requirements for computer simulations is proposed and recommendations for the proper research design of simulation studies are made. (shrink)

Mobile phones are part of a major growth industry in so-called Third World countries. As in other places, the use of this technology changes communication behaviour. The influence of these changes on indigenous social structures was investigated with a mixed-type questionnaire that targeted parameters such as: in-group vs. out-group communication, involvement with dominant industrial culture and the use of financial resources. Data was collected from indigenous representatives at the United Nations, as well as in Africa from subjects of various cultural (...) backgrounds, and from a control group in Berlin. The results reflect widespread use of mobile phones among indigenous persons, having a segregating effect within the indigenous community, but also enhancing ingroup communication and especially the use of the indigenous language. Mobile phones also facilitate moves from village to town, with the opportunity of frequently communicating with other in-group members. (shrink)