23 found
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  1. Linguistic Mistakes.Indrek Reiland - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (5):2191-2206.
    Ever since the publication of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, there’s been a raging debate in philosophy of language over whether meaning and thought are, in some sense, normative. Most participants in the normativity wars seem to agree that some uses of meaningful expressions are semantically correct while disagreeing over whether this entails anything normative. But what is it to say that a use of an expression is semantically correct? On the so-called orthodox construal, it is to say (...)
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  2. Rules of Use.Indrek Reiland - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):566-583.
    In the middle of the 20th century, it was a common Wittgenstein-inspired idea in philosophy that for a linguistic expression to have a meaning is for it to be governed by a rule of use. In other words, it was widely believed that meanings are to be identified with use-conditions. However, as things stand, this idea is widely taken to be vague and mysterious, inconsistent with “truth-conditional semantics”, and subject to the Frege-Geach problem. In this paper I reinvigorate the ideas (...)
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  3. On Experiencing High-Level Properties.Indrek Reiland - 2014 - American Philosophical Quarterly 51 (3):177-187.
    Tim Bayne and Susanna Siegel have recently offered interesting arguments in favor of the view that we can experience high-level properties like being a pine tree or being a stethoscope (Bayne 2009, Siegel 2006, 2011). We argue first that Bayne’s simpler argument fails. However, our main aim in this paper is to show that Siegel’s more sophisticated argument for her version of the high-level view can also be resisted if one adopts a view that distinguishes between perceptual experiences and seemings.
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  4. Predication and the Frege–Geach problem.Indrek Reiland - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (1):141-159.
    Several philosophers have recently appealed to predication in developing their theories of cognitive representation and propositions. One central point of difference between them is whether they take predication to be forceful or neutral and whether they take the most basic cognitive representational act to be judging or entertaining. Both views are supported by powerful reasons and both face problems. Many think that predication must be forceful if it is to explain representation. However, the standard ways of implementing the idea give (...)
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  5. On experiencing moral properties.Indrek Reiland - 2021 - Synthese 198 (1):315-325.
    Do we perceptually experience moral properties like rightness and wrongness? For example, as in Gilbert Harman’s classic case, when we see a group of young hoodlums pour gasoline on a cat and ignite it, can we, in the same robust sense, see the action’s wrongness?. Many philosophers have recently discussed this question, argued for a positive answer and/or discussed its epistemological implications. This paper presents a new case for a negative answer by, first, getting much clearer on how such experience (...)
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  6. Experience, Seemings, and Evidence.Indrek Reiland - 2015 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (4):510-534.
    Many people have recently argued that we need to distinguish between experiences and seemings and that this has consequences for views about how perception provides evidence. In this article I spell out my take on these issues by doing three things. First, I distinguish between mere sensations like seeing pitch black all around you and perceptual experiences like seeing a red apple. Both have sensory phenomenology in presenting us with sensory qualities like colors, being analog in Dretske's sense, and being (...)
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  7. Constitutive Rules: Games, Language, and Assertion.Indrek Reiland - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (1):136-159.
    Many philosophers think that games like chess, languages like English, and speech acts like assertion are constituted by rules. Lots of others disagree. To argue over this productively, it would be first useful to know what it would be for these things to be rule-constituted. Searle famously claimed in Speech Acts that rules constitute things in the sense that they make possible the performance of actions related to those things (Searle 1969). On this view, rules constitute games, languages, and speech (...)
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  8. Meaning change.Indrek Reiland - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 65 (3):434-451.
    The linguistic meaning of a word in a language is what fully competent speakers of the language have a grasp of merely in virtue of their semantic competence. The meanings of words sometimes change over time. ‘Meat’ used to mean ‘solid food’, but now means ‘animal flesh eaten as food’. This type of meaning change comes with change of topic, what we are talking about. Many people interested in conceptual engineering have claimed that there is also meaning change where topic (...)
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  9. Reference, Predication, Judgment and their Relations.Indrek Reiland - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Over the course of the past ten-plus years, Peter Hanks and Scott Soames have developed detailed versions of Act-Based views of propositions which operate with the notions of reference to objects, indicating properties, predication, and judgment (or entertaining). In this paper I discuss certain foundational aspects of the Act-Based approach having to do with the relations between these notions. In particular, I argue for the following three points. First, that the approach needs both an atomistically understood thin notion of reference, (...)
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  10. Propositional Attitudes and Mental Acts.Indrek Reiland - 2012 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (3):239-245.
    Peter Hanks and Scott Soames have recently developed similar views of propositional attitudes on which they consist at least partly of being disposed to perform mental acts. Both think that to believe a proposition is at least partly to be disposed to perform the primitive propositional act: one the performance of which is part of the performance of any other propositional act. However, they differ over whether the primitive act is the forceless entertaining or the forceful judging. In this paper (...)
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  11. On Experiencing Meanings.Indrek Reiland - 2015 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 53 (4):481-492.
    Do we perceptually experience meanings? For example, when we hear an utterance of a sentence like ‘Bertrand is British’ do we hear its meaning in the sense of being auditorily aware of it? Several philosophers like Tim Bayne and Susanna Siegel have suggested that we do (Bayne 2009: 390, Siegel 2006: 490-491, 2011: 99-100). They argue roughly as follows: 1) experiencing speech/writing in a language you are incompetent in is phenomenally different from experiencing speech/writing you are competent in; 2) this (...)
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  12. Rule-Following I: The Basic Issues.Indrek Reiland - 2024 - Philosophy Compass 19 (1):e12900.
    ‘Rule-following’ is a name for a cluster of phenomena where we seem both guided and “normatively” constrained by something general in performing particular actions. Understanding the phenomenon is important because of its connection to meaning, representation, and content. This article gives an overview of the philosophical discussion of rule-following with emphasis on Kripke’s skeptical paradox and recent work on possible solutions. Part I of this two-part contribution is devoted to the basic issues from Wittgenstein to Kripke. Part II will be (...)
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  13. (1 other version)Predication and Two Concepts of Judgment.Indrek Reiland - 2019 - In Brian Ball & Christoph Schuringa (eds.), The Act and Object of Judgment: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Routledge. pp. 217-234.
    Recently, there’s been a lot of interest in a research program that tries to understand propositional representation in terms of the subject’s performance of sub-propositional mental acts like reference and predication (e. g. Burge 2010, Hanks 2015, Soames 2010, 2015). For example, on one version of the view, for a subject to predicate the property of being a composer of Arvo just is what it is to perform the to the basic propositional act of judging that Arvo is a composer (...)
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  14. Rule-Following II: Recent Work and New Puzzles.Indrek Reiland - 2024 - Philosophy Compass 19 (5):e12976.
    ‘Rule-following’ is a name for a cluster of phenomena where we seem both guided and “normatively” constrained by something general in performing particular actions. Understanding the phenomenon is important because of its connection to meaning, representation, and content. This article gives an overview of the philosophical discussion of rule-following with emphasis on Kripke’s skeptical paradox and recent work on possible solutions. Part I of this two-part contribution was devoted to the basic issues from Wittgenstein to Kripke. Part II is about (...)
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  15. Squid games and the lusory attitude.Indrek Reiland - 2022 - Analysis 82 (4):638-646.
    On Bernard Suits’s celebrated analysis, to play a game is to engage in a ‘voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’. Voluntariness is understood in terms of the players having the ‘lusory attitude’ of accepting the constitutive rules of the game just because they make possible playing it. In this paper I suggest that the players in Netflix’s hit show Squid Game play the ‘squid games’, but they do not do so voluntarily; they are forced to play. I argue that this (...)
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  16.  96
    Austin vs. Searle on Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts.Indrek Reiland - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The central pillar of Austin’s theory of speech acts is the three-way distinction between locutionary acts like saying, illocutionary acts like asserting, and perlocutionary acts like persuading (Austin 1962: VIII-IX). While the latter distinction has been widely accepted, the former distinction has been frequently rejected due to Searle’s objections, who argued that since Austin’s locutionary acts are supposed to be forceful in the sense contrasting with neutral expression of a content and all force is by Austin’s own definition illocutionary, the (...)
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  17. The Disunity of Perception: An Introduction.Indrek Reiland & Jack Lyons - 2015 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (4):443-445.
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  18. The Unity of Perceptual Content.Indrek Reiland - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (3):941-961.
    Representationalists hold that perceptual experience is a conscious representational state with content, something which is accurate or inaccurate in certain conditions. The most common version of Representationalism takes perceptual content to be singular in the object-place and otherwise consisting of attribution of properties (Singularism/Attributionism). Schellenberg has recently developed a version on which perceptual content is singular even in the property-place in containing a de re mode of presentation of a property-instance (Particularism). In this paper, I show that Particularism faces a (...)
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  19. "Saying 'Thank You!' and Expressing Gratitude: A Response to Schwartz".Indrek Reiland - manuscript
    This is a short response piece to Jeremy Schwartz's "Saying 'Thank You' and Meaning It", published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2020, 98, pp. 718-731. -/- Schwartz argues against the received view that 'Thank You! is for expressing gratitude, claiming instead that it is for expressing one's judgment that gratitude is appropriate or fitting. I argue against the judgment view while defending the received one. -/- I mainly consider the objection that the judgment view is implausible since it makes ‘Thank (...)
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  20. Gary Ostertag (Ed.), Meanings and Other Things: Themes from the Work of Stephen Schiffer. [REVIEW]Indrek Reiland - 2018 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 7.
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  21. Propositional Content. [REVIEW]Indrek Reiland - 2017 - Philosophical Review 126 (1):132-136.
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  22. The Given: Experience and Its Contents. [REVIEW]Indrek Reiland - 2018 - Analysis 78 (2):374-377.
    The Given: Experience and Its Contents By MontagueMichelleOxford University Press, 2016. xii + 250 pp. £35.00.
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  23. Meanings as Species. [REVIEW]Indrek Reiland - 2021 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2.
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