Philosophers have wanted to work with conceptions of word-competence, or concept-possession, on which being a competent practitioner with a word amounts to being a competent judge of its uses by others. I argue that our implicit conception of competence with a word does not have this presupposition built into it. One implication of this is what I call "modesty" in interpretation: we allow for others, uses of words that we would not allow for ourselves. I develop this point by looking (...) at Saul Kripke's discussion of some famous examples given by Benson Mates, concerning beliefs about beliefs. I defend Mates's point against Kripke's claim that an interpreter who is modest in my sense must be "conceptually confused." . (shrink)

I propose an apparatus for handling intrasentential change in context. The standard approach has problems with sentences with multiple occurrences of the same demonstrative or indexical. My proposal involves the idea that contexts can be complex. Complex contexts are built out of (“simple”) Kaplanian contexts by ordered n-tupling. With these we can revise the clauses of Kaplan’s Logic of Demonstratives so that each part of a sentence is taken in a different component of a complex context. I consider other applications (...) of the framework: to agentially distributed utterances (ones made partly by one speaker and partly by another); to an account of scare-quoting; and to an account of a binding-like phenomenon that avoids what Kit Fine calls “the antinomy of the variable.”. (shrink)

I explain a mechanism I call “incorporation,” that I think is at work in a wide range of cases often put under the heading of “scare-quoting.” Incorporation is flagging some words in one’s own utterance to indicate that they are to be interpreted as if uttered by some other speaker in some other context, while supplying evidence to one’s interpreter enabling them to identify that other speaker and context. This mechanism gives us a way to use others’ vocabularies and contexts, (...) thereby extending our expressive capacities on the fly. -/- Explaining incorporation involves explaining intra-sentential shifts in lexicon and in context. Shifts of the former sort are familiar to linguists under the heading of “code-switching.” Shifts of the latter sort have been less explored; accordingly I explain how to modify Kaplan’s logic of demonstratives to allow for such shifts. -/- I compare the incorporation account of scare-quoting with accounts offered by Brandom, Recanati, Geurts and Maier, Benbaji, Predelli, and Shan. Finally I note a possible implication concerning the speech act of assertion: that you can properly assert a content you do not believe, let alone know, because part of it is expressed with words you do not understand. (shrink)

In response to Stefano Predelli's article finding in David Kaplan's “Demonstratives” a distinction between “context shifting” monsters and “operators on character,” I argue that context shifters are operators on character. That conclusion conflicts with the claim that operators on character must be covertly quotational. But that claim is itself unmotivated.

Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have argued that inferential roles are not compositional. It is unclear, however, whether the theories at which they aim their objection are obliged to meet the strong compositionality requirement they have in mind. But even if that requirement is accepted, the data they adduce can in fact be derived from an inferential-role theory that meets it. Technically this is trivial, but it raises some interesting objections turning on the issue of the generality of inferential roles. (...) I explain how those objections can be met. Whether Fodor’s and Lepore’s strong compositionality requirement is justified or not, then, inferential-role theories do not have the problem that they claim to have identified. (shrink)

I offer a philosophically well-motivated solution to a problem that George Bealer has identified, which he claims is fatal to functionalism. The problem is that there seems to be no way to generate a satisfactory Ramsey sentence of a psychological theory in which mental-state predicates occur within the scopes of mental-state predicates. My central claim is that the functional roles in terms of which a creature capable of self-consciousness identifies her own mental states must be roles that items could play (...) within creatures whose psychology is less complex than hers. (Bealer’s reply to this paper appears in the same issue of Mind & Language.). (shrink)

Richard Heck, Jr has recently argued against Russellianism about proper names not in the usual way—by appeal to “intuitions” about the truth conditions of “that”-clause belief ascriptions—but by appeal to our need to specify beliefs in a way that reflects their individuation. Since beliefs are individuated by their psychological roles and not their Russellian contents, he argues, Russellianism is precluded in principle from accounting for our ability to specify beliefs in ordinary language. I argue that Heck thus makes things easier (...) for the Russellian. For by framing the issue as one concerning the specificatory powers of ordinary language in general, rather than just of “that”-clause ascriptions, Heck weakens the implications of any claim about the semantics of that one type of belief-specifying locution. I augment this diagnosis with a positive account of the specificatory usefulness, and attested commonness, of (partly or wholly) quotational belief ascriptions, e.g. “Lois believes that ‘Superman’ is at the meeting.” This proposal is not of the usual sort concerning such locutions since it does not involve the (dubious) claim that they are in some way equivalent to “that”-clause ascriptions. (shrink)

I argue for the usefulness of the distinction between knowledge that is, and knowledge that is not, acquired in such a way as necessarily to be acquired along with other knowledge so acquired. Knowledge gained in the latter ways—e.g. by testimony, by linguistic stipulation—has proved philosophically puzzling. But this is because philosophers have used traditional epistemological vocabulary to try to describe what’s distinctive about it. Using the solitary/embedded distinction, we can frame descriptions that are both true, and not stipulative-seeming, of (...) what is distinctive of knowledge gained in these ways. I illustrate these points by discussing Saul Kripke’s claim that one can gain non-linguistic knowledge by linguistic stipulation. (shrink)

Some readers of Wittgenstein---I discuss Robert Brandom---think that his writings contain a regress argument showing that the notion of participating in a practice is more basic than the notion of following a rule, in explanations of linguistic correctness. But the regress argument bears equally on both these notions: if there is an explanatory regress of rules, then there is an explanatory regress of practices as well. Why then does Wittgenstein invoke the notion of a practice, apparently by way of diagnosing (...) the error on which the regress argument rests? I suggest that he invokes that notion to emphasize certain aspects of rule-following which we are apt to neglect, when we forget that rule-following is---not, rests upon---participating in a practice. When we appreciate those aspects of rule/practice-following we see the flaw in both regress arguments. (shrink)

Davidson and Burge have claimed that the conditions under which self-knowledge is possessed are such that externalism poses no obstacle to their being met by ordinary speakers and thinkers. On their accounts. no such person could fail to possess self-knowledge. But we do from time to time attribute to each other such failures; so we should prefer to their accounts an account that preserves first person authority while allowing us to make sense of what appear to be true attributions of (...) such failures.While the core idea behind Davidson’s and Burge’s accounts appears inadequate to this task, I argue that it can be deployed in such a way as to deliver the desired result. What makes this possible is that two attitude-types can differ as follows: the self-knowledge required for an utterance to be a Φing that p is different from the self-knowledge required for it to be a Ψing that p. (shrink)

Inferentialist accounts of concept possession are often supported by examples in which rejection of some inference seems to amount to rejection of some concept, with the apparently implausible consequence that anyone who rejects the inference cannot so much as understand those who use the concept. This consequence can be avoided by distinguishing conditions necessary for direct uses of a concept (to describe the non-cognitive world) from conditions necessary for content-specifying uses (to specify what someone thinks or says). I consider how (...) this claim about the non-uniformity of concept possession accords with different theories of attitude ascription and with claims about reverse compositionality. Surprisingly little stands in the way of the claim that someone unable to use a concept directly can nevertheless satisfy conditions for using it in a content-specifying thought. (shrink)

I offer a reading of Aristotle’s “doctrine of the mean” that avoids two pitfalls: taking it as truistic, and taking it as involving the bizarre thesis that whenever one acts as reason directs, one’s action is mid-way between some extremes. The crucial point is that while Aristotle denies the existence of useful general ethical truths, he himself offers truths about the likelihoods with which rationality will require actions of certain types; and it is with such truths that the statistical idea (...) of the mean gets a foothold in his theory of the virtues. (shrink)

It has proved challenging to account for the dual role that a directly quoted part of a 'that'-clause plays in so-called mixed quotation. The Davidsonian account, elaborated by Cappelen and Lepore, handles many cases well; but it fails to accommodate a crucial feature of mixed quotation: that the part enclosed in quotation marks is used to specify not what the quoter says when she utters it, but what the quoted speaker says when she utters it. Here I show how the (...) Davidsonian can do better. The proposal rests on the idea that mixed quotation involves deferred demonstration: a mixed quotati on specifies what the subject says partly by demonstrating the quoter's utterance of the unquoted part and partly by deferred-demonstrating the subject's utterance of the quotation-marked part. (shrink)

Basic to Robert Brandom’s project in Making It Explicit is the demarcation of singular terms according to the structure of their inferential roles---rather than, as is usual, according to the kinds of things they purport to denote. But the demarcational effort founders on the need to distinguish extensional and nonextensional occurrences of expressions in terms of inferential roles; the closest that an inferentialist can come to drawing that distinction is to discern degrees of extensionality, and that is not close enough. (...) The general moral applies as well to “two factor” theories of content: the notion of inferential role lacks the independence from the notion of denotation that many proponents of such theories have attributed to it. (shrink)

I offer a reading of Aristotle’s “doctrine of the mean” that avoids two pitfalls: taking it as truistic, and taking it as involving the bizarre thesis that whenever one acts as reason directs, one’s action is mid-way between some extremes. The crucial point is that while Aristotle denies the existence of useful general ethical truths, he himself offers truths about the *likelihoods* with which rationality will require actions of certain types; and it is with such truths that the statistical idea (...) of the mean gets a foothold in his theory of the virtues. (shrink)

This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy is dedicated to Timothy Williamson's work on modality. It consists of a new paper by Williamson followed by papers on Williamson's work on modality, with each followed by a reply by Williamson. -/- Contributors: Andrew Bacon, Kit Fine, Peter Fritz, Jeremy Goodman, John Hawthorne, Øystein Linnebo, Ted Sider, Robert Stalnaker, Meghan Sullivan, Gabriel Uzquiano, Barbara Vetter, Timothy Williamson, Juhani Yli-Vakkuri.

This is a lively, provocative book and many of its arguments are convincing. In this critical study I summarize the book, then discuss some of the authors’ claims, dwelling on three issues: their objections to the view of François Recanati on “pre-semantic” effects; the relation between their theory of quotation and the Tarskian “Proper Name Theory,” which they reject; and their treatment of mixed quotation, which rests on the claim that quotation expressions are “syntactic chameleons.” I argue that the objections (...) to Recanati don’t expose any problem with his view, and that the “Proper Name Theory” has all the virtues of their own proposal. Finally I raise some queries about the technical apparatus of syntactic chameleonism. (shrink)

Resumen Ésta es la primera traducción al español de las guías “Atención después de la investigación: un marco para los comités de ética de investigación del National Health Service (NHS) (borrador versión 8.0)”. El documento afirma que existe una fuerte obligación moral de garantizar que los participantes enfermos de un estudio clínico hagan una transición después del estudio hacia una atención de la salud apropiada. Con “atención de la salud apropiada” se hace referencia al acceso para los participantes a la (...) atención de la salud, proporcionada principalmente por el National Health Service (en adelante NHS), el sistema de salud del Reino Unido, y/o a la intervención en estudio, también llamada producto o tratamiento en investigación. Las guías “Atención después de la investigación” están dirigidas principalmente a los miembros de los 79 comités de ética de investigación del NHS y a quienes presentan sus estudios de investigación ante estos comités. Se trata de un documento borrador muy avanzado, trabajado en numerosas reuniones, durante más de 3 años, que ha sido discutido por participantes de estudios y miembros de la comunidad, miembros y presidentes de comités de ética de investigación del Reino Unido, especialistas internacionales en ética de la investigación, representantes de la industria y otras partes interesadas. La redacción de las guías es producto de la colaboración de Neema Sofaer y Penney Lewis, ambas investigadoras del King’s College London, en el Centre of Medical Law and Ethics del Dickson Poon School of Law, y Hugh Davies, Asesor en Ética de la Investigación de la Health Research Authority (HRA) del NHS. El traductor del presente documento, Ignacio Mastroleo, participó del workshop en la Fundación Brocher (Ginebra, Suiza, diciembre de 2011) donde se revisó el borrador versión 7.0 y contribuyó en la revisión del borrador de la versión 8.0 durante el 2012. -/- Abstract This is the first Spanish translation of the guidelines “Care after research: a framework for NHS RECs (8th draft)”. The document states that there is a strong moral obligation to ensure that participants in a clinical study who are ill transition after the study to appropriate healthcare. The terms "appropriate healthcare" refer to participants’ access to health care, mainly provided by the National Health Service (NHS), the health system in the UK, and/or to the intervention study also named investigational treatment or product. The guides "Care after research" are mainly directed to members of the 79 NHS committees of research ethics (RECs) and to those who submit their research to these committees. This is a very advanced draft document, worked in several meetings, for more than three years, that has been discussed with study participants and community members, members and chairs of RECs in the UK, international specialists in research ethics, industry representatives and other stakeholders. The drafting of the guidelines is the result of the collaboration of Neema Sofaer and Penney Lewis, both researchers at King's College London, at the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics of Dickson Poon School of Law, and Hugh Davies, Research Ethics Advisor of the Health Research Authority (HRA) of the NHS. The translator of this document, Ignacio Mastroleo, attended the workshop at the Brocher Foundation (Geneva, Switzerland, December 2011) where draft version 7.0 was revised and contributed in the revision of draft version 8.0 during 2012. (shrink)

Background: Transgender health care is a subject of much debate among clinicians, political commentators, and policy-makers. While the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care (SOC) establish clinical standards, these standards contain implied ethics but lack explicit focused discussion of ethical considerations in providing care. An ethics chapter in the SOC would enhance clinical guidelines. Aims: We aim to provide a valuable guide for healthcare professionals, and anyone interested in the ethical aspects of clinical support for gender (...) diverse and transgender people of all ages. Recognizing that the WPATH is a global association, we address broad challenges. We offer a reflection on general ethical principles, providing conceptual tools for healthcare providers, patients, and families to navigate the specific challenges they might encounter in transgender health care, in line with WPATH’s worldwide mission and scope. Method: This article employs a descriptive analysis, and our framework of reference is the four principles of biomedical ethics: respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Results: The article presents a discussion on the four ethical principles as applied to transgender health care. We address issues such as respect for patient autonomy in decision-making, the role of beneficence and nonmaleficence in clinical interventions, and the importance of justice in equitable treatment and access to care. Some of the ethical concerns we address in this article pertain to the current sociopolitical climate, where there has been increasing legal interference, internationally, for transgender and nonbinary people, particularly youth, seeking medical care. Discussion: We highlight the interplay between ethical principles and clinical practice, underscoring the need for ethical guidance in addressing the diverse challenges faced by healthcare providers and patients in transgender health care. We advocate for continuous refinement of ethical thinking to ensure that transgender health care is not only medically effective but also ethically sound. (shrink)

This chapter aims to examine the configuration of the sharing economy in the United Kingdom. The chapter provides an examination of the key opportunities and challenges that this socio-economic model generates in the country. It includes an account of different sharing economy initiatives in the United Kingdom, including crowdfunding projects, tool libraries, timesharing banks, men’s sheds, and shared workspaces, commercial sharing economy services, micro-libraries, community-gardening projects, and paid online peer-to-peer accommodation. Increased consumer choice and economic benefits derived from an extended (...) economy around the sharing economy are identified as key opportunities. Key challenges relate to policymaking and taxation of businesses and participants in the sharing economy, as well as the wider enforcement of health and safety regulations and the impact that the recent pandemic is having on the industry. The chapter also provides an examination of the latest developments and regulations in this area. In addition, the chapter identifies the most pressing issues and possible future directions of research in this context. (shrink)

While many argue investment-based criteria for immigration are wrong or at least problematic, skill-based criteria remain relatively uncontroversial. This is normatively inconsistent. This article assesses three prominent normative objections to investment-based selection criteria for immigrants: that they wrongfully discriminate between prospective immigrants that they are unfair, and that they undermine political equality among citizens. It argues that either skill-based criteria are equally susceptible to these objections, or that investment-based criteria are equally shielded from them. Indeed, in some ways investment-based criteria (...) are less normatively problematic than skill-based criteria. Given this analysis, the resistance to investment-based migration criteria, but not to skill-based criteria, is inconsistent. (shrink)

This paper begins with a brief summary of the Self-consciousness Argument, developed in the author’s paper “Self-consciousness.” (This argument is designed to refute the extant versions of functionalism -- American functionalism, Australian functionalism, and language-of-thought functionalism.) After this summary is given, two thesis are defended. The first is that the Self-consciousness Argument is not guilty of a Fregean equivocation regarding embedded occurrences of mental predicates, as has been suggested by many commentators, including Mark McCullagh. The second thesis is that (...) the Self-consciousness Argument cannot be avoided by weakening the psychological theory upon which Ramsified functional definitions are based. Specifically, it does no good to excise psychological principles involving embedded mental predicates. Why? Because functional definitions based on the resulting sparse theories are exposed to an interesting new family of counterexamples. (shrink)

In seeing a tilted penny, we are experientially aware of both its circularity and another shape, which I dub ‘β‐ellipticality’. Some claim that our experiential awareness of the intrinsic shapes/sizes of everyday objects depends upon our experiential awareness of β‐shapes/β‐sizes. In contrast, I maintain that β‐property experiences are the result of what Richard Wollheim calls ‘seeing‐in’, but run in reverse: instead of seeing a three‐dimensional object in a flat surface, we see a flat surface in a three‐dimensional object. Using (...) this new account, I re‐examine the phenomenological directness of visual experience and undermine an argument for skepticism about β‐property experiences. (shrink)

The chapter concerns some aspects of Russell’s epistemological turn in the period after 1911. In particular, it focuses on two aspects of his philosophy in this period: his attempt to render material objects as constructions out of sense data, and his attitude toward sense data as “hard data.” It examines closely Russell’s “breakthrough” of early 1914, in which he concluded that, viewed from the standpoint of epistemology and analytic construction, space has six dimensions, not merely three. Russell posits a three-dimensional (...) personal or “perspective” space that is inhabited by sense data. This space then forms the basis for constructing the three dimensional space of physics (and of public things). I am concerned with the specifics of this construction: with the properties of the private spaces, the relations among those spaces, and their relation to physical space and to constructed “things,” such as pennies or tables. There are difficulties of interpretation with respect to these relations, which stem from the difficulty of finding a coherent interpretation of Russell’s claim that objects such as tables and pennies look smaller at a greater distance (or look trapezoidal or elliptical from some points of view). I don’t mean to challenge the phenomenal claim that objects do, in some sense, look small in the distance. Rather, I raise difficulties with Russell’s analysis of this fact, in which he appeals to both phenomenal experience and the findings of sensory psychology. I hold that if he wishes to maintain his phenomenal claim about objects appearing smaller with greater distance, he must alter or redescribe aspects of his construction of ordinary things. However, if his construction of things and physical space is based on a problematic description of the private spaces, then his claim that private or perspective spaces are very well known and provide the hard data for knowledge of the physical world faces a challenge. (shrink)

Philosophical work on the concept of consent in the past few decades has got to grips with it as a rich notion. We are increasingly sensitive to consent not as a momentary, atomic, transactional thing, but as a complex idea admitting of various qualities and dimensions. In this paper we note that the recognition of this complexity demands a theoretical framework quite different to those presently extant, and we suggest that the enactive approach is one which offers significant value in (...) this regard. In consonance with arguments made by Laurie Penny about how consent is a continuous and dynamic process, we outline how an enactive approach identifies consent as temporally extended (rather than momentarily transactional), and as affected by the skilfulness of the agents involved, the fitness of community provided resources to negotiate the consensual relationship over time, and the unfolding of circumstances in the situation in which the joint action is taking place. We argue that the value of an enactive perspective on consent is in highlighting these complexities, and providing resources to articulate and theorise them in ways that are not open to other current approaches. (shrink)

I sometimes hear the statement that good has no chance in the battle against evil. People often say “ You won’t change the world anyway” or “That’s what the system looks like”. In fact, some arguments are irresistible, but only in certain circumstances. However, when these circumstances do not occur, and they do not occur very often, it turns out that good has very strong tactics. When you apply it, then it is simply irresistible. What kind of tactics is it? (...) Is it worth using it? Is it worth being a moral person? Sometimes it seems that our evil actions won’t result in any negative consequences. However, evil provides services and demands profits in return. Thus, it is very selfish. How did we pay since we didn’t spend any penny? On the contrary, we even earned something. Isn’t it puzzling? This “profit” is an extremely mysterious phenomenon, yet very real. Therefore, I examined various situations that happened in life and enclosed my major observations in this book. I hope it won’t be only a fascinating reading but above all an abundant source of inspiration for everyone who seeks to understand a deeper sense of the surrounding world. (shrink)