Montague and Kaplan began a revolution in semantics, which promised to explain how a univocal expression could make distinct truth-conditional contributions in its various occurrences. The idea was to treat context as a parameter at which a sentence is semantically evaluated. But the revolution has stalled. One salient problem comes from recurring demonstratives: "He is tall and he is not tall". For the sentence to be true at a context, each occurrence of the demonstrative must make a different truth-conditional contribution. (...) But this difference cannot be accounted for by standard parameter sensitivity. Semanticists, consoled by the thought that this ambiguity would ultimately be needed anyhow to explain anaphora, have been too content to posit massive ambiguities in demonstrative pronouns. This article aims to revived the parameter revolution by showing how to treat demonstrative pronouns as univocal while providing an account of anaphora that doesn't end up re-introducing the ambiguity. (shrink)

A number of contemporary philosophers think that the unqualified statement “X is unspeakable” faces the danger of self-referential absurdity: if this statement is true, it must simultaneously be false, given that X is speakable by the predicate word “unspeakable.” This predicament is in this chapter formulated as an argument that I term the “ineffability paradox.” After examining the Buddhist semantic theory of apoha (exclusion) and an apoha solution to the issue, I resort to a few Chinese Buddhist and Hindu (...) philosophical materials to rationally reconstruct a strategy for resolving the paradox. By introducing the mode of expression termed “indication,” together with the relevant notions of superimposition and of gesturing beyond the horizon, I show that expressing the ineffable does not necessarily involve irresoluble contradiction. It is also suggested that philosophers may need to acknowledge the relevance of the notion of ineffability for contemporary philosophizing. (shrink)

Two lines of evidence indicate that there exists a reciprocal inhibitory relationship between opposed brain networks. First, most attention-demanding cognitive tasks activate a stereotypical set of brain areas, known as the task-positive network and simultaneously deactivate a different set of brain regions, commonly referred to as the task negative or defaultmode network. Second, functional connectivity analyses show that these same opposed networks are anti-correlated in the resting state. Wehypothesize that these reciprocally inhibitory effects reflect two incompatible cognitive modes, each of (...) which may be directed towards understanding the external world. Thus, engaging onemode activates one set of regions and suppresses activity in the other.Wetest this hypothesis by identifying two types of problem-solving task which, on the basis of prior work, have been consistently associated with the task positive and task negative regions: tasks requiring social cognition, i.e., reasoning about the mental states of other persons, and tasks requiring physical cognition, i.e., reasoning about the causal/mechanical properties of inanimate objects. Social and mechanical reasoning tasks were presented to neurologically normal participants during fMRI. Each task type was presented using both text and video clips. Regardless of presentation modality, we observed clear evidence of reciprocal suppression: social tasks deactivated regions associated with mechanical reasoning and mechanical tasks deactivated regions associated with social reasoning. These findings are not explained by self-referential processes, task engagement, mental simulation,mental time travel or external vs. internal attention, all factors previously hypothesized to explain default mode network activity. Analyses of resting state data revealed a close match between the regions our tasks identified as reciprocally inhibitory and regions of maximal anti-correlation in the resting state. These results indicate the reciprocal inhibition is not attributable to constraints inherent in the tasks, but is neural in origin. Hence, there is a physiological constraint on our ability to simultaneously engage two distinct cognitive modes. Furtherwork is needed tomore precisely characterize these opposing cognitive domains. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relationships between organizational change and trust in management. It is argued that organizational change represents a critical episode for the production and destruction of trust in management. Although trust in management is seen as a semi stable psychological state, changes in organizations make trust issues salient and organizational members attend to and process trust relevant information resulting in a reassessment of their trust in management. The direction and magnitude of change in trust is dependent on a (...) set of change dimensions that reflect trust relevant experiences and information. We distinguish between dimensions related to trust relevant consequences of the change and trust relevant aspects of how the change process is performed. Empirical results indicate that increases in post change emotional stress and the use of referential accounts for justifying change are both negatively related to post change trust in management. The use of ideological accounts and participation were found to be positively related to post change trust in management, so was perceived decision quality. Findings also indicate that the effects of change on trust are negatively moderated by tenure. (shrink)

Research in vision science, developmental psychology, and the foundations of cognitive science has led some theorists to posit referential mechanisms similar to indices. This hypothesis has been framed within a Fodorian conception of the early vision module. The article shows that this conception is mistaken, for it cannot handle the ‘interface problem’—roughly, how indexing mechanisms relate to higher cognition and conceptual thought. As a result, I reject the inaccessibility of early vision to higher cognition and make some constructive (...) remarks on the perception–cognition interface. -/- 1 The Case for Visual Indices 1.1 Preliminary assumptions 1.2 Transcendental arguments 1.3 Evidence from vision science 2 Visual Indices, Object Files, and Fodorian Modularity 3 The Interface Problem 3.1 Top-down attention and modularity 3.2 Selective attention and information 4 Revising the Indexing Hypothesis 4.1 Revising the perception–cognition interface 4.2 Revising the modularity of early vision 5 Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

The comprehension of anaphoric relations may be guided not only by discourse, but also syntactic information. In the literature on online processing, however, the focus has been on audible pronouns and descriptions whose reference is resolved mainly on the former. This paper examines one relation that both lacks overt exponence, and relies almost exclusively on syntax for its resolution: adjunct control, or the dependency between the null subject of a non-finite adjunct and its antecedent in sentences such as Mickey talked (...) to Minnie before ___ eating. Using visual world eyetracking, we compare the time course of interpreting this null subject and overt pronouns (Mickey talked to Minnie before he ate). We show that when control structures are highly frequent, listeners are just as quick to resolve reference in either case. When control structures are less frequent, reference resolution based on structural information still occurs upon hearing the non-finite verb, but more slowly, especially when unaided by structural and referential predictions. This may be due to increased difficulty in recognizing that a referential dependency is necessary. These results indicate that in at least some contexts, referential expressions whose resolution depends on very different sources of information can be resolved approximately equally rapidly, and that the speed of interpretation is largely independent of whether or not the dependency is cued by an overt referring expression. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, in order to make (T1) and (T2) compatible within a Fregean approach, we must reject the view that all modes of presentation are senses. (T1) There is a diversity of ways in which Venus may be presented to each subject, and which are associated with the name ‘Venus’. (T2) There is only one Fregean thought expressed by the sentence ‘Venus is a planet’. Modes of presentation are essentially psychological and have causal powers on minds. (...) The mind of a subject is sensitive to differences in modes of presentation, so that if an object is presented to a subject under different modes of presentation and she has no reason to believe that they are modes of presentation of one and the same object, then she may take opposing attitudes involving those different modes of presentation. In contrast, senses are essentially semantic. For this reason, I propose that they be understood as certain ways of determining the reference of terms, and either are given by the semantic rules for those terms or are identical to those semantic rules. I agree with McDowell that an interpretive truth-theory for a language L gives us a theory of sense for L, and that something like (V) ‘Venus’ refers to Venus will give us the axiom which assigns the semantic value for ‘Venus’ within such a theory, and which is necessary in order to derive the interpretive truth-conditions of a sentence like ‘Venus is a planet’. An axiom like ‘Venus’ refers to Hesperus will not do within a theory of sense. Nonetheless, it will do within a theory of reference, a truth-theory which delivers not interpretive truth-conditions, but purely referential truth conditions. The purely referential truth-conditions for an indicative atomic sentence are, I claim, those which are specified by specifying those features in the world (objects, properties, etc.) to which the meaningful parts of the sentence refer, representing them as related in a certain way. For the specification of such truth-conditions, the difference in cognitive value between two sentences will not matter, whereas it will matter for the specification of interpretive truth-conditions. Now, senses are introduced to allow for an explanation of the difference in cognitive value between sentences with the same purely referential truth-conditions. An indication of when two sentences differ in cognitive value is when it is possible for a subject who is rational and understands the language in question to take opposing attitudes to those sentences (or their contents —whatever those contents are); and if there is in fact such a subject who takes opposing attitudes to those sentences, then those sentences differ in their cognitive value. Given this connection between cognitive value and a subject’s attitudes, and given the purpose for which senses are introduced, we must suppose that a subject’s mind must be sensitive to differences in senses, and so, that senses must be psychologically relevant. My proposal, which aims to establish some kind of identity between some modes of presentation under certain conditions and those ways of determination which are senses, is as follows: A psychological mode of presentation M is a way of determination which is a sense relative to a particular expression e in a public language L which aids in expressing propositional attitude P if and only if i the subject who has M and who is sufficiently competent in L knows (or realizes) that M goes with e in L; ii no other proposition e′ in L is more adequate for reporting the subject’s propositional attitude P; iii M is crucial in the subject’s rational failure to make certain identifications; and iv M is an appropriate function to an appropriate reference. Only the mode of presentation associated with ‘Venus’ that satisfies conditions i-iv relative to ‘Venus’ which aids in expressing a propositional attitude like the belief that Venus is a planet, will be the sense of ‘Venus’. I argue that only the mode of presentation of Venus as Venus will do, and that such mode of presentation is implicit in the way of determination shown by (V). Other modes of presentation of Venus as being big or appearing in the sky in the evenings or being the second planet in proximity to the sun will not satisfy conditions i–iv. Thus, although a subject may have all these modes of presentation of Venus and associate them with ‘Venus’ (i.e. (T1)), only the mode of presentation of Venus as Venus will do as the sense of ‘Venus’. Hence, only one thought will be expressed by a sentence like ‘Venus is a planet’ (i.e. (T2)). (shrink)

The development of possible worlds semantics for modal claims has led to a more general application of that theory as a complete semantics for various formal and natural languages, and this view is widely held to be an adequate (philosophical) interpretation of the model theory for such languages. We argue here that this view generates a self-referential inconsistency that indicates either the falsity or the incompleteness of PWS.

The paper leans on a movie cult from the 1960s, Blow-Up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni, of which a famous sequence is often mentioned, the one in which the protagonist, the photographer Thomas (considered here as a "conceptual character"), repeatedly enlarged the photographs he made in a park, in order to find an answer to the mystery surrounding the murder of a man: magnification which leads, on the one hand, to a gradual loss of definition of images, with the grain of (...) the picture becoming more and more evident, but also, on the other, in the emergence, from the very material of the print, of a fundamental detail that will help solve the mystery. What interests is the link between indicative referentiality and evidence documentary, between degrees of definition and authentication powers. The paper also analyzes the links that intertwine, in the film, between the photographs of Thomas (by Don McCullin) and paintings painted by another character of the movie, Bill (directed by Ian Stephenson), but also, outside the film, with all a series of examples from artistic production and visual culture of the time: very low definition images of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas (the famous Zapruder Film), the portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald directed by Sigmar Polke by simulating the halftone technique, the war photographs of Don McCullin and David Bailey's Fashion Photographs, Random Earths Studies by Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, Materialologies and Texturologies by Jean Dubuffet, as well as Zen for Film by Nam June Paik. Fimiani's text addresses also two contemporary installations which have tried to return to the issues from the photographic sequence of Antonioni's film: Blow-Up Blow-Up (2010) by Joan Fontcuberta and Portrait Landscape (from the Object Classifier series) (2015) by John Houck, an installation in which photograms of Blow-Up are analyzed through facial recognition software. (shrink)

(1) This is Part 2 of the semantic theory I call TM. In Part 1, I developed TM as a theory in the analytic philosophy of language, in lexical semantics, and in the sociology of relating occasions of statement production and comprehension to formal and informal lexicographic conclusions about statements and lexical items – roughly, as showing how synchronic semantics is a sociological derivative of diachronic, person-relative acts of linguistic behavior. I included descriptions of new cognitive psychology experimental paradigms which (...) would allow us to precisely measure the two constituents of semantics – meaning and reference – both at the level of individual speech acts and at the level of societal convergences, i.e. at both the token and type levels. -/- (2) In the Introduction, I recapitulate the arguments of Part 1. The Introduction also develops some analytic philosophical and lexical semantics themes not discussed in Part 1. -/- (3) After the Introduction, I present neural TM (nTM) as a theory of the neural mechanisms and processes which give rise to these person/occasion-relative acts of linguistic behavior. I develop nTM at three levels, the first two of which describe linguistic/semantic functions independently of their cortical locations. At the first level, I describe individual word-to-word and word-to-object connections. At the second level, I describe the corresponding structuralist networks of which they are the individual components. At this level, I introduce some key linguistic concepts of TM – its graded meaning, reference, and generalization sets, and the types of statements which express various levels of word-to-word and word-to-object relationships among lexical items which, because of the constraints they impose on the use of those lexical items in statements we produce and comprehend, are concepts. This constitutes the second structural level of nTM. -/- (4) At the third level, I associate the non-localized structures of the previous levels with cortically located neural structures and with the fasciculi that connect them. I distinguish neural areas in which primary (phonetic) and secondary (orthographic) lexicons are stored in long-term memory. I also describe the embodied concepts which co-exist in the anterior temporal lobes with the images they lexicalize. These concepts are often said to name physical objects and their features, although what they in fact name are kinds of physical objects and features. I describe how conceptual constraints and referential constraints interact to channel our intentions to say how things are into statements which are semantically well-formed, and which consequently successfully communicate information. -/- (5) Following this presentation of nTM, I examine five prominent neural semantic theories. I point out what is wrong with each of them as far as their explanations of semantics are concerned, and I also indicate how nTM can replace the “semantic cores” of those theories. -/- (6) The two basic mistakes made by neuroscience semantic theories, as I will explain, are (i) that all but one of them regard semantics as a matter of the association of words with perceptual images, and of generalizations from those associations; and (ii) that they all rely on an unspecified set of neural structures which purportedly encode the meaning of concepts in abstraction from their phonological and orthographic forms. nTM maintains, in contrast, that there are no abstract neural representations of semantic content. Neural constraints on our linguistic behavior, especially on our ascriptive and co-ascriptive use of words, express the semantic constraints on those words which make them concepts. That is the semantic content of words. -/- (7) I next consider several results from neuroscience experimental data which have been given one interpretation by one or another of the standard neurosemantic theories, but to which nTM gives a different interpretation. I include several predictions which I have found neither confirmed nor disconfirmed in the experimental neuroscience literature. -/- (8) After a concluding section in which I summarize the major changes to neurosemantic theory introduced by TM, and the analytic philosophy of language and lexical semantics contexts within which TM is situated, there follows an appendix in which I discuss neural net AI, and make some recommendations for implementing nTM in silicon. (shrink)

According to the accepted translation-failure interpretation, the problem of incommensurability involves the nature of the meaning-referential relation between scientific languages. The incommensurability thesis is that some competing scientific languages are mutually untranslatable due to the radical variance of meaning or/and reference of the terms they employ. I argue that this interpretation faces many difficulties and cannot give us a tenable, coherent, and integrated notion of incommensurability. It has to be rejected. ;On the basis of two case studies, I find (...) that the confrontations between many classical incommensurable languages are not confrontations between two untranslatable languages with different distribution of truth values, but rather the confrontations between incompatible fundamental presuppositions at the ontological level. We can always identify a truth-value gap between two incommensurable languages. Such a truth-value gap indicates a communication breakdown between the two language communities on the one hand, and is caused by the incompatible fundamental presuppositions underlying them on the other. ;I thereby identify the truth-value functional relationship between sentences, instead of the meaning-referential relationship between terms, as the dominant semantic relation between two incommensurable languages. According to my presuppositional interpretation of incommensurability, the real secret of incommensurability lies in the ontological setup of two competing presuppositional languages. When two presuppositional languages with incompatible factual commitments encounter with each other, the confrontation leads to a truth-value gap, and consequently a communication breakdown between them. Formally put, two scientific languages are incommensurable when core sentences of one language, which have truth values when considered within its own context, lack truth values when considered within the context of the other due to an ontological gap between them. ;The presuppositional interpretation makes many significant contributions to the discussion of the issue of incommensurability and the related metaphysical and epistemological issues: It confirms the existence of the phenomenon of incommensurability and makes it metaphysically and epistemologically significant. It establishes the tenability and integrity of the notion of incommensurability. It avoids many alleged unattractive epistemological and metaphysical consequences of the translation-failure interpretation. (shrink)

It has been noticed that self-referential, ambiguous definitional formulas are accompanied by complementary self-referential antinomy formulas, which gives rise to contradictions. This made it possible to re-examine ancient antinomies and Cantor’s Diagonal Argument (CDA), as well as the method of nested intervals, which is the basis for evaluating the existence of uncountable sets. Using Georg Cantor’s remark that every real number can be represented as an infinite digital expansion (usually decimal or binary), a simplified system for verifying the (...) definitions of real numbers, subsets, and strings was created - the Cantor Criterion, which allows faulty definitions to be pointed out. For the CDA, the connection of formulas defining objects (real numbers, subsets, strings) from outside the list with supplementary formulas was demonstrated - their indirect and indispensable nature testifies to the lack of unambiguity and gives rise to contradictions for Cantor’s antinomic formulas. Thus, Cantor’s theorem about the higher power of the set of all subsets, using the reductio ad absurdum proof, lost its power and it was indicated that it is necessary to correct the scheme of the Axiom of Specification, which was introduced precisely to exclude antinomies from set theory by excluding from the use of self-referential antinomies and ambiguous supplementary formulas coupled with them identified by the H hypothesis. The method of nested intervals was investigated and it was shown that every real number can be defined by the limit of nested intervals and a countable list of real numbers obtained from a countable pool of all Jules Richard’s texts. (shrink)

One of the problems that are often indicated as a criticism of different forms of representationalism is the difficulty to find definitions that are neither semantic nor realist in a simple sense. The present work tackles this class of critiques from a contextualist point of view, assuming those semantic aspects that are necessary for a concept of representation, but showing that semantic relations of representation should neither be static, nor referential in a classical and strictly realist sense. Two distinctions (...) are crucial for our proposal: On the one hand, we have the distinction between closed and open systems; on the other, a tripartite distinction between structural, informational and semantic representations. On this basis, we understand representations in terms of asymmetric variations between contextual models. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyse egocentric indexicals ‘I’, ‘now’, and ‘here’ as different aspects of the same self-conscious or self-referential act emphasising the underlying phenomenological structure of the essential indexical ‘I’. What makes an indexical essential is not its indexicality but the egocentric mental state indicated by its use. Therefore, interpreting them only in the confines of language severely limits the scope of the investigation. First, I will define the pure use of ‘here’, ‘now’, and ‘I’, which will consequently (...) lead to the relation between the indexical ‘I’ and the pure I, and the transcendental designation of the subject. In the second part of the paper, the focus will shift towards the phenomenological notions of primal I with its contextualisation and to the dimensions of ‘now’ and ‘here’, analysed through the character of nunc stans. Through some ideas of Husserl and Heidegger, ‘here’ and ‘now’ will emerge as amalgamated with the I. It will be shown that they acquire their formal meaning, along with the empirical content, through the I, which is the actual I of immediate presence that is purely self-referring, and that other indexicals and pronouns are thus derivative. It will be concluded that the essentiality of the indexical ‘I’ has its origin in the very structure of pure self-consciousness. In that regard, the theory of the essential indexical ‘I’ could be interpreted as an extension of the doctrine of the pure or transcendental I. (shrink)

The truth-functional hypothesis states that indicative conditional sentences and the material implication have the same truth conditions. Haze (2011) has rejected this hypothesis. He claims that a self-referential conditional, coupled with a plausible assumption about its truth-values and the assumption that the truth-functional hypothesis is true, lead to a liar’s paradox. Given that neither the self-referential conditional nor the assumption about its truth-values are problematic, the culprit of the paradox must be the truth-functional hypothesis. Therefore, we should reject (...) it. In this paper I argue that, contrary to what Haze thinks, the truth-functional hypothesis is not to blame. In fact, no liar’s paradox emerges when the truth-functional hypothesis is true; it emerges only if it is false. (shrink)

Our intuition tells us that there is a general trend in the evolution of nature, a trend towards greater complexity. However, there are several definitions of complexity and hence it is difficult to argue for or against the validity of this intuition. Christoph Adami has recently introduced a novel measure called physical complexity that assigns low complexity to both ordered and random systems and high complexity to those in between. Physical complexity measures the amount of information that an organism stores (...) in its genome about the environment in which it evolves. The theory of physical complexity predicts that evolution increases the amount of ‘knowledge’ an organism accumulates about its niche. It might be fruitful to generalize Adami’s concept of complexity to the entire evolution (including the evolution of man). Physical complexity fits nicely into the philosophical framework of cognitive biology which considers biological evolution as a progressing process of accumulation of knowledge (as a gradual increase of epistemic complexity). According to this paradigm, evolution is a cognitive ‘ratchet’ that pushes the organisms unidirectionally towards higher complexity. Dynamic environment continually creates problems to be solved. To survive in the environment means to solve the problem, and the solution is an embodied knowledge. Cognitive biology (as well as the theory of physical complexity) uses the concepts of information and entropy and views the evolution from both the information-theoretical and thermodynamical perspective. Concerning humans as conscious beings, it seems necessary to postulate an emergence of a new kind of knowledge - a self-aware and self-referential knowledge. Appearence of selfreflection in evolution indicates that the human brain reached a new qualitative level in the epistemic complexity. (shrink)

NOTE TO THE READER - December, 2021 ●●●●● -/- After a long period of time devoted to research in other areas, the author returned to the subject of this paper in a book-length study, CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning. In this book (Chapter 11, “The Metalogic of Meaning”), the position developed in the 1982 paper, "Referential Consistency as a Criterion of Meaning", has been substantively revised and several important corrections made. It is recommended that readers (...) read the revised and corrected version that appears in the book, CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON. ●●●●● -/- The book is available in a printed edition, ISBN 978-0-578-88646-6, from online booksellers such as Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and through independent bookstores. The book is also available as a freely downloadable _corrected second edition_ eBook, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5458352, through PhilSci, PhilPapers, HAL, and other online archives. ●●●●● -/- In addition to the above-mentioned book, readers may find "A Primer on Bartlett's CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON" to be useful as a guide to the nearly 900-page CRITIQUE. The primer is available as a free download through PhilPapers. ●●●●● -/- "Referential Consistency as a Criterion of Meaning" describes a logically compelling criterion of meaning — that is, a necessary condition of meaning, one which is non-arbitrary and compelling. One cannot _not_ accept the proposed criterion without self-referential inconsistency. This “metalogical” variety of self-referential inconsistency is new, opening a third category beyond semantical and pragmatical forms of self-referential inconsistency. ●●●●● -/- It is argued that such a criterion of meaning can serve as an instrument of internal criticism for any theoretical framework that permits reference to a class of objects. The paper combines the concern of the logical empiricists to formulate a rigorous meaning criterion, with the analytical interest in identifying and eliminating self-defeating statements through an analysis of the referential structure of theories. ●●●●● -/- The paper is followed by a list of other publications by the author that further develop and extend the ideas presented here. (shrink)

Buchanan (2014) argues for a Gricean solution to well-known counterexamples to direct reference theories of content. Peet (2016) develops a way to change the counterexample so that it seems to speak against Buchanan’s own proposal. I argue that both theorists fail to notice a significant distinction between the kinds of cases at issue. Those appearing to count against direct reference theory must be described such that speakers have false beliefs about the identity of the object to which they intend to (...) refer, beliefs that appear relevant to the determination of what constitutes communicative success. This suggests, further, that cases of this sort do not provide a basis for robust generalizations about singular reference. (shrink)

We study the structure of families of theories in the language of arithmetic extended to allow these families to refer to one another and to themselves. If a theory contains schemata expressing its own truth and expressing a specific Turing index for itself, and contains some other mild axioms, then that theory is untrue. We exhibit some families of true self-referential theories that barely avoid this forbidden pattern.

attributive/referential. Pragmatic intrusion.

This book offers a philosophical account of memory. Memory is remarkably interesting from a philosophical point of view. Our memories interact with mental states of other types in a characteristic way. They also have some associated feelings that other mental states lack. Our memories are special in terms of their representational capacity too, since we can have memories of objective events, and we can have memories of our own past experiences. Finally, our memories are epistemically special, in that beliefs formed (...) on the basis of our memories are protected from certain errors of misidentification and justified in a way which does not rely on any cognitive capacity other than memory. The aim of the book is to explain these features of memory. It proposes that memories have a particular functional role which involves past perceptual experiences and beliefs about the past and suggests that memories have a particular content as well; they represent themselves as having a certain causal origin. The book then accounts for the feelings associated with our memories as the experience of some of the things that our memories represent; things such as our own past experiences, or the fact the memories originate in those experiences. It also accounts for the special justification for belief afforded by our memories in terms of the content that memories have. The resulting picture is a unified account of several philosophically interesting aspects of memory. (shrink)

Episodic memory has a distinctive phenomenology. One way to capture what is distinctive about it is by using the notion of mental time travel: When we remember some fact episodically, we mentally travel to the moment at which we experienced it in the past. This way of distinguishing episodic memory from semantic memory calls for an explanation of what the experience of mental time travel is. In this paper, I suggest that a certain view about the content of memories can (...) shed some light on the experience of mental time travel. This is the view that, when a subject remembers some fact episodically, their memory represents itself as coming from a perception of that fact. I propose that the experience of mental time travel in memory is the experience of representing one of the elements in this complex content, namely, the past perceptual experience of the remembered fact. In defence of this proposal, I offer two considerations. Firstly, the proposal is consistent with the idea that memories enjoy a temporal phenomenology (specifically, a feeling of pastness). Secondly, the proposal is consistent with the possibility that some of our other cognitive capacities might yield an experience of mental time travel which can be oriented towards the future. I argue that the received conception of mental time travel is in tension with those two ideas. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on expressively rich languages that can formalise talk about probability. These languages have sentences that say something about probabilities of probabilities, but also sentences that say something about the probability of themselves. For example: (π): “The probability of the sentence labelled π is not greater than 1/2.” Such sentences lead to philosophical and technical challenges; but can be useful. For example they bear a close connection to situations where ones confidence in something can affect whether it is (...) the case or not. The motivating interpretation of probability as an agent's degrees of belief will be focused on throughout the thesis. -/- This thesis aims to answer two questions relevant to such frameworks, which correspond to the two parts of the thesis: “How can one develop a formal semantics for this framework?” and “What rational constraints are there on an agent once such expressive frameworks are considered?”. (shrink)

This article provides a comprehensive conceptual analysis of information. It begins with a folk notion that information is a tripartite phenomenon: information is something carried by signals about something for some use. This suggests that information has three main aspects: structural, referential, and normative. I analyze the individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for defining these aspects of information and consider formal theories relating to each aspect as well. The analysis reveals that structural, referential, and normative aspects of (...) information are hierarchically nested and that the normative depends on the referential, which in turn depends on the structural. (shrink)

Peter Lamarque, in chapter 4 of his 2010 book Work and Object, argues that certain artworks, like musical scores and literary texts, are such that there can be no forgeries of them that purport to be of an actually existing work—what Lamarque calls “referential forgeries”. Lamarque motivates this claim via appeal to another distinction, first made by Goodman, between “allographic” and “autographic” artworks. This article will evaluate Lamarque’s argument that allographic literary works are unable to be referentially forged and (...) will find them wanting. In so doing, the distinction between allographic and autographic artworks (and therefore artforms) will be called into question. In section I, I characterize referential forgery and Lamarque’s definition of allographic and autographic artforms. Section II critically examines Lamarque’s argument against the possibility of referential forgery in allographic artforms. Section III offers a case where it appears that a putatively allographic text’s type membership is sensitive to facts about its causal-intentional provenance. This case serves as pretext for Section IV’s identification of this causal-intentional relation with the sanctioning relation as formulated by Sherri Irvin. On the basis of considerations treated in sections I through IV, section V questions the tenability of the allographic/autographic distinction. -/- . (shrink)

There are two sorts of singular terms for which we have difficulty applying Donnellan’s referential/attributive distinction: complex definite descriptions, and proper names. With respect to the uses of such terms in certain contexts we seem to have conflicting intuitions as to whether they should be classified as referential or attributive. The problem concerning how to apply Donnellan’s distinction to the uses of certain complex definite descriptions has never been debated in the literature. On the other hand there have (...) been attempts to extend Donnellan’s distinction to the uses of proper names, the most popular one being due to Kripke. However the argument Kripke gives to this end in his ‘Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference’ seems to be inconsistent with the position he takes in Naming and Necessity. I suggest that the reason we seem to have conflicting intuitions with respect to the uses of such terms, is because there is not one but two separate distinctions inherent in Donnellan’s examples; a pragmatic distinction based on the speaker’s intentions in using a term , and an epistemic one based on the notion of having an object in mind. In the light of this, I argue that the issue of whether there are attributive uses of proper names, in the latter sense, relates to the epistemic problem of whether a speaker can have de re attitudes toward an object that he does not have in mind. On this epistemic issue Kripke and Donnellan are on opposite sides as revealed by their debate over the issue of whether there are contingent a priori propositions. (shrink)

This article develops a logic with two fundamental components: objects and labels. We compare the properties of the two universes that can be constructed from these building blocks and show how they naturally resolve a class of linguistic paradoxes. We conclude with a application to modal logics involving context fields.

This paper extends Kripke’s theory of truth to a language with a variably strict conditional operator, of the kind that Stalnaker and others have used to represent ordinary indicative conditionals of English. It then shows how to combine this with a different and independently motivated conditional operator, to get a substantial logic of restricted quantification within naive truth theory.

We propose a new account of indicative conditionals, giving acceptability and logical closure conditions for them. We start from Adams’ Thesis: the claim that the acceptability of a simple indicative equals the corresponding conditional probability. The Thesis is widely endorsed, but arguably false and refuted by empirical research. To fix it, we submit, we need a relevance constraint: we accept a simple conditional 'If φ, then ψ' to the extent that (i) the conditional probability p(ψ|φ) is high, provided that (ii) (...) φ is relevant for ψ. How (i) should work is well-understood. It is (ii) that holds the key to improve our understanding of conditionals. Our account has (i) a probabilistic component, using Popper functions; (ii) a relevance component, given via an algebraic structure of topics or subject matters. We present a probabilistic logic for simple indicatives, and argue that its (in)validities are both theoretically desirable and in line with empirical results on how people reason with conditionals. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper addresses a central positive claim in Matti Eklund’s Choosing Normative Concepts: that a certain kind of metaphysically ambitious realist about normativity – the ardent realist – is committed to the metasemantic idea that the distinctive inferential role of normative concepts suffices to fix the extension of those concepts. I argue first that commitment to this sort of inferential role metasemantic view does nothing to secure ardent realism. I then show how the ardent realist can address Eklund’s leading (...) challenge without appeal to distinctively metasemantic commitments. (shrink)

This paper addresses a central positive claim in Matti Eklund’s Choosing Normative Concepts: that a certain kind of metaphysically ambitious realist about normativity – the ardent realist – is committed to the metasemantic idea that the distinctive inferential role of normative concepts suffices to fix the extension of those concepts. I argue first that commitment to this sort of inferential role metasemantic view does nothing to secure ardent realism. I then show how the ardent realist can address Eklund’s leading challenge (...) without appeal to distinctively metasemantic commitments. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the debate regarding the semantic type of singular referential names. According to one view, known as referentialism, names rigidly designate individuals (Kripke 1972, Abbott 2002, Leckie 2013, Jeshion 2015, Schoubye 2017). According to another view, known as predicativism, names designate properties of individuals (Burge 1973, Geurts 1997, Bach 2002, Elbourne 2005, Matushansky 2008, Fara 2015). Most predicativist accounts claim that bare names in English occur with a phonologically null determiner, a proposal that is based on (...) languages like Greek where names require a determiner in argument position. Novel data from both English and Greek show that names can be nonrigid designators under modal operators ("Aristotle may teach Socrates") and bound variables under quantifiers ("in every set of twins, Helen is a musician"), challenging referentialism. As for rigidity, one possible source of this phenomenon is the proprial article, a name-specific determiner found in Catalan and other languages that may be null in English and homophonous with the definite article in Greek (Ghomeshi and Massam 2009, Muñoz 2019, Izumi and Erickson 2021). While much further research is needed, the data suggest that the proper analysis of names is grounded in predicativism rather than referentialism. (shrink)

It is widely held that there are important differences between indicative conditionals (e.g. “If the authors are linguists, they have written a linguistics paper”) and subjunctive conditionals (e.g. “If the authors had been linguists, they would have written a linguistics paper”). A central difference is that indicatives and subjunctives convey different stances towards the truth of their antecedents. Indicatives (often) convey neutrality: for example, about whether the authors in question are linguists. Subjunctives (often) convey the falsity of the antecedent: for (...) example, that the authors in question are not linguists. This paper tests prominent accounts of how these different stances are conveyed: whether by presupposition or conversational implicature. Experiment 1 tests the presupposition account by investigating whether the stances project – remain constant – when embedded under operators like negations, possibility modals, and interrogatives, a key characteristic of presuppositions. Experiment 2 tests the conversational-implicature account by investigating whether the stances can be cancelled without producing a contradiction, a key characteristic of implicatures. The results provide evidence that both stances – neutrality about the antecedent in indicatives and the falsity of the antecedent in subjunctives – are conveyed by conversational implicatures. (shrink)

This paper argues that two widely accepted principles about the indicative conditional jointly presuppose the falsity of one of the most prominent arguments against epistemological iteration principles. The first principle about the indicative conditional, which has close ties both to the Ramsey test and the “or‐to‐if” inference, says that knowing a material conditional suffices for knowing the corresponding indicative. The second principle says that conditional contradictions cannot be true when their antecedents are epistemically possible. Taken together, these principles entail that (...) it is impossible to be in a certain kind of epistemic state: namely, a state of ignorance about which of two partially overlapping bodies of knowledge corresponds to one's actual one. However, some of the more popular “margin for error” style arguments against epistemological iteration principles suggest that such states are not only possible, but commonplace. I argue that the tension between these views runs deep, arising just as much for non‐factive attitudes like belief, presupposition, and certainty. I also argue that this is worse news for those who accept the principles about the indicative conditional than it is for those who reject epistemological iteration principles. (shrink)

This book proposes a novel theory of truth and falsity. It argues that truth is a form of reference and falsity is a form of reference failure. -/- Most of the philosophical literature on truth concentrates on certain ontological and epistemic problems. This book focuses instead on language. By utilizing the Fregean idea that sentences are singular referring expressions, the author develops novel connections between the philosophical study of truth and falsity and the huge literature in in the philosophy of (...) language on the notion of reference. The first part of the book constructs the author’s theory and argues for it in length. Part II addresses the ways in which the theory relates to, and is different from, some of the basic theories of truth. Part III takes up how to account for the truth of sentences with logical operators and quantifiers. Finally, Part IV discusses the applications and implications of the theory for longstanding problems in philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. -/- A Referential Theory of Truth and Falsity will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and linguistics. -/- . (shrink)

Following the phenomenology that is revealed by the emergent structure of consciousness, the path will lead to the acknowledgement of consciousness having a self-referential aspect. By following phenomenological clues, properties of self-reference will be revealed. The two most prominent properties of self-reference will be shown to be inclusion and transcendence that will be shown to be found everywhere in the phenomenology of consciousness. Also, self-reference will turn out to be unformalizable, this imposing limits on what a theory of consciousness (...) can ever achieve. The unformalizability of self-reference would be shown to be because self-reference: is itself, includes itself, and transcendes itself, all at the same time. Nevertheless, unformalizability will be shown to be an essential feature needed to bring essences into existence. (shrink)

Mallon, Machery, Nichols and Stich (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79: 332–356, 2009) argue that the use of intuitions in the philosophy of reference is problematic as recent studies show intuitions about reference vary both within and between cultures. I use some ideas from the recent literature on disagreement and truth relativism to shed light on the debate concerning the appropriate reaction to these studies. Mallon et al. argue that variation is problematic because if one tries to use intuitions which vary (...) to find the correct theory of reference one will end up endorsing an absurd position: referential pluralism. I argue that there is hope for intuition-based philosophy of reference. One can avoid endorsing referential pluralism (as Mallon et al. understand it). Furthermore, referential pluralism may not be so absurd after all. (shrink)

Past work has shown systematic differences between Easterners' and Westerners' intuitions about the reference of proper names. Understanding when these differences emerge in development will help us understand their origins. In the present study, we investigate the referential intuitions of English- and Chinese-speaking children and adults in the U.S. and China. Using a truth-value judgment task modeled on Kripke's classic Gödel case, we find that the cross-cultural differences are already in place at age seven. Thus, these differences cannot be (...) attributed to later education or enculturation. Instead, they must stem from differences that are present in early childhood. We consider alternate theories of reference that are compatible with these findings and discuss the possibility that the cross-cultural differences reflect differences in perspective-taking strategies. (shrink)

This paper is intended to show that, at least in a considerably wide class of cases, indicative conditionals are adequately formalized as strict conditionals. The first part of the paper outlines three arguments that support the strict conditional view, that is, three reasons for thinking that an indicative conditional is true just in case it is impossible that its antecedent is true and its consequent is false. The second part of the paper develops the strict conditional view and defends it (...) from some foreseeable objections. (shrink)

This is Dr. Taraneh Javanbakht's paper on analytical philosophy, which was published by the Tabatabai University in Journal of New Philosophy in 2011.

This paper of Dr. Taraneh Javanbakht on a new analytical philosophy was published in Journal of New Philosophy by the Tabatabai University in Iran in 2011.

Expert knowledge regularly informs personal and civic-decision making. To decide which experts to trust, lay publics —including policymakers and experts from other domains—use different epistemic and non-epistemic cues. Epistemic cues such as honesty, like when experts are forthcoming about conflicts of interest, are a popular way of understanding how people evaluate and decide which experts to trust. However, many other epistemic cues, like the evidence supporting information from experts, are inaccessible to lay publics. Therefore, lay publics simultaneously use second-order social (...) cues in their environment to inform decisions to trust. These second-order social cues, or ‘social indicators of trust’, prevent lay publics from having to trust blindly. Social indicators of trust therefore inform lay publics’ epistemic vigilance, or constant low level-monitoring of testimony from experts. This special issue examines the nature, acquisition and application of social indicators of trust for scientific experts and institutions. It also raises questions about the types of trust asked of lay publics and challenges traditional normative assumptions about the relationship between science and lay publics through study of attitudes, values, and experiences. The issue descriptively re-examines the structure of institutions, their role and methods for ferrying information, as well as how social indicators operate in times of crisis. In this collection of works, we bridge history, science, philosophy of science, science and technology studies, science communication and social epistemology, to broaden the discourse on trust in experts and more accurately reflect the imperfect yet indispensable endeavour that trusting is. (shrink)

It is argued that none of the speaker's referential intentions accompanying his utterance of a demonstrative are semantically significant but rather the associated demonstration (or some other source of salience). It is constitutive of the speaker's having the specifically referential intention - held by Kent Bach to be semantically significant - that the speaker is taking, and relying upon, his accompanying gesture (or some other source of salience) as semantically significant, making it the case that this intention is (...) not even partly semantically significant. The same is then shown to hold for the speaker's remaining referential intentions: his intention aimed at a perceived object, believed by David Kaplan to be semantically significant, as well as the intention to refer to the object that he has in mind. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson has defended the claim that the semantics of the indicative ‘if’ is given by the material conditional. Putative counterexamples can be handled by better understanding the role played in our assessment of indicatives by a fallible cognitive heuristic, called the Suppositional Procedure. Williamson’s Suppositional Conjecture has it that the Suppositional Procedure is humans’ primary way of prospectively assessing conditionals. This paper raises some doubts on the Suppositional Procedure and Conjecture.

Existentialism claims that propositions that directly refer to individuals depend on those individuals for their existence. I argue for two points regarding Existentialism. First, I argue that recent accounts of Existentialism run into difficulties accommodating the possibility of there being a lonely alien electron. This problem is distinct from one of the better-known alien problems—concerning iterated modal properties of aliens—and can’t be solved using a standard response to the iterated case. Second, though the lonely alien electron problem might seem to (...) be reason to reject the sort of Existentialist view at hand, there’s a plausible way to preserve the view: accept the existence of possible worlds that directly refer to individuals that don’t exist in those worlds. Such a solution might seem incompatible with Existentialism, but I show that Existentialists can avoid the incompatibility and should find the resulting view plausible. (shrink)

In the framework of Husserl's phenomenology, intentionality is regarded as the main feature of every act of consciousness. Our consciousness is directed towards objects immanent in it, however in a variety of epistemological functions and operations, such as sensory perception, judgment, cognition, volition, imagination, etc. Husserl uses the technical terms noesis and noema to designate the intentional acts of consciousness and their outcome in the constitution of objects in consciousness. At the same time, the persistence of a hyletic data is (...) emphasized, which as pure sense data escapes the phenomenological reduction and remains as such a residuum in the consciousness. In my lecture I try to work out the clear implication of epistemological referentiality in the phenomenological basic notion of intentionality. Among other things, I rely on the conceptual history of intentionality, i. e. on the earlier theories of intentionality in the Middle Ages and the philosophical revival of this notion in the late 19th century by Franz Brentano. Referentiality defines itself as the referential access of consciousness to objects of sensory perception, judgment, cognition, etc., in which the objects form the final referents. In the phenomenological framework, intentionality refers to the intentional access of consciousness to objects irrespective of their consciousness-immanence or -transcendence. The analogy between intentionality and referentiality is therefore based on the act-character as well as the directionality of consciousness which suggests the characteristic attempt of consciousness to gain intentional-referential access to objects. The directionality of consciousness in every intentional act ultimately marks and confirms the referentiality i. e the referential access of consciousness to the object. Intentionality as intentional-referential access to objects becomes a problem, when the access of consciousness to the object proves to be inadequate. I try to show how this problem of referentiality inevitably arises in Husserl's phenomenology of inner time-consciousness, especially in his conception of a time-object (Zeitobjekt). The consciousness-immanence of a time-object, such as a melody, points to a problem, that the intertwining of the temporality of consciousness and that of time-object necessarily results in various aporias of time, as Paul Ricœur observes and discusses in detail in his seminal work Temps et Récit. Moreover, the residual persistence of hyletic data, that survives all phenomenological reductions, would establish an actual interface between consciousness and reality, as Jaakko Hintikka emphasizes in his essay The phenomenological dimension. The aporicity of time refers to the autonomy of time and, thereby, to the autonomy of time-object in its intentional in-existence in consciousness. The hyletic data as interface between consciousness and reality points to the necessary referential extension of consciousness to objects that are otherwise excluded in the context of phenomenology. From these and similar premises, I would like to demonstrate how the problem of referentiality in Husserl's philosophy of time inevitably presupposes a reversion of referentiality within the prevailing noesis-noema structure that underlies the consciousness-immanence of objects. (shrink)

I give cases where the contrast between "if Shakespeare had not written Hamlet someone else would have" and "if Shakespeare did not write Hamlet and someone else did"is found in future tense sentences. This is often denied.

A book review of _Free Choice: A Self-referential Argument_ by J. M. Boyle, Jr., G. Grisez, and O. Tollefsen. The review concerns the pragmatical self-referential argument employed in the book, and points to the fact that the argument is itself self-referentially inconsistent, but on the level of metalogical self-reference.