Weak psychological egoism is the doctrine that anything an agent does intentionally, that agent does at least expecting thereby to realize one of her self-regarding ends. (Strong psychological egoism, by contrast, is the doctrine that agents act always intending thereby to realize a self-regarding end.) Though weak psychological egoism is a doctrine ultimately answerable to empirical evidence, we presently have excellent a priori reasons for accepting it and attempting to construct psychological theories that include it as an organizing principle. These (...) reasons have mainly to do with the idea that to understand the motivation behind an action, we need to understand the force of the consideration that motivates the agent, and the way to do this is to find a self-regarding end associated in the agent''s mind with acting on that consideration. (shrink)

Donald Davidson holds that metaphors have no linguistic meaning in addition to their literal meaning. Max Black and Frank B. Farrell each contends that Davidson’s view is inconsistent with the fact that metaphors are appropriate objects of explication and evaluation. However, as I show, Davidson’s view actually is entirely consistent with this fact. I also argue that Black’s and Farrell’s own accounts of metaphor imply that sometimes the linguistic meaning of a sentence is other than a product of the meanings (...) of its words and its logical form, and I give a reason why accounts of metaphor with this implication are best rejected. E.M. Zemach, for his part, agrees with Davidson about what metaphors mean, but contends that, on Davidson’s recent account of language and interpretation, all metaphors turn out to be true; metaphors express novel or impractical but nonetheless literally true comparisons or categorizations. Zemach, however, I argue, has neglected the distinction between how speakers actually apply their words to things and their standards of correct application. (shrink)

I will present what I think is the best argument for the version of psychological egoism under consideration here, and explain why I think even that argument fails to go much distance toward establishing it. It turns out, though, I will caution, that defeating that argument means only that we are right to reject psychological egoism as extremely implausible; it does not entitle us to claim to have shown the thesis itself to be either confused and senseless or false. However, (...) my main goal in this paper is neither to refute nor to defend psychological egoism, but rather to show how it, even in a very strong form, manages to survive a number of common objections both to itself and to arguments meant to support it. (shrink)

To believe a proposition wishfully is to believe it because one wants to believe it, and not because one has evidence or reason that it is true. Is it wise to be open to believing wishfully? After criticising one popular argument that we ought be closed to believing wishfully, I develop an argument that being closed to believing wishfully is to labour under a debilitating prejudice. As a rule, then, we ought to be open to believing wishfully. I find one (...) and only one exception to this rule. People who value understanding things as they are, and value this more than anything else they value, are wise to be closed to believing wishfully. (shrink)

The dissertation is an exploration of the possibility and nature of interpretation. Its thesis is that coming to know what someone believes or desires, or what their words mean, or what they are doing, is not to be distinguished from coming to know something about the world. This thesis is defended, on the one hand, by distancing it from empiricist readings, and, on the other hand, by arguing against idealist or realtivist reasons for rejecting it. ;The dissertation is in two (...) parts. Part I, "Philosophy of Mind," takes up the question whether the thesis stated above implies that agents are mere objects and knowledge of minds is just knowledge of brains. There is, it is true, a sense in which explanations of events under physical descriptions are better as explanations than are explanations of the same events under psychological descriptions; nonetheless, it is argued, psychological descriptions and explanations are neither reducible to nor eliminable in favour of purely physicalistic ones. Part I established that coming to know what someone believes or means is coming to know something about the world--something about the world, that is, under a psychological description. ;Part II, "Philosophy of Language," takes up the question whether there is some difference in kind between knowledge of things conceived as psychological or meaningful and knowledge of things conceived as physical, a difference in addition to that of subject matter. It emerged in Part I that the notion of rationality is central to psychological description and explanation, whereas it plays no role in physical description: is this a difference that makes a difference? It is concluded that interpretation is possible not because speaker and interpreter share a tradition, or a conceptual scheme, or countless basic beliefs, or even because most of their beliefs are true. Rather, the possibility of interpretive knowledge rests on nothing more than that interpreter and speaker are in causal contact with a common environment. Thus in no important respect is interpretive understanding unlike knowledge of physical things. (shrink)

The authors argue that while meaning holism makes massive error possible, it does not, as Donald Davidson fears, threaten interpretability. Thus they hold, in opposition to Davidson, that meaning holism need not be constrained by an account of meaning according to which in the methodologically most basic cases the content of a belief is given by the cause of that belief. What ensures interpretability, they maintain, is not that speakers' beliefs are in the main true, but rather that beliefs have (...) the contents they do because of events others can in principle identify and describe. (shrink)