The prohibition against using others ‘merely as means’ is one of Kant’s most famous ideas, but it has proven difficult to spell out with precision what it requires of us in practice. In ‘How to Use Someone “Merely as a Means”’ (2020), I proposed a new interpretation of the necessary and sufficient conditions for using someone ‘merely as a means’. I argued that my agent-focused actual consent inter- pretation has strong textual support and significant advantages over other (...) readings of the prohibition. In the present essay, I respond to comments by Claudia Blöser, Irina Schumski, and Oliver Sensen. I first address the role of maxims in relation to the Formula of Humanity, and I spell out in more detail the relation between the agent’s belief and the actual facts pertaining to the consent of the person who is used as means to the agent’s end. I then discuss the importance of the requirement that agents make their use of others conditional on the others’ consent as a matter of moral principle. I next show that the proposed reading of the prohibition, despite its focus on the agent’s maxims and practical reasoning, yields important conclusions about the moral status of external actions, and I address several cases that are pur- ported to spell trouble for my reading of Kant’s prohibition. I end by outlining two challenges for possible (rational) consent readings of the prohibition against using others merely as means. (shrink)

Kant’s Formula of Humanity can be analyzed into two parts. One is an injunction to treat humanity always as an end. The other is a prohibition on using humanity as a mere means. The second is often referred to as the FH prohibition or the mere means prohibition. It has become popular to interpret this prohibition in terms of consent. The idea is that, if X uses Y's humanity as a means and Y does not (...) consent to it, then X uses Y's humanity as a mere means. There is then debate about the kind of consent that is relevant: possible, actual, or rational. In this paper, I argue against this interpretation. Section one sets up the consent account. Section two attacks possible and actual consent accounts on doctrinal grounds. Section three extends this doctrinal attack to rational consent accounts. Section four circles back to the original motivation for the consent interpretation. I argue that the consent account rests on a misinterpretation, and I conclude with a quick sketch of an alternative interpretation of the FH prohibition. (shrink)

There has been a remarkable shift in the relation between market and state responsibilities for public services like health care and education. While these services continue to be financed publicly, they are now often provided through the market. The main argument for this new institutional division of labor is economic: while (public) ends stay the same, (private) means are more efficient. Markets function as ‘mere means’ under the continued responsibility of the state. This paper investigates and rejects (...) currently existing egalitarian liberal theories about this division of labor and it presents and defends a new theory of marketization, in which social rights and democratic decision-making occupy center-stage. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 9, September 2020, Page 62-65.

Few think that Kant’s moral theory can provide a defensible view in the area of environmental ethics because of Kant’s well-known insistence that all nonhumans are mere means. An examination of the relevant arguments, however, shows that they do not entitle Kant to his position. Moreover, Kant’s own Formula of Universal Law generates at least one important and basic duty which is owed both to human beings and to nonhuman animals. The resulting Kantian theory not only is sounder (...) and more intuitive than the original, but also boasts some notable theoretical advantages over some of the most prominent views in environmental ethics. (shrink)

The mere means principle says it is impermissible to treat someone as merely a means to someone else’s ends. I specify this principle with two conditions: a victim is used as merely a means if the victim does not want the treatment by the agent and the agent wants the presence of the victim’s body. This principle is a specification of the doctrine of double effect which is compatible with moral intuitions and with a restricted kind (...) of libertarianism. An extension of this mere means principle, where not only using but also considering someone as merely a means is immoral, can explain and unify other deontological principles: doing versus allowing, partiality in imperfect duties of beneficence, and the asymmetry of procreational duties. A loop trolley dilemma is often presented as a counterexample of the mere means principle, but I argue that this dilemma generates a moral illusion, comparable to perceptual illusions. (shrink)

I argue that, alongside the already well-established prohibition against treating persons as mere means, Kant’s Formula of Humanity requires a prohibition against treating persons as mere things. The former captures ethical violations due to someone’s (perceived) instrumental value, e.g. exploitation, the latter captures cases in which I mistreat others because they have no instrumental value to me. These are cases in which I am indifferent and complacent towards persons in need; forms of mistreatment frequently suffered by the (...) world’s poorest. I explain why we need the category of treating others as mere things and what the prohibition against such treatment entails. Prohibitions against treating as mere means and as mere things are both essential for understanding the specific nature and extent of our duties to the world’s poorest. (shrink)

According to Kant, it is impermissible to treat humanity as a mere means. If we accept Kant's equation of humanity with rational agency, and are literalists about ascriptions of agency to collectives it appears to follow that we may not treat collectives as mere means. On most standard accounts of what it is to treat something as a means this conclusion seems highly implausible. I conclude that we are faced with a range of options. One (...) would be to rethink the equation of humanity with rationality. Another would be to abandon the prohibition on treating as a means. The last would be to abandon literalist construals of attribution of agency to collectives. (shrink)

The prohibition on using others ‘merely as means’ is one of the best-known and most influential elements of Immanuel Kant’s moral theory. But it is widely regarded as impossible to specify with precision the conditions under which this prohibition is violated. On the basis of a re-examination of Kant’s texts, the article develops a novel account of the conditions for using someone ‘merely as a means’. It is argued that this account has not only strong textual support but (...) also significant philosophical advantages over alternative conceptions. (shrink)

For several decades, Kant scholars, inspired by the Groundwork false-promising example, have constructed consent-based criteria for using another merely as a means. Unfortunately, these consent-based accounts produce assessments that are both counter-intuitive and un-Kantian in relatively simple cases. This article investigates why these consent-based accounts fail and offers an alternative. The Groundwork false-promising example has encouraged a problematically narrow understanding of the conditions for using another merely as a means in virtue of the fact that the example involves (...) a consent-sensitive duty. This article demonstrates that the scope of the prohibition on using another merely as a means includes both consent-sensitive and consent-insensitive duties and offers a duty-based account that reflects this. (shrink)

The main aims of the paper are to explain how objectification admits of degrees and why a significant portion of the objectification of women in contemporary Western society - objectification that contributes to their oppression - is what I call "partial objectification." To acknowledge the full range of objectification in women's lives, feminists need a theory of how objectification can be degreed. They need to be able to say that women can be both bosom and legitimate job candidate, both breeder (...) and health care patient, both sex object and intimate partner. (shrink)

Several commentators have tried to ground legal prohibitions of kidney sales in some form of Kant’s moral arguments against such sales. This paper reconsiders this approach to justifying laws and policies in light of Kant’s approach to law in his political philosophy. The author argues that Kant’s political philosophy requires that kidney sales be legally permitted, although contracts for such sales must remain unenforceable. The author further argues that Kant’s approach to laws, such as those governing kidney distribution, was formed (...) in part by considering and rejecting an assumption frequently employed in the bioethics literature, namely, that legal duties can be grounded directly in moral duties. The author explains some of Kant’s reasons for rejecting this assumption and concludes that arguments pertaining to the legality of kidney sales developed on the basis of Kant’s moral philosophy should no longer be considered tenable. (shrink)

In the Formula of Humanity, Kant embraces the principle that it is wrong for us to treat others merely as means. For contemporary Kantian ethicists, this Mere Means Principle plays the role of a moral constraint: it limits what we may do, even in the service of promoting the overall good. But substantive interpretations of the principle generate implausible results in relatively ordinary cases. On one interpretation, for example, you treat your opponent in a tennis tournament merely (...) as a means and thus wrongly when you try, through defeating him, to win first place. The article aims to develop a reconstruction of the Mere Means Principle that has more plausible implications than do rival reconstructions. It sets out a sufficient condition for an agent's treating another merely as a means. This condition is intended to be Kantian, but not necessarily one that Kant endorses. (shrink)

There has been a great deal of philosophical discussion about using people, using people intentionally, using people as a means to some end, and using people merely as a means to some end. In this paper, I defend the following claim about using people: NOT ALWAYS WRONG: using people—even merely as a means—is not always morally objectionable. Having defended that claim, I suggest that the following claim is also correct: NO ONE FEATURE: when it is morally objectionable (...) to use people, this is for many different kinds of reasons—there is no one wrong-making feature that every morally objectionable using has in common. After discussing these claims, I use them to present and motivate what I call the “precaution” theory of norms against using people. I conclude by considering a few cases from the criminal law context—cases that are naturally described as using people—to assess the moral appropriateness of this kind of use in these cases, and to demonstrate how the theory applies to the real world. (shrink)

At the heart of Kantian theory lies the prohibition against treating humanity merely as a means. Two of the most influential interpretations of what this means are Wood's and O'Neill's. Drawing on these thinkers' ideas, Kerstein formulates two accounts of what is involved in the idea of treating a person merely as a means: the and accounts. Kerstein's attempt is to show that they are problematic. He introduces his to alleviate the problems they face. I argue that (...) the end-sharing and possible consent accounts are not vulnerable to Kerstein's criticism. However, they both face a shortcoming: they fail to support the Kantian conclusion that the prostitute and the servile person are treated merely as means. Through reconstructing these accounts, I surmount this difficulty. Moreover, my proposal helps Kerstein's own account overcome a problem he admits it has, without the need to resort to consequentialism. (shrink)

It is often argued that clinical research should not violate the Kantian principle that people must not be used merely as a means for the purposes of others. At first sight, the practice of clinical research itself, however, seems to violate precisely this principle: clinical research is often beneficial to future people rather than to participants; even if participants benefit, all things considered, they are exposed to discomforts which are absent both in regular care for their diseases and in (...) other areas of daily life. Therefore, in this paper we will consider whether people are used merely as a means by being enrolled in clinical research. On the basis of recent studies of Kantian scholars we will argue that clinical research is compatible with the Kantian principle if the conditions of possible consent and end-sharing have been met. Participants are not used merely as a means if they have sufficient reasons to consent to being enrolled in clinical research and can share the ends of the researchers who use them. Moreover, we will claim that even if people are used merely as a means by participating in clinical research, it may not always be morally wrong to use them in this way. (shrink)

It is often argued that clinical research should not violate the Kantian principle that people must not be used merely as a means for the purposes of others. At first sight, the practice of clinical research itself, however, seems to violate precisely this principle: clinical research is often beneficial to future people rather than to participants; even if participants benefit, all things considered, they are exposed to discomforts which are absent both in regular care for their diseases and in (...) other areas of daily life. Therefore, in this paper we will consider whether people are used merely as a means by being enrolled in clinical research. On the basis of recent studies of Kantian scholars we will argue that clinical research is compatible with the Kantian principle if the conditions of possible consent and end-sharing have been met. Participants are not used merely as a means if they have sufficient reasons to consent to being enrolled in clinical research and can share the ends of the researchers who use them. Moreover, we will claim that even if people are used merely as a means by participating in clinical research, it may not always be morally wrong to use them in this way. (shrink)

The paper aims to investigate some aspects of Ernst Mach’s epistemology in the light of the problem of human orientation in relation to the world (Weltorientierung), which is a main topic of Western philosophy since Kant. As will be argued, Mach has been concerned with that problem, insofar as he developed an original pragmatist epistemology. In order to support my argument, I firstly investigate whether Mach defended a nominalist or a realist account of knowledge and compare his view to those (...) elaborated by other pragmatist thinkers, such as W. James, H. Vaihinger and H. Poincaré. Secondly, the question of what does it mean, for Mach, to orient ourselves in science is addressed. Finally, it will be argued that, although Mach tried to keep his epistemology restricted to a mere operational and economical account of science, that question involves the wider plane of practical philosophy. (shrink)

The meaning of the wave function has been a hot topic of debate since the early days of quantum mechanics. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in this long-standing question. Is the wave function ontic, directly representing a state of reality, or epistemic, merely representing a state of knowledge, or something else? If the wave function is not ontic, then what, if any, is the underlying state of reality? If the wave function is indeed ontic, then exactly what physical (...) state does it represent? In this book, I aim to make sense of the wave function in quantum mechanics and find the ontological content of the theory. The book can be divided into three parts. The first part addresses the question of the nature of the wave function. After giving a comprehensive and critical review of the competing views of the wave function, I present a new argument for the ontic view in terms of protective measurements. In addition, I also analyze the origin of the wave function by deriving the free Schroedinger equation. The second part analyzes the ontological meaning of the wave function. I propose a new ontological interpretation of the wave function in terms of random discontinuous motion of particles, and give two main arguments supporting this interpretation. The third part investigates whether the suggested quantum ontology is complete in accounting for our definite experience and whether it needs to be revised in the relativistic domain. (shrink)

_Welfare, Meaning, and Worth_ argues that there is more to what makes a life worth living than welfare, and that a good life does not consist of what is merely good for the one who lives it. Smuts defends an objective list theory that states that the notion of worth captures matters of importance for which no plausible theory of welfare can account. He puts forth that lives worth living are net high in various objective goods, including pleasure, meaning, knowledge, (...) and loving relationships. The first part of the book presents a theory of worth, a mental statist account of welfare, and an objectivist theory of meaning. The second part explores the implications for moral theory, the popularity of painful art, and the viability of pessimism about the human condition. This book offers an original exploration of worth as a combination of welfare and meaning that will be of interest to philosophers and ethicists who work on issues in well-being and positive psychology. (shrink)

The linguistic meaning of a word in a language is what fully competent speakers of the language have a grasp of merely in virtue of their semantic competence. The meanings of words sometimes change over time. 'Meat' used to mean 'solid food', but now means 'animal flesh eaten as food'. This type of meaning change comes with change of topic, what we’re talking about. Many people interested in conceptual engineering have claimed that there is also meaning change where topic (...) is retained. For example, they claim that the meanings of ‘fish’ and ‘pasta’ have undergone such change and that the meaning of 'marriage' would change this way after gay marriages become legal and widely accepted. In this paper I relate two sets of relatively independent literatures: mainstream philosophy of language and conceptual engineering to argue that on a plausible and widely accepted Minimalist view of meaning that is part and parcel of anti-descriptivism none of the above sorts of cases involve meaning change with topic retention. I do this by showing how to distinguish minimalism about meaning from the related theses of externalism and anti-individualism about intension and how to separate meaning from intension in a way that allows meaning and topic to remain the same despite changes in intension. The larger lesson is that much like we shouldn’t disregard the boundary between the narrowly meaning-related (“semantics”) and the more broadly communication-related (“pragmatics”), we shouldn’t disregard the boundary between the former and the more broadly thought-related, conceptual or cognitive (“cognition”). (shrink)

Many people claim that semantic content is normative, and that therefore naturalistic theories of content face a potentially insuperable difficulty. The normativity of content allegedly undermines naturalism by introducing a gap between semantic 'ought's and the explanatory resources of naturalism. I argue here that this problem is not ultimately pressing for naturalists. The normativity thesis, I maintain, is ambiguous; it could mean either that the content of a term prescribes a pattern of use, or that it merely determines which pattern (...) of use can be described as 'correct'. For the antinaturalist argument to go forward, content must be prescriptive. I argue, however, that it is not. Moreover, the thesis that content supplies standards for correct use is insufficient to supply a similar, a priori objection to naturalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:.. MERELY A MAN OF LETTERS" an interview with Jorge Luis Borges* Philosophy and Literature: Why don't you tell us about some of the philosophers who have influenced your work and in whom you have been the most interested? Jorge Luis Borges: Well, I think that's an easy one. You might talk in terms of two: Berkeley and Schopenhauer. But I suppose Hume might be worked in also, because, (...) after all, Hume refutes Berkeley. Really, he comes from Berkeley—even if Berkeley comes from Locke. You might think of Locke, of Berkeley, and of Hume as being three links in an argument..... But I suppose that when someone refutes someone else in philosophy, he is carrying on the argument. P&L: And Schopenhauer? Borges: Schopenhauer is very different from Hume. Of course, Schopenhauer had his idea of the Will. That is not to be found in Hume.... The case of Berkeley was different. I suppose he thought of God as being aware of all things all the time, if I don't get him wrong. If we go away, does this room disappear? No, because God is thinking about it. Now, in the case of Schopenhauer, I was rereading Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, The World as Will and Idea, and I was rather taken aback, or baffled I should say, puzzled by something that keeps on recurring in Schopenhauer. Of course it may have been a slip of the pen, but as he goes back to it, and as he was a very careful writer, I wonder if it is a slip of the pen. For example, Schopenhauer begins by saying that the universe, the stars, the spaces in between, the planets, *On April 14, 1976, two editors of Philosophy and Literature, along with an interested colleague, interviewed Jorge Luis Borges at Michigan State University, where he held a position as visiting professor for the winter term. These remarks are edited from the transcript of that conversation. 337 338Philosophy and Literature this planet, those things, have no existence—except in the mind which perceives them. But then, to my surprise—and I suppose you can explain this to me, since you are philosophers and I am not—what Schopenhauer says is that all those things have no existence except in the brain. And that the universe—I remember these words, I don't think I'm inventing them now—"ist ein Gehirnphänomen," that the world is a cerebral phenomenon. Now, I was baffled. Because, of course, if you think of the universe, I suppose the brain is as much a part of the external world as the stars or the moon. The brain after all is a system of visual, of tactile, perceptions. He keeps on insisting on the brain. I don't think, for example, that Bishop Berkeley insists on the brain, or Hume, who would have insisted on the mind, consciousness. P&L: People sometimes say that they see Berkeley in stories like "Orbis Tertius." Borges: Yes, I suppose they do. Well, of course. But in that story I was led by literary means also. P&L: How do you distinguish the literary from the philosophical means in that story? Could you explain that? Borges: Very easily.... Encyclopedias have been my chief reading. I have always been interested in encyclopedias. I used to go to the Biblioteca National in Buenos Aires—and since I was so shy, I felt I could not cope with asking for a book, so I looked on the shelves for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I would pick up any chance volume and I would read it. One night I was richly rewarded, because I read all about the Druses, Dryden and the Druids—a treasure trove, no?—all in the same volume, "Dr-." Then I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia... a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked. For example, you would have a language and then a literature, and then a history and so on. Then I thought I would write a story of a fancy encyclopedia. Of course that would require many different people to write it... (shrink)

Outlines the features of descriptive terms and judgements. The role played by descriptive meaning in moral statements is elucidated by examining the general nature of descriptivist statements and the connection with universalizability. It is argued that any singular descriptive judgement is universalizable in the sense that it commits the speaker to making the same judgement about relevantly similar subjects. Value judgements and generally descriptive judgements share descriptive content and are therefore universalizable in the same way. But in the case of (...) moral judgements, the universal rules that determine the descriptive meaning are not mere meaning‐rules, but rules of substance. The logical connections between descriptivism, prescriptivism, naturalism, and the thesis of universalizability are explored. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Story One: Sewn into My Skin is Written into My Story Story Two: Tattooing at Auschwitz – Ink, Terror, Death Story Three: Tattooing as a Practice of Writing, Unwriting, Inscription, and Counterinscription Story Four: ‘Real’ Tattoos and the Excesses of Meaning A Final Story: My Geckos.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:.. MERELY A MAN OF LETTERS" an interview with Jorge Luis Borges* Philosophy and Literature: Why don't you tell us about some of the philosophers who have influenced your work and in whom you have been the most interested? Jorge Luis Borges: Well, I think that's an easy one. You might talk in terms of two: Berkeley and Schopenhauer. But I suppose Hume might be worked in also, because, (...) after all, Hume refutes Berkeley. Really, he comes from Berkeley—even if Berkeley comes from Locke. You might think of Locke, of Berkeley, and of Hume as being three links in an argument..... But I suppose that when someone refutes someone else in philosophy, he is carrying on the argument. P&L: And Schopenhauer? Borges: Schopenhauer is very different from Hume. Of course, Schopenhauer had his idea of the Will. That is not to be found in Hume.... The case of Berkeley was different. I suppose he thought of God as being aware of all things all the time, if I don't get him wrong. If we go away, does this room disappear? No, because God is thinking about it. Now, in the case of Schopenhauer, I was rereading Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, The World as Will and Idea, and I was rather taken aback, or baffled I should say, puzzled by something that keeps on recurring in Schopenhauer. Of course it may have been a slip of the pen, but as he goes back to it, and as he was a very careful writer, I wonder if it is a slip of the pen. For example, Schopenhauer begins by saying that the universe, the stars, the spaces in between, the planets, *On April 14, 1976, two editors of Philosophy and Literature, along with an interested colleague, interviewed Jorge Luis Borges at Michigan State University, where he held a position as visiting professor for the winter term. These remarks are edited from the transcript of that conversation. 337 338Philosophy and Literature this planet, those things, have no existence—except in the mind which perceives them. But then, to my surprise—and I suppose you can explain this to me, since you are philosophers and I am not—what Schopenhauer says is that all those things have no existence except in the brain. And that the universe—I remember these words, I don't think I'm inventing them now—"ist ein Gehirnphänomen," that the world is a cerebral phenomenon. Now, I was baffled. Because, of course, if you think of the universe, I suppose the brain is as much a part of the external world as the stars or the moon. The brain after all is a system of visual, of tactile, perceptions. He keeps on insisting on the brain. I don't think, for example, that Bishop Berkeley insists on the brain, or Hume, who would have insisted on the mind, consciousness. P&L: People sometimes say that they see Berkeley in stories like "Orbis Tertius." Borges: Yes, I suppose they do. Well, of course. But in that story I was led by literary means also. P&L: How do you distinguish the literary from the philosophical means in that story? Could you explain that? Borges: Very easily.... Encyclopedias have been my chief reading. I have always been interested in encyclopedias. I used to go to the Biblioteca National in Buenos Aires—and since I was so shy, I felt I could not cope with asking for a book, so I looked on the shelves for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I would pick up any chance volume and I would read it. One night I was richly rewarded, because I read all about the Druses, Dryden and the Druids—a treasure trove, no?—all in the same volume, "Dr-." Then I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia... a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked. For example, you would have a language and then a literature, and then a history and so on. Then I thought I would write a story of a fancy encyclopedia. Of course that would require many different people to write it... (shrink)

Notes and Discussions Philodoxy: Mere Opinion and Question of History the "Philosophy as... rigorous science-- the dream is over." Edmund Husserl 1. MERE OPINION From the beginning philosophy has not only had a love affair with wisdom but also a special claim on truth and a concomitant contempt for mere opinion. Parmenides left a poem in which he contrasted the "way of truth," which was the path taken by Plato and his followers, with the "way of opinion," (...) which was paved with falsehood and deceit.' Arcesilaus defended opinion in the sense that he refused to concede certain truth to any ideas2 On such grounds Cicero concluded that the wise man should hold no opinions.s In the self-constituting canon of philosophy "opinion" has always been a pejorative term, designating an inferior sort of knowledge based not on demon- stration but on belief and associated in particular with the much-maligned Sophists, who languished under a "dark shadow" for centu- ries.4 As Macrobius wrote: "Opinion is born of failure of memory," meaning the preexistent form of knowledge -- ideas -- which was Platonic recollection;5 and for Aquinas, "opinion is knowledge of those things about which we do not have certain knowledge. ''6 In general, questions of "opinion" or "prejudice" have seldom been posed by 'Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers , 156. See also T. Sprute, Der Begriff der doxa in der platonische.. (shrink)

Notes and Discussions Philodoxy: Mere Opinion and Question of History the "Philosophy as... rigorous science-- the dream is over." Edmund Husserl 1. MERE OPINION From the beginning philosophy has not only had a love affair with wisdom but also a special claim on truth and a concomitant contempt for mere opinion. Parmenides left a poem in which he contrasted the "way of truth," which was the path taken by Plato and his followers, with the "way of opinion," (...) which was paved with falsehood and deceit.' Arcesilaus defended opinion in the sense that he refused to concede certain truth to any ideas2 On such grounds Cicero concluded that the wise man should hold no opinions.s In the self-constituting canon of philosophy "opinion" has always been a pejorative term, designating an inferior sort of knowledge based not on demon- stration but on belief and associated in particular with the much-maligned Sophists, who languished under a "dark shadow" for centu- ries.4 As Macrobius wrote: "Opinion is born of failure of memory," meaning the preexistent form of knowledge -- ideas -- which was Platonic recollection;5 and for Aquinas, "opinion is knowledge of those things about which we do not have certain knowledge. ''6 In general, questions of "opinion" or "prejudice" have seldom been posed by 'Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, 156. See also T. Sprute, Der Begriff der doxa in der platonische... (shrink)

[First Paragraph] Unlike so many other distinctions in philosophy, H P Grice's distinction between what is said and what is implicated has an immediate appeal: undergraduate students readily grasp that one who says 'someone shot my parents' has merely implicated rather than said that he was not the shooter [2]. It seems to capture things that we all really pay attention to in everyday conversation'this is why there are so many people whose entire sense of humour consists of deliberately ignoring (...) implicatures. ('Can you pass the salt?' 'Yes.') Unsurprisingly, it was quickly picked up and put to a wide variety of uses in not only in philosophy but also in linguistics and psychology. What is surprising, however, is that upon close inspection Grice's conception of implicature turns out to be very different from those at work in the literature which has grown out of his original discussion. This would not be much of a criticism of this literature were it not for the fact that discussions of implicature explicitly claim to be using Grice's notion, not some other one inspired by him (generally going so far as to quote one of Grice's characterisations of implicature). This still would not be terribly interesting if the notion Grice was actually carving out had little theoretical or practical utility. But I will argue here that Grice's own notion of implicature, one quite different from the ones most of us have come to work with, is in fact far more interesting and subtle than that which has been attributed to him. (shrink)

Meaning as the original function of language is the arrangement of internal things on the part of the creative and historical individual subject who speaks a particular language. Meaning constitutes the series of contents making up the linguistic world human subjects can manage real things with. Real things are not described with meanings but merely represented and designated. Meanings represent the essence of things thus making them members of a category. In this sense, meaning is the base to create things (...) in as much as they constitute entities. Only through the operation of determination can meanings designate individual real things. Since meaningful categories are intended to particular purposes, meaning is intentional and inclusive. (shrink)

Frequently quoted in the context of contemporary philosophical reflections on ‘artistic creativity’, Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition are generally read as articulating an anti‐traditionalist account of genius. Against this reading, I argue that Young does not reject the value of traditional models and conventions, but rather means to insist on the artist’s capacity to determine such values through her natural capacity for autonomous critical thinking. I support this claim by showing how he draws from Neo‐Platonism and the experimental (...) philosophy of Francis Bacon in order to develop what has all the appearances of a method of original composition. In the last lines of the paper, I suggest that this method may have heuristic value for the understanding of artworks as ‘artistic creations’ in the context of contemporary institutional theories of art. (shrink)

Paul Horwich's main aim in Reflections on Meaning is to explain how mere noises, marks, gestures, and mental symbols are able to capture the world--that is, how words and sentences (in whatever medium) come to mean what they do, to stand for certain things, to be true or false of reality. His answer is a groundbreaking development of Wittgenstein's idea that the meaning of a term is nothing more than its use. While the chapters here have appeared as individual (...) essays, Horwich has edited them to make a continuous argument, focused on articulating and developing an important new conception of language. (shrink)

Political authorities claim to be able to impose moral duties on citizens by the mere expedient of legislating. This claim is problematic -- in fact, among theorists, it is widely denied that political authorities have such powers. I argue that the legitimacy of political authority is not contingent upon the truth of its claim to be able to impose moral duties by mere legislation. Such claims are better seen as exercises of semiotic techniques to alter social meanings. These (...) alterations serve to facilitate desirable social change that may not have been antecedently obligatory because of the nonfulfillment of a compliance condition, which normally attaches to any "fair-play" duty. Where political authority uses the semiotic technique of announcing a legal -- and by implication moral -- duty, thereby altering social meaning as a means of bringing about the satisfaction of a compliance condition, it makes a claim whose literal falsehood does not derogate from the authority's legitimacy. (shrink)

The second part of Philosophical Investigations and other contemporary writings contain abundant material dedicated to the examination of visual perception, along the lines of similarities and differences manifested in the use of concepts such as “seeing as”, “seeing aspects”, “noticing the aspect”, “aspect blindness”, among other, related ones. However, the application of these concepts to phenomena such as face perception and word perception has not received proper attention in the literature. Our interest lies in identifying the features pertaining facial perception (...) and recognition of its content in order to understand how and to what extent they contribute to shed light on perceptual (and experiential) relationships we have with language, in particular with its written form. In other words, we will try to show in what ways the “phenomenology of facial perception” or “physiognomy” helps to understand the “experience of meaning” and the “phenomenology of reading”. My interpretative hypothesis is that, in Wittgenstein’s view, the features shared by face and word perception are more profound than a mere analogy, and that, in the case of words, these features can explain specific semantic (perhaps, semantic-pragmatic) phenomena that should be included in an appropriate reconstruction of the varieties of use in natural languages. (shrink)

This article argues for understanding Christian theological speech, including a Reformed engagement with confessions, as ‘traditioned creativity’. The argument is introduced by highlighting a theological hermeneutic that underlies the Belhar confession’s accompanying letter. This discussion points towards an account of Christian discourse that is ‘traditioned’ by the past but also moves beyond the mere repetition of the tradition’s authoritative statements. The article, therefore, affirms the need to distinguish between a living tradition and a narrow traditionalism. In addition, the article (...) also interrogates some forms of theological rhetoric in which ‘tradition’ functions to insert control over spaces and people, often exhibiting totalising discourses and over-triumphant claims. Contribution: The conclusion links a hermeneutic of tradition (that sees Christian speech, doctrine and action as ‘traditioned creativity’) to some metaphors that can further illuminate what it means for a tradition to be open to the future in a way that displays vulnerability and vitality. (shrink)

Meaning holism says that the meaning of an expression depends on all of its inferential connections. This dissertation defends this view from the objections that its grounds are infirm and that any theory of meaning holism faces insuperable difficulties. I argue that there are indeed compelling Quinean grounds for holism . I explicate the debate between Quine and Carnap over the status of analyticity, concluding that Quine is right to deny the distinction between inferences that are constitutive of expression meanings (...) and inferences that are merely empirical. The upshot is that all inferences are constitutive of meaning. Coupled with confirmation holism---the claim that all statements in a system of beliefs are holistically inferentially connected---meaning holism follows. I then argue that holism allows for communication even though it entails that communicants do not share the meanings of their expressions . In Chapter 5, I demonstrate how holism is reconcilable with the compositionality of language, thus denying the criticism that their incompatibility presents a prima facie case against holism. After responding to criticisms of holism, I provide a model of the interdependent structure of meaning constituting inferential relations among sentences in terms of conditional subjective probabilities, and I explain how the theory accounts for the normativity of meaning . I then defend a crucial assumption that underlies the entire dissertation, namely, that the meaning of an expression is in fact constituted by the inferences in which it figures . I argue that transparent self-knowledge is an essential feature of meaning, and show how self-knowledge lends itself to inferential role semantics. Chapter 8 takes a critical look at other meaning theories. I argue that denotational views either neglect the significance of behavior explanation in the theory of meaning, or they face the same difficulties that holism encounters, in which case they offer no advantage over holism. Internalist accounts of meaning, on the other hand, unjustifiably invoke ordinary external objects as semantic values. But without this illicit appeal to external objects, they tell us little about the meanings of expressions. (shrink)

Recent advances in natural language generation (NLG), such as public accessibility to ChatGPT, have sparked polarised debates about the societal impact of this technology. Popular discourse tends towards either overoptimistic hype that touts the radically transformative potentials of these systems or pessimistic critique of their technical limitations and general ‘stupidity’. Surprisingly, these debates have largely overlooked the exegetical capacities of these systems, which for many users seem to be producing meaningful texts. In this paper, we take an interdisciplinary approach that (...) combines hermeneutics—the study of meaning and interpretation—with prompt engineering—task descriptions embedded in input to NLG systems—to study the extent to which a specific NLG system, ChatGPT, produces texts of hermeneutic value. We design prompts with the goal of optimising hermeneuticity rather than mere factual accuracy, and apply them in four different use cases combining humans and ChatGPT as readers and writers. In most cases, ChatGPT produces readable texts that respond clearly to our requests. However, increasing the specificity of prompts’ task descriptions leads to texts with intensified neutrality, indicating that ChatGPT’s optimisation for factual accuracy may actually be detrimental to the hermeneuticity of its output. (shrink)

In this festschrift for the eminent philosopher Hilary Putnam, a team of distinguished philosophers write on a broad range of topics and thus reflect the remarkably fertile and provocative research of Putnam himself. The volume is not merely a celebration of a man, but also a report on the state of philosophy in a number of significant areas. The essays fall naturally into three groups: a central core on the theme of conventionality and content in the philosophy of mind, language, (...) and science, and two smaller sections on the relationship of ethics and language, and on the philosophy of logic and aesthetics. (shrink)

The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression ‘reasonable’ mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We find that (...) ‘reasonable’ is predicted to be an evaluative term in the majority of cases. This supports prescriptive accounts, and challenges descriptive and hybrid accounts of the term—at least given the way we operationalize the latter. Interestingly, other expressions often used interchangeably in jury instructions (e.g. ‘careful,’ ‘ordinary,’ ‘prudent,’ etc), however, are predicted to be descriptive. This indicates a discrepancy between the intended use of the term ‘reasonable’ and the understanding lay jurors might bring into the court room. (shrink)

In this festschrift for the eminent philosopher Hilary Putnam, a team of distinguished philosophers write on a broad range of topics and thus reflect the remarkably fertile and provocative research of Putnam himself. The volume is not merely a celebration of a man, but also a report on the state of philosophy in a number of significant areas. The essays fall naturally into three groups: a central core on the theme of conventionality and content in the philosophy of mind, language, (...) and science, and two smaller sections on the relationship of ethics and language, and on the philosophy of logic and aesthetics.In this festschrift for the eminent philosopher Hilary Putnam, a team of distinguished philosophers write on a broad range of topics and thus reflect the remarkably fertile and provocative research of Putnam himself. The volume is not merely a celebration of a man, but also a report on the state of philosophy in a number of significant areas. The essays fall naturally into three groups: a central core on the theme of conventionality and content in the philosophy of mind, language, and science, and two smaller sections on the relationship of ethics and language, and on the philosophy of logic and aesthetics. (shrink)

What place do experiences of beauty have in a meaningful life? A marginal one, at best, it would seem, if one looks at the current literature in analytic philosophy. Treatments of beauty within so-called “analytic existentialism” tend to suffer from four limitations: beauty is neglected, reduced to artistic production, saddled to theology, or taken as a mere application of a broader theoretical framework. These discussions fail to engage with the rich tradition of philosophical aesthetics. In this essay, I begin (...) by responding to the contention that experiences of beauty cannot lend life meaning because they are passive. Drawing on work in philosophical aesthetics, I then argue that encounters with the beautiful count as genuinely meaning-conferring because they have features commonly taken as marks of meaningfulness. (shrink)

My starting point is two themes from Peirce: his familiar pragmatist conception of meaning focused on what follows from an application of a term rather than on what is the case if it is correctly applied, and his less familiar and rather startling claim that even purely deductive, logical reasoning is not merely formal but instead constructive or diagrammatic — and hence experimental, and fallible. My aim is to show, using Frege’s two-dimensional logical language as a paradigm of a “constructive” (...) logic in Peirce’s sense, that taking this second theme into account in one’s interpretation of the first yield a very different, and arguably more fruitful, conception of meaning than is usually ascribed to Peirce, not only a different conception of the role of inference in meaning than is found in, say, Brandom following Sellars, but also a very different understanding of the role of pragmatics in semantics than is standard in social practice theories. (shrink)

This book is a full-scale account of the morally important ideas of treating persons merely as means and treating them as ends. Audi clarifies these independently of Kant, but with implications for understanding him, and presents a theory of conduct that enhances their usefulness both in ethical theory and in practical ethics.