I address the question whether Dummetts manifestation challenge to semantic realism can be disarmed by reflection on the compositionality of meaning. Building on work of Dummett and Wright, I develop in §§12 what I argue to be the most formidable version of the manifestation challenge. Along the way I review attempts by previous authors to deploy considerations about compositionality in realisms favour, and argue that they are unsuccessful. The formulation of the challenge I develop renders explicit something which I argue (...) to be implicit in Dummetts and Wrights presentations: that the challenge depends on a contention about the constitution of speakers states of declarative sentence understanding: i.e., that many such states incorporate abilities to recognize whether the associated sentences truth conditions are satisfied. In §3 I argue that reflection on the compositionality of meaning reveals, first, that this contention must be rejected by the realist, and second, that it is unmotivated. This result does not settle the debate over the manifestation challenge, but it implies that the onus of argument does not currently rest with the realist. (shrink)

The paper addresses a prima facie tension between two popular views about concepts. The first is the doctrine that some concepts are constitutively perceptual/experiential, so that they can be possessed only by suitably experienced subjects. This is a classic empiricist theme, but its most conspicuous recent appearance is in literature on phenomenal concepts. The second view is anti-individualism: here, the view that concept possession depends not only on a thinker’s internal states and relations to the concepts’ referents, but also on (...) certain of her relations to sociolinguistic peers. In recent works, Derek Ball and Michael Tye have in effect argued that the doctrines are incompatible, and their conclusion is that no concepts depend on experience. In reply, Bénédicte Veillet endorses those authors’ incompatibilism, but argues that it is anti-individualism that we should reject. I develop an approach to reconciliation that is more promising than any considered by these theorists. Against Veillet, I defend a version of anti-individualism about phenomenal concepts, but against Ball and Tye, I argue that they can be possessed only by suitably experienced thinkers. (shrink)

Many contemporary physicalists concede to dualists that conscious subjects have distinctive “phenomenal concepts” of the phenomenal qualities of their experiences. Indeed, they contend that idiosyncratic characteristics of these concepts facilitate responses to influential anti-physicalist arguments. Like some some other critics of this approach, James Tartaglia maintains that phenomenal concepts express contents that conflict with physicalism, but as a physicalist, the moral he distinctively draws from this is that phenomenal concepts misrepresent. He contends further that the contemporary physicalists’ account cannot accommodate (...) this feature, and that in consequence, physicalists should abandon phenomenal concepts and return to the identity theory championed by Place and Smart in the 1950s. I respond to Tartaglia by identifying lacunae in his interpretation of contemporary physicalism and arguing that phenomenal concepts as conceived by the contemporary physicalists do not express content... (shrink)

The first half of Mark Quentin Gardiner’s recent book, Semantic Challenges to Realism: Dummett and Putnam, is a sustained, systematic, and, for the most part, novel attempt to demolish the case against semantic realism instigated by Michael Dummett. In this article I reply on the anti-realist’s be-half. I aim to demonstrate that none of Gardiner’s main anti-Dummettian arguments are successful, and moreover that his errors are, in the main, consequences of serious misconstruals of vital aspects of the semantic realist and (...) anti-realist positions. (shrink)

Abstract Empiricist philosophers of mind have long maintained that the possession conditions of many concepts include recognitional abilities. One of Jerry Fodor's recent attacks on empiricist semantics proceeds by attempting to demonstrate that there are no such, ?recognitional? concepts. His argument is built on the claim that if there were such concepts, they would not compose: i.e., they would exhibit properties which are not in general ?inherited? by complex concepts of which they are components. Debate between Fodor and his critics (...) on this issue has focused on his construal of compositionality, the critics in effect advocating a weaker conception than that assumed by Fodor. I argue that the critics' contention is under-motivated, and in the current context ad hoc. But there is something else wrong with Fodor's argument. He misidentifies the notion of recognitionality in which the empiricist should trade. A proper understanding of recognitionality allows us to disarm Fodor's argument without resolving the question about compositionality that divides Fodor and his critics. I end with two very general remarks. First a contention about the motivation for empiricist semantics, and second, a suggestion that my proposal about recognitionality may be extended to disarm a more familiar and influential type of concern about their viability. (shrink)

Arguing About Language presents a comprehensive selection of key readings on fundamental issues in the philosophy of language. It offers a fresh and exciting introduction to the subject, addressing both perennial problems and emerging topics. Classic readings from Frege, Russell, Kripke, Chomsky, Quine, Grice, Lewis and Davidson appear alongside more recent pieces by philosophers or linguists such as Robyn Carston, Delia Graff Fara, Frank Jackson, Ernie Lepore & Jerry Fodor, Nathan Salmon, Zoltán Szabó, Timothy Williamson and Crispin Wright. Organised into (...) clear sections, readings have been chosen that engage with one another and often take opposing views on the same question, helping students to get to grips with the key areas of debate in the philosophy of language, including: sense and reference definite descriptions linguistic conventions language and behaviour descriptivism and rigidity contextualism vagueness rule-following and normativity fictional discourse. Each article selected is clear, thought-provoking and free from unnecessary jargon. The editors provide lucid introductions to each section in which they give an overview of the debate and outline the arguments of the papers. Arguing About Language is an ideal reader for students looking for a balanced yet up-to-date introduction to the philosophy of language. Darragh Byrne is lecturer in philosophy at the University of Birmingham, UK. Max Kölbel is ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona, Spain. He is the author of Truth without Objectivity (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of Wittgenstein's Lasting Significance (Routledge, 2004) with Bernhard Weiss, as well as Relative Truth (Oxford, 2008) with Manuel García-Carpintero. (shrink)

1 I shall mainly concentrate on Loar (1997, 1999), Tye (1999), Papineau (1998, 2002), Levine (1998, 2001) and Chalmers (2003). Only the first three of these authors endorse the claim that the proposal supports materialism. Levine.

I begin by summarizing my view of the progression that occurred from the 1950s to the 1990s on the topic of physicalism and, in terms of this, present an overview of the reconciliation I was attempting in “Conceptualizing Physical Consciousness.” I then address Byrne’s two main arguments. In the case of the first, I show that his argument turns on a third-person conception of appearance which is not the one addressed in the debates in question, and argue that functionalism (...) is not relevant to physicalism about consciousness in the manner Byrne thinks. In the case of the second, I argue that Byrne’s attempt to prize metaphysics apart from science shows a misunderstanding of the physicalist agenda. In conclusion I indicate how my views have moved on. My misrepresentation thesis, like any form of conventional physicalism, ultimately entails eliminativism; and I reject eliminativism. (shrink)

Traditionally, perceptual experiences—for example, the experience of seeing a cat—were thought to have two quite distinct components. When one sees a cat, one’s experience is “about” the cat: this is the representational or intentional component of the experience. One’s experience also has phenomenal character: this is the sensational component of the experience. Although the intentional and sensational components at least typically go together, in principle they might come apart: the intentional component could be present without the sensational component or vice (...) versa. (shrink)

One very popular framework in contemporary epistemology is Bayesian. The central epistemic state is subjective confidence, or credence. Traditional epistemic states like belief and knowledge tend to be sidelined, or even dispensed with entirely. Credences are often introduced as familiar mental states, merely in need of a special label for the purposes of epistemology. But whether they are implicitly recognized by the folk or posits of a sophisticated scientific psychology, they do not appear to fit well with perception, as is (...) often noted. -/- This paper investigates the tension between probabilistic cognition and non-probabilistic perception. The tension is real, and the solution—to adapt a phrase from Quine and Goodman—is to renounce credences altogether. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind have distinguished (and sometimes conflated) various qualities. This article tries to sort things out.

This essay surveys the varieties of disjunctivism about perceptual experience. Disjunctivism comes in two main flavours, metaphysical and epistemological.

Moral philosophy and psychology have sought to define the nature of right and wrong, and good and evil. The industrial turn of the twentieth century fostered increasingly technological approaches that conjoined philosophy to psychology, and psychology to the natural sciences. Thus, moral philosophy and psychology became ever more vested to investigations of the anatomic structures and physiologic processes involved in cognition, emotion and behavior - ultimately falling under the rubric of the neurosciences. Since 2002, neuroscientific studies of moral thought, emotions (...) and behaviors have become known as – and a part of – the relatively new discipline of neuroethics. Herein we present Part 2 of a bibliography of neuroethics from 2002–2013 addressing the “neuroscience of ethics” – studies of putative neural substrates and mechanisms involved in cognitive, emotional and behavioral processes of morality and ethics. (shrink)

This comment mainly examines Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne’s preferred framework for examining whether narrow content is viable, arguing that their framework is not well-suited to the task; once a more traditional framework is adopted, Y&H’s case against internalism is strengthened.

According to a long interpretative tradition, Aristotle holds that the formal cause is the ultimate object of induction when investigating perceptible substances. For, the job of induction is to find the essential nature common to a set of individuals, and that nature is captured solely by their shared formal cause. Against this view, I argue that Aristotle understands perceptible individuals as irreducibly composite objects whose nature is constituted by both their formal and their material cause. As a result, when investigating (...) perceptible objects, the job of induction is to discover their composite, formal and material nature. The process by which universal claims about this composite nature are justified, I argue, is similar to what we now know as mathematical induction. In particular, such claims are grounded in a non-enumerative, but replicable process in which things are resolved into their simplest components. As a result, the observation of past uniformities has, at most, a heuristic function in scientific inquiry. (shrink)

This commentary describes some extensions of the Phillips & Singer model of contextual interactions to cater for the contrast- and extent-dependency of surround facilitation and suppression. I also comment briefly on some semantic problems with what exactly the role of synchronization might be: input preprocessing or output postprocessing?

This paper accomplishes two tasks. First, I unpack Husserl’s analysis of interest from his 1893 manuscript, “Notes Towards a Theory of Attention and Interest” to demonstrate that it comprises his first rigorous genetic analysis of attention. Specifically, I explore Husserl’s observations about how attentive interest is passively guided by affections, moods, habits, and cognitive tensions. In doing so, I reveal that the early Husserl described attention as always pulled forward to new discoveries via the rhythmic recurrence of tension and pleasure. (...) Second, I demonstrate that “Notes” is the germ of Husserl’s mature genetic phenomenology of attention. The 1893 analysis provides Husserl with all of the philosophical reasons and tools for the construction of his genetic account of attention in his late works. I then discuss how the disclosure of this novel subterranean link can prompt a rethinking of the development of phenomenology. (shrink)

The terminology surrounding the dispute between higher-order and first-order theories of consciousness is piled so high that it sometimes obscures the view. When the debris is cleared away, there is a real prospect.

Some things are _about_, or are _directed on_ , or _represent_, other things. For example, the sentence 'Cats are animals' is about cats (and about animals), this article is about intentionality, Emanuel Leutze's most famous painting is about Washington's crossing of the Delaware, lanterns hung in Boston's North Church were about the British, and a map of Boston is about Boston. In contrast, '#a$b', a blank slate, and the city of Boston are not about anything. Many mental states and events (...) also have "aboutness": the belief that cats are animals is about cats, as is the fear of cats, the desire to have many cats, and seeing that the cats are on the mat. Arguably some mental states and events are not about anything: sensations, like pains and itches, are often held to be examples. Actions can also be about other things: hunting for the cat is about the cat, although tripping over the cat is not. This -- rather vaguely characterized -- phenomenon of "aboutness" is called _intentionality_. Something that is about (directed on, represents) something else is said to "have intentionality", or (in the case of mental states) is said to be an "intentional mental state". (shrink)

Three arguments for the thesis that sex is socially constructed are examined and rejected. No such argument could succeed, because sex is not socially constructed.

A survey of color science and color vision.

This paper considers whether a physician is criminally liable for administering a dose of painkillers that hastens a patient's death. The common wisdom is that a version of the doctrine of double effect legally protects the physician. That is, a physician is supposedly acting lawfully so long as the physician's primary purpose is to relieve suffering. This paper suggests that the criminal liability issue is more complex than that. Physician culpability can be based on recklessness, and recklessness hinges on whether (...) a physician has taken an unjustifiable risk of hastening death. The authors identify three conditions of justifiability. Their analysis helps to explain the distinction between euthanasia, which is legally banned, and the use of risky analgesics, which is permitted in limited circumstances. (shrink)

Comment on David Papineau's _The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience_.

Millar has written a valuable monograph on perceptual knowledge. Knowing By Perceiving is careful and detailed, at times laborious, delivering many insights. Oc.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 12.1 (2002) 103-113 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note Update Searching Across Boundaries: National Information Resource on Ethics and Human Genetics* While indeed an historical moment, the announcement of the mapping of the human genome has been treated in the literature as a beginning—a new way to think about biology and the ways in which biological concepts are applied to medicine. Issues of both (...) Science and Nature magazines celebrated the event by establishing interdisciplinary websites where readers can access essays on aspects of genome mapping and directly link to databases to search for more information on the topics (IV. Genome Gateway 2001; The Human Genome 2001). Since 1994, the National Information Resource on Ethics and Human Genetics (NIREHG), a special project of the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRC), has been providing such an integrated information service on ethics and genetics. Designed to enable a wide range of users to go from annotated bibliographies (Scope Notes) and brief essays (called "enotes") to database searching, NIREHG fosters an interdisciplinary approach to research on ethics and genetics. Links are provided between and among Scope Notes and enotes to information maintained on the NIREHG site as well as to sources found throughout the Internet. In providing the following annotations added to NIREHG materials since 1997, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (in its online presence through Project Muse) becomes an additional forum for NIREHG links. "It is a rare and wonderful moment when success teaches us humility, and this, I argue, is precisely the moment at which we find ourselves at the end of the twentieth century" (IV. Keller 2000, p. 7). It is with both joy and humility that we celebrate the mapping of the human genome. [End Page 103] I. Genetic Testing Andrews, Lori B. Future Perfect: Confronting Decisions About Genetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. 264 p.Noting the wide impact of genetic testing, Andrews discusses patient self concept, reproduction decisions, confidentiality, discriminations in health insurance and employment, the need for competent counseling, and the legal, ethical, and social regulations she deems important to help solve dilemmas arising from the tests and their ensuing ramifications. She describes three models, pointing out both advantages and problems: a medical model with physician gatekeepers, a public health model that could provide education as well some testing for those unable to afford tests, and a fundamental rights model that could give greater weight to individuals decisions about the use of health care services. The book has 85 pages of footnotes.American Society of Human Genetics. Social Issues Subcommittee on Familial Disclosure. Professional Disclosure of Familial Genetic Information. American Journal of Human Genetics 62 (2): 474-83, February 1998.The ASHG statement outlines points to consider: the general rule of confidentiality, exceptional circumstances that permit disclosure, and the ethical duty to inform patients about familial implications. Background discussion includes: ethical frameworks for disclosure of otherwise confidential information, the duty to warn under law, and international trends and positions.Boetzkes, Elisabeth. Genetic Knowledge and Third-Party Interests. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 8 (4): 386-92, Summer 1999.Protection from the interests of insurers or prospective employers are discussed from the point of view of the ethical basis of the professional obligation to confidentiality as well as the right to privacy of those tested. However, the author supports family members, saying that "first-party resistance to disclosure may be overcome by weighty third-party claims."Chadwick, Ruth; Shickle, Darren; ten Have, Henk; and Wiesing, Urban, eds. The Ethics of Genetic Screening. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. 255 p.Twenty-one chapters and 23 authors provide views of genetic testing/screening in different European countries and offer brief discussions of sociological perspectives, moral and philosophical issues, privacy, reconciling liberty and the common good, and questions raised in genetic testing of children.Clayton, Ellen Wright. Genetic Testing in Children. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 22 (3): 233-51, June 1997.Clayton argues that there is room for... (shrink)

argument fails, and the purpose of this note is to bring out that failure. The view in question which Heck calls the Hybrid Vie~istinguishes between the meanings of names and the contents of beliefs which are expressible using names. According to the Hybrid View the meaning of a name is its referent: names do not have senses. Thus (a) "George Orwell wrote 1984" means the same as (b) "Eric Blair wrote 1984". However, the Hybrid View tells a different story about (...) the beliefs one expresses when one utters (a) or (b). The content of a belief expressed using a sentence that contains a name has more to it than just the referent of the name and whatever properties the sentence ascribes to the name's referent. There is.. (shrink)

This text surveys the thesis that all religions are alike in referring and relating to a single, common transcendent and sacred reality. It treats this thesis as one in the philosophy of religion and systematically sets out its main philosophical strengths and weaknesses. The key to understanding and defending pluralism is argued to lie in a realist understanding of religion, which is defined by way of an account of the reference of names for sacred, transcendent reality.

Siegel and Byrne debate whether perceptual experiences present rich properties or exclusively thin properties.

This study is an introduction to the problems of moral philosophy designed particularly for those interested in theology and religious studies. It offers an account of the nature and subject matter of moral reasoning and of the major types of moral theory in contemporary moral philosophy. The account aims to bring out the major issues in moral theory, to present a clear, non-technical articulation of the structure of moral knowledge, and to explore the relation between religious belief and morality.

This chapter considers Aristotle's requirements for perceptible objects qua movable, changeable, and perceptible, namely that they must be extended in three dimensions, movable in space, and capable of physical contact with other extended bodies.