The aim of this paper is to discuss Kripkc?s reasons for declaring the existence of both necessary a posteriori as well as contingent a priori statements, thus breaking the traditional extensional coincidence of the two pairs of concepts:necessary?contingent and a priori?a posteriori. As I shall argue, there is no reason, from Kripke?s work at least, to reject the usual picture of the topic The appeal ot his arguments rests on the ambiguity with which his expressions are used and on the (...) introduction o\ new senses for old notions. This does not mean, however, that all Knpke?s and Putnam?s intuitions on singular terms and natural kind nouns are wrong. Once Kripke?s ideas are properly uudeistood, they are much moreharmless then they are presented to be and they do not pose a threat to traditional relations relations between modal and epistemological categories. (shrink)

El artículo ofrece una caracterización de las constantes lógicas, [CL], analizando el significado de las expresiones que son sus contrapartidas en el lenguaje natural. [CL] recoge los rasgos sintácticos, semánticos y pragmáticos individualmente necesarios y conjuntamente suficientes para que una expresión sea una constante lógica. Se obtendrá la siguiente conclusión: que la lista de las expresiones que habitualmente se consideran constantes lógicas no comparten rasgos relevantes desde el punto de vista del significado que justifiquen su tratamiento como un grupo homogéneo. (...) Sólo algunos usos del condicional, de la negación y de ciertos cuantificadores son constantes lógicas genuinas. (shrink)

The background of this paper is what I call “pragmatic inferentialism,” a view that I attribute to Robert Brandom. Here, I develop Brandom’s view and argue that it is a kind of subject naturalism, in Price’s sense, and that the charge of idealism sometimes addressed against it is unwarranted. Regarding, I show that pragmatic inferentialism finds support from evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology. Regarding, I present what I call “level 0 expressivism,” which I take to be the semantic counterpart of (...) some aspects of evolutionary psychology and developmental psychology. Besides, I resort to Brandom’s defense of Hegel’s conceptual realism. The conclusion of the paper is a vindication of objective truth in the inferentialist framework. (shrink)

This paper deals with Ramsey's theory of truth and its aim is twofold: on the one hand, it will explain what position about truth Ramsey actually defended, and, on the other hand, we will pursue Ramsey's insight in the 20th Century. When the name of Frank Ramsey is mentioned, one of the things that comes to mind is the theory of truth as redundancy. In the following pages we will argue that Ramsey never supported such a theory, but rather an (...) analysis of truth noticeably similar to the prosentential account. In fact, the very word "pro-sentence" appears for the first time in the 20th Century in Ramsey's unfinished work "The nature of truth," written around 1929. Besides, we will show that the prosentential account of truth is a neglected trend throughout the history of analytic philosophy, even though relevant analytic philosophers, such as Prior, Strawson, Williams, Grover, and Brandom, have endorsed it. (shrink)

Este artículo debate algunas de las cuestiones que el Profesor Puntel discute en su conferencia “‘verdad’ como concepto ontológico-semántico” (2007). La conferencia de Puntel toca numerosos aspectos de la noción de verdad; de entre ellos, hemos aislado dos conjuntos temáticos. El primero tiene que ver con cuestiones preliminares acerca de la verdad que el Prof. Puntel discute antes de presentar su posición. El segundo está relacionado con la posición particular que Puntel defiende y en concreto con su crítica a las (...) teorías pro-oracionales. El primer asunto tiene relevancia porque las cuestiones preliminares en teoría de la verdad constriñen el desarrollo posterior de la teoría de manera determinante; el segundo aspecto tiene relevancia porque la crítica de Puntel encierra ciertos malentendidos de fondo que desdibujan su propia posición y le impiden tener el alcance que el Prof. Puntel le atribuye. (shrink)

We identify two senses of ‘pragmatics’ and related terms that give rise to two different methods of propositional individuation. The first one is the contextualist approach that essentially acknowledges contextual information to take part in the determination of what is said by the utterance of a sentence. In this sense, Pragmatics relies on the Principle of Compositionality and interprets propositions as structured entities. It epitomises the Building-block Model of Propositional Individuation. The general approach that makes what the agents do the (...) grounding level of philosophical and linguistic analysis characterizes the second sense, Pragmatism. It finds its clearest expression in Peirce’s Pragmatist Maxim, and it relies on the Fregean Principle of Context, and supports a view of propositions as unstructured entities. This is the Organic Model of Propositional Individuation. There is a test, the Analytic Equivalence Test, that tells apart the two models. According to it, the answer to the question whether a theory makes room for different but analytically equivalent propositions determines the model the theory belongs in. A positive answer classifies the theory as belonging to the building-block model; a negative answer allocates the theory within the organic model. (shrink)