A system of categories is a complete list of highest kinds or genera. Traditionally, following Aristotle, these have been thought of as highest genera of entities (in the widest sense of the term), so that a system of categories undertaken in this realist spirit would ideally provide an inventory of everything there is, thus answering the most basic of metaphysical questions: “What is there?”. Skepticism about the possibilities for discerning the different categories of ‘reality itself’ has led others to approach (...) category systems not with the aim of cataloging the highest kinds in the world itself, but rather with the aim of elucidating the categories of our conceptual system. Thus Kant makes the shift to a conceptualist approach by drawing out the categories that are.. (shrink)

Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903–30) made seminal contributions to philosophy, mathematics and economics. Whilst he was acknowledged as a genius by his contemporaries, some of his most important ideas were not appreciated until decades later; now better appreciated, they continue to bear an influence upon contemporary philosophy. His historic significance was to usher in a new phase of analytic philosophy, which initially built upon the logical atomist doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, raising their ideas to a new level of (...) sophistication, but ultimately he became their successor rather than remain a mere acolyte. (shrink)

Platonism about mathematics (or mathematical platonism) isthe metaphysical view that there are abstract mathematical objectswhose existence is independent of us and our language, thought, andpractices. Just as electrons and planets exist independently of us, sodo numbers and sets. And just as statements about electrons and planetsare made true or false by the objects with which they are concerned andthese objects' perfectly objective properties, so are statements aboutnumbers and sets. Mathematical truths are therefore discovered, notinvented., Existence. There are mathematical objects.

Ordinary English contains different forms of quantification over objects. In addition to the usual singular quantification, as in 'There is an apple on the table', there is plural quantification, as in 'There are some apples on the table'. Ever since Frege, formal logic has favored the two singular quantifiers ∀x and ∃x over their plural counterparts ∀xx and ∃xx (to be read as for any things xx and there are some things xx). But in recent decades it has been argued (...) that we have good reason to admit among our primitive logical notions also the plural quantifiers ∀xx and ∃xx. More controversially, it has been argued that the resulting formal system with plural as well as singular quantification qualifies as ‘pure logic’; in particular, that it is universally applicable, ontologically innocent, and perfectly well understood. In addition to being interesting in its own right, this thesis will, if correct, make plural quantification available as an innocent but extremely powerful tool in metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophical logic. For instance, George Boolos has used plural quantification to interpret monadic second-order logic and has argued on this basis that monadic second-order logic qualifies as “pure logic.” Plural quantification has also been used in attempts to defend logicist ideas, to account for set theory, and to eliminate ontological commitments to mathematical objects and complex objects. (shrink)

Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. The puzzles of intentionality lie at the interface between the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. The word itself, which is of medieval Scholastic origin, was rehabilitated by the philosopher Franz Brentano towards the end of the nineteenth century. ‘Intentionality’ is a philosopher's word. It derives from the Latin word intentio, which in turn derives from the verb (...) intendere, which means being directed towards some goal or thing. The entry falls into eleven sections. (shrink)

Speech acts are a staple of everyday communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the Twentieth Century.[1] Since that time “speech act theory” has been influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory and many other scholarly disciplines.[2] Recognition of the importance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things than describe reality. In the (...) process the boundaries among the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind and even ethics have become less sharp. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare an implicit normative structure within linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice concerned with describing reality. Much recent research aims at an accurate characterization of this normative structure underlying linguistic practice. (shrink)

-/- Hate speech is a concept that many people find intuitively easy to grasp, while at the same time many others deny it is even a coherent concept. A majority of developed, democratic nations have enacted hate speech legislation—with the contemporary United States being a notable outlier—and so implicitly maintain that it is coherent, and that its conceptual lines can be drawn distinctly enough. Nonetheless, the concept of hate speech does indeed raise many difficult questions: What does the ‘hate’ in (...) hate speech refer to? Can hate speech be directed at dominant groups, or is it by definition targeted at oppressed or marginalized communities? Is hate speech always ‘speech’? What is the harm or harms of hate speech? And, perhaps most challenging of all, what can or should be done to counteract hate speech? -/- In part because of these complexities, hate speech has spawned a vast and interdisciplinary literature. Legal scholars, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, political theorists, historians, and other academics have each approached the topic with exceeding interest. In this current article, however, we cannot hope to cover how these many disciplines have engaged with the concept of hate speech. Here, we will focus most explicitly on how hate speech has been taken up within philosophy, with particular emphasis on issues such as: how to define hate speech; what are the plausible harms of hate speech; how an account of hate speech might include both overt expressions of hate (e.g., the vitriolic use of slurs) as well as more covert, implicit utterances (e.g., dogwhistles); the relationship between hate speech and silencing; and what might we do to counteract hate speech. (shrink)

A singular thought can intuitively be understood as a thought that is directly about a particular thing, e.g., a non-conceptual thought about B.B. King, Mont Blanc, or your most beloved pet. The consensus within the singular thought literature has been that Gareth Evans (1982) develops a theory of singular thought throughout his posthumously published work The Varieties of Reference. However, Evans never claims to be developing a theory of singular thought, nor does the locution ‘singular thought’ appear more than a (...) handful of times throughout the work. The singular thought literature lacks any substantial exegetical engagement with the theory of singular thought that Evans argues for — including an account as to why Evans should be interpreted as offering a theory of singular thought, as well as how he should be so interpreted. The interpretation of Evans that I wish to argue for is one according to which a singular thought (for Evans) is an object-dependent thought, the thinking of which requires the satisfaction of Russell’s Principle. Liberalism is the thesis that there is no general acquaintance constraint on singular thought. Many contemporary Liberalists, including semantic instrumentalists and cognitivists, are quick to argue that Evans’ theory of singular thought is incorrect. What I seek to demonstrate is that, armed with a proper understanding of Evans’ theory of singular thought, most recent Liberalist critiques of Evans are unsuccessful because they either misevaluate or misidentify the explicandum with which Evans was concerned. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically examine the major philosophical standpoints regarding subsentential speech acts such as “Nice dress”, “Under the table”, or “Where?”. The opponents of this category argue either that apparent subsentential speech acts are ellipses or that they are not full-fledged speech acts. The defenders of subsentential speech acts argue that even though they are not sentences in the syntactic or the semantic sense, they can be used to perform a speech act. I argue in defence of subsentential (...) speech acts and propose to analyze them using Recanati’s moderate relativism. (shrink)

In the last forty years Dummett, Hanks, Künne, and Bobzien have claimed that when Frege wrote ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question [Satzfrage] was not a thought [Gedanke] ((Dummett 1981: 307–308); (Hanks 2007: 142–143); (Künne 2010: 427–429); (Bobzien 2021: 163–164)). Recently, Textor has claimed that when Frege wrote ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question was not a question [Frage] (Textor 2021: 227 fn.2). I think it is possible that (...) when Frege wrote ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question was a question and a thought. To show that this possibility should not be overlooked, I have written a dialogue in which Frege responds to Dummett, Hanks, Künne, Bobzien, and Textor. -/- Bobzien seems to think that when Frege wrote ‘Die Verneinung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question was not a question (Bobzien 2021: 163–165). I think it is possible that when Frege wrote ‘Die Verneinung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question was a question and a thought. Hence, I have also written the dialogue to show that this possibility should not be overlooked either. (shrink)

An imperative conditional is a conditional in the imperative mood (by analogy with “indicative conditional”, “subjunctive conditional”). What, in general, is the meaning and the illocutionary effect of an imperative conditional? I survey four answers: the answer that imperative conditionals are commands to the effect that an indicative conditional be true; two versions of the answer that imperative conditionals express irreducibly conditional commands; and finally, the answer that imperative conditionals express a kind of hybrid speech act between command and assertion.

Since the appearance of Dummett’s monumental monograph in the early seventies of the last century there have been two interpretative traditions of reading Frege, one contradicting the other: the platonistic (or realistic) interpretation and the holistic (rationalistic) one. In this article, as a kind of intermediation, I firstly point out some pragmatic aspects of Frege’s work. Secondly, and more ambitiously, I outline the controversy between the most influential theories of truth (the correspondence, coherence, redundancy and pragmatic theory) in the light (...) of Frege’s philosophy. After all it was the concept of truth that Frege himself identified as the main objective of logic. (shrink)

A very short introductory tutorial to Brandom's idea of assertion.

Summary of Anna Pilatova’s doctoral thesis A User’s Guide to Proper Names, Their Semantics And Pragmatics The origins of this work go all the way back to my reading of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity in 1993. It had left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction that lingered long enough to inspire my MA thesis (on Internalism and Externalism in the Theories of Reference), and finally inspired the current work. Over time, I became acquainted with other influential accounts of reference of (...) proper names, but my unease with essentialism and wariness of direct designation remained. In the User’s Guide to Proper Names, I seized the opportunity to analyse what I thought was problematic with the mainstream theories of reference of proper names. I tried to tease apart a number of related doctrines about the behaviour of proper names, and thus arrive at a better understanding of how the various parts of the theories of reference I chose to analyse are related. This helped me to develop my own proposal regarding both the semantics and the pragmatics of proper names. The Guide is organised around a particular approach to the tasks of a semantic theory. According to this view, proposed by Stalnaker, a semantic theory dealing with proper names should account for the descriptive semantics of names, their foundational semantics, and the semantics of modal statements in which they figure. Descriptive semantics focuses on the contribution a proper name makes to the truth-value of sentences in which it occurs. Based on such an analysis, a proper name is assigned a semantic value, which is supposed to provide us with an interpretation of that name. A crucial part of this task is to see just what kind of thing the semantic value of a proper name is. In interpreting sentences containing proper names, one can, and often does, use the notion of possible worlds. This is especially true if the sentences in question are modal. There are various approaches to modality, which carry with them different sets of presuppositions. An analysis of the systematic features and presuppositions of various possible-world frameworks is a part of the task of the semantics of modal statements. Another task of semantics of modal statements is to investigate whence the constraints on possible worlds used in analysing these statements should derive, that is, whether, and to what degree, they should derive from the descriptive or the foundational part of the semantic enterprise. Both of these parts of a semantic theory have the potential to make predictions about the foundational semantics of proper names, which deals with the speaker’s behaviour and communication. Foundational semantics aims at answering the following question: What makes it the case that the language spoken by a particular individual or community has the very descriptive semantics it has? In this investigation, one looks at the speaker, her intentions and communicative goals, and tries to look at the strategies she uses to get her (linguistic) point across. To show the usefulness of organising the User’s Guide to Proper Names around these distinctions, and to provide their proper characterisation, is the task of the first part of the introductory first chapter, Outlining the Field and Introducing Some of the Players. In the second part of the same chapter, Setting the Scene, I give a preliminary outline of some of the notions needed to describe the theories of reference that are later investigated, that is mainly the theories proposed by Kripke, Kaplan, Lewis, and Stalnaker. The second chapter, Descriptive Semantics, focuses on the descriptive semantics proposed by Kripke and Kaplan for proper names. In the first part of the chapter, I introduce several arguments in favour of rigid designation. A closer look reveals that none of the three arguments in question -- the modal, the epistemological, and the semantic one -- is actually an argument for rigid designation. They all just argue against some forms of descriptivism. Moreover, in the case of the modal and the epistemological argument, it is relatively easy to find forms of descriptivism that are immune to the lines of reasoning proposed in these arguments. The semantic argument seems to be the strongest of the three. An analysis of a direct argument for rigid designation highlights the connection between rigid designation and certain preconceptions about the identity of individuals. A further investigation of the notion of identity of individuals across possible worlds emerges at this point as an important issue to tackle. It also becomes clear that rigid designation alone cannot fully determine the Kripkean picture of names as non-descriptive entities referring without a mediation of any sort of conceptual content. In the second part of Chapter 2, I introduce the basic notions of Kaplan’s approach to the descriptive semantics of proper names. It turns out that in order to derive the familiar Kripkean picture of proper names, one has to presuppose direct reference for names and at least some version of haecceitism for the individuals in question. While, as we show, Kaplan’s framework does not work well for proper names, it gives us conceptual tools that help us in our undertaking. In the third chapter, Modal Statements, Individuals, and Essences, I analyse three different approaches to building a possible-world framework, Lewis’s, Kripke’s, and Stalnaker’s. In each case, the same questions are asked: What is the motivation and intended field of application of this framework? What are the ontological commitments of the approach? What form of essentialism, if any, does it imply? How does it deal with the notion of an individual? In Lewis’s case, the main problem turns out to be the theory of counterparts, which is, as I show, an integral part of his approach. The concept of an individual implied by it does not seem to correspond to any intuitive reading of counterfactual statements involving individuals. The investigation of Kripke’s framework focuses on describing the weakest form of essentialism that has to be presupposed to make the proposal work. Once that is concluded, I analyse the essentialism Kripke actually proposes, and the motivation and presuppositions on which it rests. I conclude that its motivation cannot be said to come from an analysis of language and that it presupposes a particular form of scientific realism. The rest of the chapter is devoted to a reconstruction and analysis of Stalnaker’s possible world framework, which turns out to be rather more cautious about metaphysical presuppositions and more suited for an analysis of natural language. As in the two previous proposals, I try to reconstruct the notion of actual world that is presupposed here. In the fourth chapter, Foundational Semantics, I investigate the notion of proposition implied by Lewis’s, Kripke’s, and Stalnaker’s approach. I focus on propositions containing proper names, and analyse the way in which each of the conceptions mentioned above is vulnerable to the problem of logical omniscience. An analysis of Lewis’s framework reveals that the concept of proposition implied by it is so weak as to be rather uninteresting. An investigation of Kripke’s concept of proposition deals not only with the systematic issues, but also with the Pierre puzzle and various attempts at solving it. I present a number of different approaches to the problem and compare their merits. Stalnaker is very worried about the problem of logical omniscience, and yet it turns out that his conception is less vulnerable to the adverse consequences of the problem of logical omniscience than other frameworks we investigate. I point out that various pragmatic features of Stalnaker’s framework (the epistemic nature of his possible-world framework, the Gricean principles built into the notion of assertion) help to counterbalance and mitigate the scope of the problem of logical omniscience within it. In Chapter 5, User-friendly Descriptive Semantics, I present and motivate my own proposal for the descriptive semantics of proper names and the treatment of modal statements in which they figure. Basically, the aim is to preserve the notion of names as rigidly designating expressions while admitting as little metaphysics as possible. Working with epistemic possible worlds whose domain is in each case co-determined by a particular context enables me to develop a very intuitive plausible notion of individual, to which a name can be said to refer rigidly. The interpretation of modal statements is then driven not by essentialist constraints in the common sense of the term, but by context-derived limitations, which seems to be a more natural approach. In the sixth and last chapter, Names, Indexicality, and Ambiguity, I develop a view of foundational semantics inspired by the pragmatic observation that in common parlance one can say that a name, `John Smith’ for instance, can refer to numerous individuals. A lot of attention is given to the ontology of names, and the question `What is a name?’ delivers answers which are then used in a discussion about whether names should be seen as indexical or ambiguous. I adopt the ambiguity view, and propose a way of using a Stalnakerian possible-world framework to derive intuitively plausible results for some difficult cases. The weight of the discussion all through the guide rests in an examination of different kinds of presuppositions implied by various possible-world frameworks and the notion of the individual used in accounts of the behaviour of proper names. In my own account of these issues, I do without any metaphysical assumptions and aim at describing communication in terms accessible to its participants. (shrink)

Knowledge is good, ignorance is bad. So it seems, anyway. But in this dissertation, I argue that some ignorance is epistemically valuable. Sometimes, we should suspend judgment even though by believing we would achieve knowledge. In this apology for ignorance (ignorance, that is, of a certain kind), I defend the following four theses: 1) Sometimes, we should continue inquiry in ignorance, even though we are in a position to know the answer, in order to achieve more than mere knowledge (e.g. (...) understanding) while minimizing the effects of confirmation bias. 2) It’s false that we should believe every proposition such that we are guaranteed to be right about it (and even such that we are guaranteed to know it) if we believe it. 3) Being in a position to know is the norm of assertion: importantly, this does not require belief or (thereby) knowledge, and so proper assertion can survive speaker-ignorance. 4) It can be permissible and conversationally useful to tell audiences things that it is logically impossible for them to come to know: Proper assertion can survive (necessary) audience-side ignorance. Cumulatively, this project suggests that, properly understood, ignorance has an important role to play in the good epistemic life. (shrink)

In a series of articles (Pagin, 2004, 2009), Peter Pagin has argued that assertion is not a social speech act, introducing a method (which we baptize ‘the P-test’) designed to refute any account that defines assertion in terms of its social effects. This paper contends that Pagin's method fails to rebut the thesis that assertion is social. We show that the P-test is both unreliable (because it overgenerates counterexamples) and counterproductive (because it ultimately provides evidence in favor of some social (...) accounts). Nonetheless, we contend that assertion is not fully social. We defend an intermediate view according to which assertion is only a partly social speech act: assertions both commit the speaker to a proposition (a social component) and present their propositional content as true (a non-social component). The upshot is that assertion is in some important respect social, although it cannot be defined solely in terms of its social effects. (shrink)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

Georgalis claimed that when Frege wrote ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ Frege thought that the indirect [ungerade] sense of an expression was identical to its normal [gewöhnlich] sense (Georgalis 2022: e.g. 4, 5, 13). In this paper, I present five arguments for the falsity of Georgalis’ claim which are based on three pieces of apparent counterevidence: a passage from Frege’s letter to Russell dated 28.12.1902; a passage from Frege’s letter to Russell dated 20.10.1902; and a passage from ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’. (...) I outline possible counter-arguments and responses. (shrink)

This paper argues against the claim that Frege is committed to an infinite hierarchy of senses. Carnap and Kripke, along with many others, argue the contrary; I expose where all such arguments go astray. Invariably these arguments assume (without citation) that Frege holds that sense and reference are always distinct. This is the fulcrum upon which the hierarchy is hoisted. The counter to this assumption is based on two important but neglected passages. The locution ‘indirect sense’ has no ontological significance (...) for Frege. It was just a ‘short expression’ (his term) to indicate that the customary relation between sign, sense, and reference is suspended in what he called the exception case of indirect context. Once the hierarchy is abandoned, the alleged problem of just what indirect sense is, as well as questions as to why Frege said so little about it and why he did not examine iterative indirect contexts are resolved. Of course, with no hierarchy, Davidson’s “unlearnability argument” turns out to be a non-starter. Some objections to my interpretation are considered and answered. Additionally, comparisons to Dummett’s one-level view of sense, which is similar to mine are made, as well as to some two-level views (Parsons and Skiba). (shrink)

This thesis focuses on models of conceptual change in science and philosophy. In particular, I developed a new bootstrapping methodology for studying conceptual change, centered around the formalization of several popular models of conceptual change and the collective assessment of their improved formal versions via nine evaluative dimensions. Among the models of conceptual change treated in the thesis are Carnap’s explication, Lakatos’ concept-stretching, Toulmin’s conceptual populations, Waismann’s open texture, Mark Wilson’s patches and facades, Sneed’s structuralism, and Paul Thagard’s conceptual revolutions. (...) -/- In order to analyze and compare the conception of conceptual change provided by these different models, I rely on several historical reconstructions of episodes of scientific conceptual change. The historical episodes of scientific change that figure in this work include the emergence of the morphological concept of fish in biological taxonomies, the development of scientific conceptions of temperature, the Church-Turing thesis and related axiomatizations of effective calculability, the history of the concept of polyhedron in 17th and 18th century mathematics, Hamilton’s invention of the quaternions, the history of the pre-abstract group concepts in 18th and 19th century mathematics, the expansion of Newtonian mechanics to viscous fluids forces phenomena, and the chemical revolution. I will also present five different formal and informal improvements of four specific models of conceptual change. I will first present two different improvements of Carnapian explication, a formal and an informal one. My informal improvement of Carnapian explication will consist of a more fine-grained version of the procedure that adds an intermediate, third step to the two steps of Carnapian explication. I will show how this novel three-step version of explication is more suitable than its traditional two-step relative to handle complex cases of explications. My second, formal improvement of Carnapian explication will be a full explication of the concept of explication itself within the theory of conceptual spaces. By virtue of this formal improvement, the whole procedure of explication together with its application procedures and its pragmatic desiderata will be reconceptualized as a precise procedure involving topological and geometrical constraints inside the theory of conceptual spaces. My third improved model of conceptual change will consist of a formal explication of Darwinian models of conceptual change that will make vast use of Godfrey-Smith’s population-based Darwinism for targeting explicitly mathematical conceptual change. My fourth improvement will be dedicated instead to Wilson’s indeterminate model of conceptual change. I will show how Wilson’s very informal framework can be explicated within a modified version of the structuralist model-theoretic reconstructions of scientific theories. Finally, the fifth improved model of conceptual change will be a belief-revision-like logical framework that reconstructs Thagard’s model of conceptual revolution as specific revision and contraction operations that work on conceptual structures. -/- At the end of this work, a general conception of conceptual change in science and philosophy emerges, thanks to the combined action of the three layers of my methodology. This conception takes conceptual change to be a multi-faceted phenomenon centered around the dynamics of groups of concepts. According to this conception, concepts are best reconstructed as plastic and inter-subjective entities equipped with a non-trivial internal structure and subject to a certain degree of localized holism. Furthermore, conceptual dynamics can be judged from a weakly normative perspective, bound to be dependent on shared values and goals. Conceptual change is then best understood, according to this conception, as a ubiquitous phenomenon underlying all of our intellectual activities, from science to ordinary linguistic practices. As such, conceptual change does not pose any particular problem to value-laden notions of scientific progress, objectivity, and realism. At the same time, this conception prompts all our concept-driven intellectual activities, including philosophical and metaphilosophical reflections, to take into serious consideration the phenomenon of conceptual change. An important consequence of this conception, and of the analysis that generated it, is in fact that an adequate understanding of the dynamics of philosophical concepts is a prerequisite for analytic philosophy to develop a realistic and non-idealized depiction of itself and its activities. (shrink)

The aim is (i) to outline an account what it is to grasp the meaning of a predicative term, and (ii) to draw on that account in an attempt to shed light on what the normativity of meaning might amount to. Central to the account is that grasping the meaning of a predicative term is a practical matter—it is knowing how to use it correctly in a way that implicates having an ability to use it correctly. This calls for an (...) examination of what it is to use a term correctly. Two quite different types of correctness are liable to be conflated. Sections 2 and 3 show why they must be kept apart. Sections 4 and 5 consider how correctness of the second type might be conceived within a practice-theoretic framework and how that framework might make sense of the idea that meaning is essentially normative. The concluding section responds to an objection. (shrink)

What semantics should we attribute to mass expressions like "wisdom" and "love", which are derived from gradable expressions? We first examine how these expressions are used, then how they are interpreted in their various uses. We then propose a model to account for these data, in which derived mass nouns denote instances of properties.

This peer-reviewed paper intervenes in debates relating to overarching themes that impact upon mass media studies, communication theory and theories of cognition more generally. In particular, the paper discusses issues involving how our ordinary psychological thinking relates to norms of rationality (and how these latter are conceived). In essence, I argue against a dominant approach taken by Christopher Peacocke, that rationality can be grounded in the possession of certain concepts. The article makes a new contribution to the field by arguing (...) against the dominant approach on two grounds: (a) it fails to distinguish between true and false normative commitments; (b) it is empirically unsound. In response, I briefly offer suggestions towards an alternative, and psychologically tractable, account of rational commitment. Presentations of earlier drafts of the paper were given at a seminar at the Centre for Study of Mind and Nature, Oslo, as well as the conference of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology. (shrink)

Gottfried Gabriel is interviewed by Todor Polimenov about the relationship between analytic and continental philosophy.

Bogusław Wolniewicz – polski tłumacz Pism semantycznych Gottloba Fregego – przełożył termin Bedeutung na język polski jako „znaczenie”, zauważając w przypisie, że wątpliwości, jakie może budzić w tym przypadku użycie tego słowa, budzi również użycie w języku niemieckim przez Fregego słowa Bedeutung. Jednocześnie Wolniewicz, w tym samym przypisie, twierdzi, że „to, co Frege nazywa znaczeniem znaku, pokrywa się z tym, co w dzisiejszej terminologii semantycznej zwykło się nazywać »denotacją« albo »denotatem«” (Frege, 2014a, s. 62, przypis 27). W niniejszym artykule postaram (...) się przedstawić rozumienie Fregowskiej kategorii znaczenia (Bedeutung), które oddawałoby sposób, w jaki posługiwał się nim niemiecki filozof, tj. zarówno w odniesieniu do nazw, zdań, jak i predykatów. W części pierwszej przedstawię pokrótce wzajemny stosunek podziałów na przedmioty i funkcje oraz na sens i znaczenie wyrażeń. W drugiej zarysuję sposób, w jaki Frege podchodził do problemów językowych i filozoficznych. W części trzeciej dokonam szczegółowej interpretacji kategorii znaczenia dla nazw, zdań pojedynczych i złożonych, a także predykatów. Część ostatnia dotyczy kwestii Fregowskiego realizmu, która jest kluczowa z punktu widzenia późniejszych krytyk forsowanej przeze mnie interpretacji Bedeutung. (shrink)

I argue that Kant's and Frege's refutations of the ontological argument are more similar than has generally been acknowledged. As I clarify, for both Kant and Frege, to say that something exists is to assert of a concept that it is instantiated. With such an assertion one expresses that there is a particular relation between the instantiating object and a rational subject - a particular mode of presentation for the object in question. By its very nature such a relation cannot (...) be the property of an object and thus cannot be included in the concept of that object. Thus the ontological argument, which takes existence to be a part of the concept of the supreme being, cannot, according to Kant and Frege, succeed. A secondary goal of the paper is to illuminate what I take to be an important affinity between Kant's and Frege's views more generally: that Frege's fundamental distinction between the sense and the referent of a proposition echoes, in an important way, Kant's distinction between concepts and the formal principles for their application to experience. (shrink)

Slurs are derogatory words; they seem to express contempt and hatred toward marginalized groups. They are used to insult and derogate their victims. Moreover, slurs give rise to philosophical questions. In virtue of what is the word “chink,” unlike “Chinese,” a derogatory word? Does “chink” refer to the same group as “Chinese”? If “chink” is a derogatory word, how is it possible to use it in a non-derogatory way (e.g., by Chinese comedians or between Chinese friends)? Many theories of slurs (...) answer these questions by assuming that slurs communicate derogatory messages. However, little attention has been paid to the speech acts slurs are used to perform. In this dissertation, I argue that slurs are illocutionary force indicators: words to perform the speech acts of derogation. “Chink” is a derogatory word because its use is to derogate the Chinese, just like the phrase “I promise” has the use to make a promise. To derogate the Chinese is to enforce a norm which assigns to them an inferior normative status. Slurs are also propositional indicators: words that contribute to the truth-conditions. “Chink” has the same referent as “Chinese,” its neutral counterpart. Appealing to speech act theory enables my theory to answer questions about slurs, e.g., slurs can be used in non-derogatory ways because the felicity conditions of derogation are not met. To illustrate the advantage of my theory, I will explain how other theories of slurs fall short because they take positions opposite to mine on certain issues. For instance, Mark Richard’s theory, unlike mine, takes utterances of slurs to have no truth values. It follows from his theory, I will argue, that lying with “Chang is a chink” is impossible. Finally, I will defend the force indicator theory from common objections. My force indicator theory provides a case study of the use theory of meaning and a framework for political philosophers to study the harm of slurs. (shrink)

What is the relation of logic to thinking? My dissertation offers a new argument for the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking in the following sense: representational activity counts as thinking only if it manifests sensitivity to logical rules. In short, thinking has to be minimally logical. An account of thinking has to allow for our freedom to question or revise our commitments – even seemingly obvious conceptual connections – without loss of understanding. This freedom, I argue, requires that (...) thinkers have general abilities to respond to support and tension among their thoughts. And these abilities are constituted by following logical rules. So thinkers have to follow logical rules. But there isn’t just one correct logic for thinking. I show that my view is consistent with logical pluralism: there are a range of correct logics, any one of which a thinker might follow. A logic for thinking does, however, have to contain certain minimal principles: Modus Ponens and Non-Contradiction, and perhaps others. We follow logical rules by exercising logical capacities, which display a distinctive first-person/third-person asymmetry: a subject can find the instances of a rule compelling without seeing them as instances of a rule. As a result, there are two limits on illogical thinking. First, thinkers have to tend to find instances of logical rules compelling. Second, thinkers can’t think in obviously illogical ways. So thinking has to be logical – but not perfectly so. When we try to think, but fail, we produce nonsense. But our failures to think are often subjectively indistinguishable from thinking. To explain how this occurs, I offer an account of nonsense. To be under the illusion that some nonsense makes sense is to enter a pretence that the nonsense is meaningful. Our use of nonsense within the pretence relies on the role of logical form in understanding. Finally, while the normativity of logic doesn’t fall directly out of logical constitutivism, it’s possible to build an attractive account of logical normativity which has logical constitutivism as an integral part. I argue that thinking is necessary for human flourishing, and that this is the source of logical normativity. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege abandoned his logicist program after Bertrand Russell had discovered that some assumptions of Frege’s system lead to contradiction (so called Russell’s paradox). Nevertheless, he proposed a new attempt for the foundations of mathematics in two last years of his life. According to this new program, the whole of mathematics is based on the geometrical source of knowledge. By the geometrical source of cognition Frege meant intuition which is the source of an infinite number of objects in arithmetic. In (...) this article, I describe this final attempt of Frege to provide the foundations of mathematics. Furthermore, I compare Frege’s views of intuition from The Foundations of Arithmetic (and his later views) with the Kantian conception of pure intuition as the source of geometrical axioms. In the conclusion of the essay, I examine some implications for the debate between Hans Sluga and Michael Dummett concerning the realistic and idealistic interpretations of Frege’s philosophy. (shrink)

This thesis concerns our moral and epistemic responsibilities regarding our concepts. I argue that certain concepts can be morally, epistemically, or socially problematic. This is particularly concerning with regard to our concepts of social kinds, which may have both descriptive and evaluative aspects. Being ignorant of certain concepts, or possessing mistaken conceptions, can be problematic for similar reasons, and contributes to various forms of epistemic injustice. I defend an expanded view of a type of epistemic injustice known as ‘hermeneutical injustice’, (...) where widespread conceptual ignorance puts members of marginalized groups at risk of their distinctive and important experiences lacking intelligible interpretations. Together, I call the use of problematic concepts or the ignorance of appropriate concepts ‘conceptual incapacities’. I discuss the conditions under which we may be responsible for our conceptual incapacities on several major theories of responsibility, developing my own account of responsibility in the process, according to which we are responsible for something just in case it was caused by one of our reasons-responsive constitutive psychological traits. However, I argue that regardless of whether we are responsible for something, we may still be required to take responsibility for it. Whether or not we are responsible for our conceptual incapacities, we are required to reflect critically upon them in a variety of scenarios that throw our use of those concepts into question. I consider the method of conceptual engineering — the philosophical critique and revision of concepts — as one way we might take responsibility for our concepts, or at least, defer that duty to experts. But, this top-down model of conceptual revision is insufficient. Using a pragmatist model of the social epistemology of morality, I argue that conceptual inquiry is a social endeavour in which we are all required to participate, to some degree. (shrink)

G. F. Stout is famous as an early twentieth century proselyte for abstract particulars, or tropes as they are now often called. He advanced his version of trope theory to avoid the excesses of nominalism on the one hand and realism on the other. But his arguments for tropes have been widely misconceived as metaphysical, e.g. by Armstrong. In this paper, I argue that Stout’s fundamental arguments for tropes were ideological and epistemological rather than metaphysical. He moulded his scheme to (...) fit what is actually given to us in perception, arguing that our epistemic practices would break down in an environment where only universals were given to us. (shrink)