Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers (BSP) has been widely influential well beyond Thomistic circles, but its modern historical sources and logical consequences call for further investigation. The first part of this two-part article explores three modern semantic assumptions or principles without which BSP’s innovated theory of existential judgment cannot be fully appreciated—the existential neutrality of the copula ubiquitous among modern logicians; Kant’s introduction of a positing or “thetic” function of judgment, the understanding of which evolved in nineteenth-century logic; and the (...) distinction between predication and assertion, generally accepted by late nineteenth century logicians. Part two of this paper offers a rereading of Gilson’s BSP as an implicit critique of and alternative to Maritain’s synthesis of Aquinas with these modern developments. (shrink)

The historical consensus is that logical evidence is special. Whereas empirical evidence is used to support theories within both the natural and social sciences, logic answers solely to a priori evidence. Further, unlike other areas of research that rely upon a priori evidence, such as mathematics, logical evidence is basic. While we can assume the validity of certain inferences in order to establish truths within mathematics and test scientifi c theories, logicians cannot use results from mathematics or the empirical sciences (...) without seemingly begging the question. Appeals to rational intuition and analyticity in order to account for logical knowledge are symptomatic of these commitments to the apriority and basicness of logical evidence. This chapter argues that these historically prevalent accounts of logical evidence are mistaken, and that if we take logical practice seriously we fi nd that logical evidence is rather unexceptional, sharing many similarities to the types of evidence appealed to within other research areas. (shrink)

In The Principles of Mathematics, Russell writes: Whatever may be an object of thought, or may occur in any true or false proposition, or can be counted as one, I call a term. This, then, is the widest word in the philosophical vocabulary. I shall use as synonymous with it the words unit, individual and entity. The first two emphasize the fact that every term is one, while the third is derived from the fact that every term has being, i.e. (...) is in some sense. A man, a moment, a number, a class, a relation, a chimera, or anything else that can be mentioned, is sure to be a term'. Now in this remark, a certain extremely general, topic-neutral use of ‘object’ is singled out, a use in which the expression is treated as equivalent to (equally neutral) uses of ‘term’, ‘entity’, ‘unit’, ‘individual’, and ‘thing’. In addition, a claim is made to the effect that the content of the expression, with its emphasis on one, is such as to be adequate to comprehend the sum-total of existence, to include whatever there may be. The paper addresses the question of what this claim means, and whether it might be true. (shrink)

Argues that a coherent theory of ethics requires an account of selfhood.

Theories about the ontological structure of the world have generally been described in informal, intuitive terms. This book offers an account of the general features and methodology of formal ontology. The book defends conceptual realism as the best system to adopt based on a logic of natural kinds. By formally reconstructing an intuitive, informal ontological scheme as a formal ontology we can better determine the consistency and adequacy of that scheme.

This paper brings to light a new puzzle for Frege interpretation, and offers a solution to that puzzle. The puzzle concerns Frege’s judgement-stroke (‘|’), and consists in a tension between three of Frege’s claims. First, Frege vehemently maintains that psychological considerations should have no place in logic. Second, Frege regards the judgementstroke—and the associated dissociation of assertoric force from content, of the act of judgement from the subject matter about which judgement is made—as a crucial part of his logic. Third, (...) Frege holds that judging is an inner mental process, and that the distinction marked by the judgement-stroke, between entertaining a thought and judging that it is true, is a psychological distinction. I argue that what initially looks like confusion here on Frege’s part appears quite reasonable when we remind ourselves of the differences between Frege’s conception of logic and our own. (shrink)

It is a commonplace of discussion about the impact of visual media, whether visual images in print, televisual images or the images of the internet, to claim that it functions irrationally. This paper argues against that claim. First, the assumptions about the connection between rationality and linear, written, unemotional prose are unjustified. Secondly, using analytic techniques analogous to those used in identifying argumentation in verbal text, is possible to discern arguments in visual text, in particular in image based advertisements.

Kripke's objections to descriptivism may be modified to apply to Scott Soames's pragmatic account from his book Beyond Rigidity. Further, intuitions about argument-validity threaten any theory in the vicinity of Soames's.

A central dispute in understanding Frege’s philosophy concerns how the sense of a complex expression relates to the senses of its component expressions. According to one reading, the sense of a complex expression is a whole built from the senses of the component expressions. On this interpretation, Frege is an early proponent of structured propositions. A rival reading says that senses compose by functional application: the sense of a complex expression is the value of the function denoted by its functional (...) component for the arguments denoted by its remaining components. I argue that two non-negotiable Fregean theses entail that senses compose by functional application. One thesis is that referents compose by functional application. The other thesis is that an expression in an indirect context refers to its customary sense. (shrink)

According to K. McDaniel’s and J. Turner’s Ontological Pluralism, there are many ways of being that are more fundamental than being in general. In this paper, I shall analyze some constraints on this doctrine. Among other, ontological pluralists are committed to the idea that there are no things that have no way of being at all and that it is not legitimate to quantify over ways of being. Later on, I shall introduce a problem for ontological pluralism: if there is (...) a privileged way of being an ontological pluralist, then, given those constraints, ontological pluralists cannot logically express that privileged way. Finally, I shall justify the acceptance of a Half-Meinongian solution to this problem, that is roughly grounded on the acceptance of entities that have no way of being at all. (shrink)

A shorthand symbolism for the relational mapping of categories is introduced and developed on the basis of Nelson Goodman's structural methodology. Through a reconstruction of extensional isomorphism that Goodman introduces as a criterion for definitional accuracy, and a brief reminder of the argument structure behind his ‘new riddle of induction’, Goodman's radical ontological relativism is turned into a protological principle of what I call ‘domain constituting philosophy’. MSS is demonstrated with reference to Goodman's symbol theory, particularly his notion of exemplification, (...) as well as in a final structured comparison of Frege's ‘sense’ with Goodman's straightforward construction of ‘secondary extension’. (shrink)

This is a thorough treatment of first-order modal logic. The book covers such issues as quantification, equality (including a treatment of Frege's morning star/evening star puzzle), the notion of existence, non-rigid constants and function symbols, predicate abstraction, the distinction between nonexistence and nondesignation, and definite descriptions, borrowing from both Fregean and Russellian paradigms.

Given the plethora of competing logical theories of validity available, it’s understandable that there has been a marked increase in interest in logical epistemology within the literature. If we are to choose between these logical theories, we require a good understanding of the suitable criteria we ought to judge according to. However, so far there’s been a lack of appreciation of how logical practice could support an epistemology of logic. This paper aims to correct that error, by arguing for a (...) practice-based approach to logical epistemology. By looking at the types of evidence logicians actually appeal to in attempting to support their theories, we can provide a more detailed and realistic picture of logical epistemology. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of a practice-based approach, we look to a particular case of logical argumentation—the dialetheist’s arguments based upon the self-referential paradoxes—and show that the evidence appealed to support a particular theory of logical epistemology, logical abductivism. (shrink)

While anti-exceptionalism about logic is now a popular topic within the philosophy of logic, there’s still a lack of clarity over what the proposal amounts to. currently, it is most common to conceive of AEL as the proposal that logic is continuous with the sciences. Yet, as we show here, this conception of AEL is unhelpful due to both its lack of precision, and its distortion of the current debates. Rather, AEL is better understood as the rejection of certain traditional (...) properties of logic. The picture that results is not of one singular position, but rather a cluster of often connected positions with distinct motivations, understood in terms of their rejection of clusters of the various traditional properties. In order to show the fruitfulness of this new conception of AEL, we distinguish between two prominent versions of the position, metaphysical and epistemological AEL, and show how the two positions need not stand or fall together. (shrink)

Much discussion of meaning by philosophers over the last 300 years has been predicated on a Cartesian first-person authority (i.e. “infallibilism”) with respect to what one’s terms mean. However this has problems making sense of the way the meanings of scientific terms develop, an increase in scientific knowledge over and above scientists’ ability to quantify over new entities. Although a recent conspicuous embrace of rigid designation has broken up traditional meaning-infallibilism to some extent, this new dimension to the meaning of (...) terms such as “water” is yet to receive a principled epistemological undergirding (beyond the deliverances of “intuition” with respect to certain somewhat unusual possible worlds). Charles Peirce’s distinctive, naturalistic philosophy of language is mined to provide a more thoroughly fallibilist, and thus more realist, approach to meaning, with the requisite epistemology. Both his pragmatism and his triadic account of representation, it is argued, produce an original approach to meaning, analysing it in processual rather than objectual terms, and opening a distinction between “meaning for us”, the meaning a term has at any given time for any given community and “meaning simpliciter”. the way use of a given term develops over time (often due to a posteriori input from the world which is unable to be anticipated in advance). This account provocatively undermines a certain distinction between “semantics” and “ontology” which is often taken for granted in discussions of realism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Our ascriptions of content to past utterances assign to them a level of conceptual continuity and determinacy that extends beyond what could be grounded in the usage up to their time of utterance. If one accepts such ascriptions, one can argue either that future use must be added to the grounding base, or that such cases show that meaning is not, ultimately, grounded in use. The following will defend the first option as the more promising of the two, though (...) this ultimately requires understanding the relation between use and meaning as ‘normative’ in two important ways. The first way is that the function from use to meaning must be of a sort that allows us to maintain a robust distinction between actual and correct use. The second sort of normativity is unique to theories that extend the grounding base into the future. In particular, if meaning is partially a function of future use, we can see our commitment to the ‘determinacy’ of meaning as a practical commitment that structures our linguistic practices rather than a theoretical commitment that merely describes them. (shrink)

Whether assent ("acceptance") and dissent ("rejection") are thought of as speech acts or as propositional attitudes, the leading idea of rejectivism is that a grasp of the distinction between them is prior to our understanding of negation as a sentence operator, this operator then being explicable as applying to A to yield something assent to which is tantamount to dissent from A. Widely thought to have been refuted by an argument of Frege's, rejectivism has undergone something of a revival in (...) recent years, especially in writings by Huw Price and Timothy Smiley. While agreeing that Frege's argument does not refute the position, we shall air some philosophical qualms about it in Section 5, after a thorough examination of the formal issues in Sections 1-4. This discussion draws on - and seeks to draw attention to - some pertinent work of Kent Bendall in the 1970s. (shrink)

Truth and knowledge are conceptually related and there is a way of construing both that implies that they cannot be solely derived from a description that restricts itself to a set of scientific facts. In the first section of this essay, I analyse truth as a relation between a praxis, ways of knowing, and the world. In the second section, I invoke the third thing—the objective reality on which we triangulate as knowing subjects for the purpose of complex scientific endeavours (...) like medical science and clinical care. Such praxes develop robust methods of “keeping in touch” with disease and illness. An analysis drawing on philosophical semantics motivates the needed account of meaning and truth and underpins the following argument: the formulation and dissemination of knowledge rests on language; language is selective in what it represents in any given situation; the praxes of a given culture are based on this selectivity; but human health and illness involve whole human beings in a human life-world; therefore, medical knowledge should reflectively transcend, where required, biomedical science towards a more inclusive view. Parts three and four argue that a post-structuralist account of the human subject can avoid both scientism and idealism or unconstrained relativism. (shrink)

What is phenomenology's contribution to contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind? I am here concerned with this question, and in particular with phenomenology's contribution to what has come to be called the problem of consciousness. The problem of consciousness has constituted the focal point of classical phenomenology as well as the main problem, and indeed perhaps the stumbling block, of the philosophy of mind in the last two decades. Many philosophers of mind, for instance, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, Owen (...) Flanagan, Colin McGinn and David Chalmers, have acknowledged the properly phenomenological character of this problem; Nagel is even willing to entrust the study of phenomenal consciousness to what he calls an “objective phenomenology.” Yet, the phenomenology to which these philosophers resort has little to do with the conceptual framework that was developed within the phenomenological tradition. They put forward an entity they term “phenomenal consciousness,” but only in the hope that it may be explained by means of the theories that currently prevail in the philosophy of mind or in cognitive sciences. (shrink)

This paper deals with the truth-Conditions and the logic for vague languages. The use of supervaluations and of classical logic is defended; and other approaches are criticized. The truth-Conditions are extended to a language that contains a definitely-Operator and that is subject to higher order vagueness.

The goal of this paper is a philosophical explication and logical rectification of the notion of concept. We take into account only those contexts that are relevant from the logical point of view. It means that we are not interested in contexts characteristic of cognitive sciences, particularly of psychology, where concepts are conceived of as some kind of mental objects or representations. After a brief recapitulation of various theories of concept, in particular Frege’s and Church’s ones, we propose our own (...) theory based on procedural semantics of Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) and explicate concept in terms of the key notion of TIL, namely construction viewed as an abstract, algorithmically structured procedure. (shrink)

This paper is dedicated to developing a formalism that takes rejection seriously. Bilateral notation of signed formulas with force indicators is adopted to define signed consequences which can be viewed as the bilateral counterpart of Tarskian consequence relations. Its relation to some other bilateral approaches is discussed. It is shown how David Nelson’s logic N4 can be characterized bilaterally and the corresponding completeness result is proved. Further, bilateral variants of three familiar notions are considered and investigated: that of a fragment, (...) of definitional equivalence, and of a conservative extension. (shrink)

The paper discusses the emergence of Frege's puzzle and the introduction of the celebrated distinction between sense and reference in the context of Frege's logicist project. The main aim of the paper is to show that not logicism per se is mainly responsible for this introduction, but Frege's constant struggle against formalism. Thus, the paper enlarges the historical context, and provides a reconstruction of Frege's philosophical development from this broader perspective.

The problematic features of Quine's set theories NF and ML are a result of his replacing the higher-order predicate logic of type theory by a first-order logic of membership, and can be resolved by returning to a second-order logic of predication with nominalized predicates as abstract singular terms. We adopt a modified Fregean position called conceptual realism in which the concepts (unsaturated cognitive structures) that predicates stand for are distinguished from the extensions (or intensions) that their nominalizations denote as singular (...) terms. We argue against Quine's view that predicate quantifiers can be given a referential interpretation only if the entities predicates stand for on such an interpretation are the same as the classes (assuming extensionality) that nominalized predicates denote as singular terms. Quine's alternative of giving predicate quantifiers only a substitutional interpretation is compared with a constructive version of conceptual realism, which with a logic of nominalized predicates is compared with Quine's description of conceptualism as a ramified theory of classes. We argue against Quine's implicit assumption that conceptualism cannot account for impredicative concept-formation and compare holistic conceptual realism with Quine's class Platonism. (shrink)

Response‐dispositional (RD) properties are standardly defined as those that involve an object's appearing thus or thus to some perceptually well‐equipped observer under specified epistemic conditions. The paradigm instance is that of colour or other such Lockean “secondary qualities”, as distinct from those—like shape and size—that pertain to the object itself, quite apart from anyone's perception. This idea has lately been thought to offer a promising alternative to the deadlocked dispute between hard‐line ‘metaphysical’ realists and subjectivists, projectivists, social constructivists, or hard‐line (...) anti‐realists. A chief source text is Plato's Euthyphro, where the issue is posed in ethical terms: do the gods infallibly approve virtuous acts on account of their divine moral omniscience or are virtuous acts just those the gods approve? Among the areas proposed as amenable to an RD approach are epistemology, ethics, political theory, and philosophy of mathematics. It is claimed that by making due allowance for the involvement of normalised or optimised human responses one can steer a course between the twin poles of an objectivist realism that places truth beyond our cognitive grasp and an epistemic conception that confines truth within the limits of humanly attainable proof, knowledge, or verification. Here I argue—on the contrary—that RD approaches can be shown to offer nothing more than a variant of the same old realist versus anti‐realist dilemma. That is, they work out either as a trivial (tautologous) claim that ‘truth’ simply equates with ‘best judgement’ in the ideal (quasi‐objective) limit or as the claim—advanced by anti‐realists like Michael Dummett—that we cannot form any adequate conception of objective (recognition‐transcendent) truths. After looking at this issue in various contexts of debate, I conclude that one useful (if pyrrhic) outcome is to demonstrate the non‐availability of any middle‐ground stance. We are left with the strictly unavoidable choice between a realist or objectivist approach and one that assimilates truth to the consensus of accredited best opinion. This latter amounts to a roundabout, elaborately qualified version of the anti‐realist case. (shrink)

This paper discusses two notational variance views with respect to indexical singular reference and content: the view that certain forms of Millianism are at bottom notational variants of a Fregean theory of reference, the Fregean Notational Variance Claim; and the view that certain forms of Fregeanism are at bottom notational variants of a direct reference theory, the Millian Notational Variance Claim. While the former claim rests on the supposition that a direct reference theory could be easily turned into a particular (...) version of a neo-Fregean one by showing that it is bound to acknowledge certain senselike entities, the latter claim is based upon the supposition that a neo-Fregean theory could be easily turned into a particular version of a Millian one by showing that De Re senses are theoretically superfluous and hence eliminable. The question how many accounts of singular reference and content are we confronted with here — Two different (and mutually antagonistic) theories? Or just two versions of what is in essence the same theory? — is surely of importance to anyone interested in the topic. And this question should be answered by means of a careful assessment of the soundness of each of the above claims. Before trying to adjudicate between the two accounts, one would naturally want to know whether or not there are indeed two substantially disparate accounts. Grosso modo, if the Fregean Claim were sound then we would have a single general conception of singular reference to deal with, viz. Fregeanism; likewise, if the Millian Claim were sound we would be facing a single general conception of singular reference, viz. Millianism. My view is that both the Fregean Notational Variance Claim and its Millian counterpart are wrong, though naturally on different grounds. I have argued elsewhere that the Fregean Notational Variance Claim - considered in its application to the semantics of propositional-attitude reports involving proper names — is unsound. I intend tosupplement in this paper such a result by trying to show that the Millian Claim - taken in its application to the semantics of indexical expressions — should also be rated as incorrect. I focus on a certain set of arguments for the Millian Claim, arguments which I take as adequately representing the general outlook of the Millian theorist with respect to neo-Fregeanism about indexicals and which involve issues about the cognitive significance of sentences containing indexical terms. (shrink)

This article discusses and develops some recent debates in feminist epistemology, by outlining the concept of an ‘emancipatory value’. It outlines the optimum conditions that a ‘community’ of knowers must satisfy in order that its members have the best chance of producing knowledge claims. The article thus covers general ground in epistemology. The article also argues that one of the conditions that any ‘emancipatory community’ must satisfy is that its underlying values should not oppress women. It is related to feminist (...) debates, therefore, in two ways: first, it develops its arguments by drawing on those debates; and second, after developing the general concepts of emancipatory value and epistemic community, it argues that feminist values are one set of emancipatory values to which an epistemic community should pay regard. (shrink)

We describe a general logical framework, Justification Logic, for reasoning about epistemic justification. Justification Logic is based on classical propositional logic augmented by justification assertions t: F that read t is a justification for F. Justification Logic absorbs basic principles originating from both mainstream epistemology and the mathematical theory of proofs. It contributes to the studies of the well-known Justified True Belief vs. Knowledge problem. We state a general Correspondence Theorem showing that behind each epistemic modal logic, there is a (...) robust system of justifications. This renders a new, evidence-based foundation for epistemic logic. As a case study, we offer a resolution of the GoldmanRed Barns in Justification Logic. Furthermore, we formalize the well-known Gettier example and reveal hidden assumptions and redundancies in Gettier’s reasoning. (shrink)

I introduce various proposal from Gottlob Frege to lately Kit Fine for the solution of Frege's Puzzle, viz. "a is b" has a different cognitive value from "a is a".

One might well wonder—is there a category under which every thing falls? Offering an informative account of such a category is no easy task. For nothing would distinguish things that fall under it from those that don’t—there being, after all, none of the latter. It seems hard, then, to say much about any fully general category; and it would appear to do no carving or categorizing or dividing at all. Nonetheless there are candidates for such a fully general office, including (...) thing, being, entity, item, existent, and—especially—object.[ It is not obvious that there is any fully general category (whether object or otherwise). Accordingly, not all accounts of object assign it to a fully general category, instead allowing that there are non-objects. On those views, object does indeed divide. Accounts of object, then, differ with respect to whether there are non-objects. And this is not the only fault line. Other dimensions of difference include what objects there are and what objects are. Accordingly, this entry will survey three broad questions about the category object: What, if any, is its contrast or complement? What is its extension? What is its nature? (shrink)

I defend a theory of mental representation that satisfies naturalistic constraints. Briefly, we begin by distinguishing (i) what makes something a representation from (ii) given that a thing is a representation, what determines what it represents. Representations are states of biological organisms, so we should expect a unified theoretical framework for explaining both what it is to be a representation as well as what it is to be a heart or a kidney. I follow Millikan in explaining (i) in terms (...) of teleofunction, explicated in terms of natural selection. -/- To explain (ii), we begin by recognizing that representational states do not have content, that is, they are neither true nor false except insofar as they both “point to” or “refer” to something, as well as “say” something regarding whatever it is they are about. To distinguish veridical from false representations, there must be a way for these separate aspects to come apart; hence, we explain (ii) by providing independent theories of what I call f-reference and f-predication (the ‘f’ simply connotes ‘fundamental’, to distinguish these things from their natural language counterparts). -/- Causal theories of representation typically founder on error, or on what Fodor has called the disjunction problem. Resemblance or isomorphism theories typically founder on what I’ve called the non-uniqueness problem, which is that isomorphisms and resemblance are practically unconstrained and so representational content cannot be uniquely determined. These traditional problems provide the motivation for my theory, the structural preservation theory, as follows. F-reference, like reference, is a specific, asymmetric relation, as is causation. F-predication, like predication, is a non-specific relation, as predicates typically apply to many things, just as many relational systems can be isomorphic to any given relational system. Putting these observations together, a promising strategy is to explain f-reference via causal history and f-predication via something like isomorphism between relational systems. -/- This dissertation should be conceptualized as having three parts. After motivating and characterizing the problem in chapter 1, the first part is the negative project, where I review and critique Dretske’s, Fodor’s, and Millikan’s theories in chapters 2-4. Second, I construct my theory about the nature of representation in chapter 5 and defend it from objections in chapter 6. In chapters 7-8, which constitute the third and final part, I address the question of how representation is implemented in biological systems. In chapter 7 I argue that single-cell intracortical recordings taken from awake Macaque monkeys performing a cognitive task provide empirical evidence for structural preservation theory, and in chapter 8 I use the empirical results to illustrate, clarify, and refine the theory. (shrink)

It is a commonly held view that Frege's doctrine of senses and references is not compatible with the idea that there are de re beliefs. The present paper is meant to challenge that view. Moreover, it seeks to show that, instead of forcing Frege's semantic framework to answer questions raised by twentieth-century philosophy of language, we could try to find other questions to which it might be an answer. It is argued that the proper treatment of Frege's views requires the (...) acknowledgement of the central role of individualistic epistemology in his thought. Once this is recognized, Frege's doctrine of senses and references can be considered a theory, or at least a sketch of a theory, of cognition, which has interesting connections with Kant's and Husserl's views. (shrink)

While we agree that the frame problem, as initially stated by McCarthy and Hayes (1969), is a problem that arises because of the use of representations, we do not accept the anti-representationalist position that the way around the problem is to eliminate representations. We believe that internal representations of the external world are a necessary, perhaps even a defining feature, of higher cognition. We explore the notion of dynamically created context-dependent representations that emerge from a continual interaction between working memory, (...) external input, and long-term memory. We claim that only this kind of representation, necessary for higher cognitive abilities such as counterfactualization, will allow the combinatorial explosion inherent in the frame problem to be avoided. (shrink)

The nexus of predication is accounted for in different ways in different theories of universals. We briefly review the account given in nominalism, logical realism , and natural realism. Our main goal is to describe the account given in a modern form of conceptualism extended to include a theory of intensional objects as the contents of our predicable and referential concepts.

This thesis offers a teleosemantic account of moral discourse and judgment. It develops a number of views about the function and content of moral judgments and the nature of moral discourse based on Ruth Millikan’s theory of intentional content and the functions of intentional attitudes. Non-cognitivists in meta-ethics have argued that moral judgments are more akin to desires and other motivational attitudes than to descriptive beliefs. I argue that teleosemantics allows us to assign descriptive content to motivational attitudes and hence (...) that even if the non-cognitivist is correct, moral judgments can be said to describe the world. Moreover, given further teleosemantic assumptions, this conclusion has consequences that are both surprising and interesting. First of all, while moral judgments have descriptive content, moral statements do not. The purpose of moral discourse is not to convey beliefs that are true simpliciter, but to convey attitudes that are descriptively correct when tokened by the addressee. Consequently, moral discourse requires speakers to adapt to hearers in order to secure their assent and bring them into "community of judgment" with themselves. Secondly, the descriptive content of a motivational attitude is partly a matter of the subject’s own preferences and circumstances. In particular, the descriptive correctness of a moral judgment is partly a function of the degree to which it is shared with others. Since a moral judgment also motivates the subject to spread it, it has the ability to, in a certain sense, make itself true. If regular descriptive beliefs are supposed to adapt the subject to the world, a moral judgment also has the capacity to adapt the world to the subject. (shrink)

This thesis examines the relation between self-deception and self-consciousness. It has been argued that, if we follow the literalist and take self-deception at face value – as a deception that is intended by, and imposed on, one and the same self-conscious subject – then self-deception is impossible. It will incur the Dynamic Problem that, being aware of my intention to self-deceive, I shall see through my projected self-deceit from the outset, thereby precluding its possibility. And it will incur the following (...) Static Problem. Qua self-deceiver, I shall believe not-P, but – qua self-deceived – I shall believe P. We shall then have to explain how I can sustain contradictory beliefs in full self-awareness. I argue that this rejection of literalism about self-deception rests on error. First, it misunderstands what literalism holds. Properly understood, literalism does not require the simultaneous commitment to contradictory beliefs. Second, it misunderstands the relation between self-deception and self-consciousness – and that is my primary focus. The phenomenology of self-deception reveals that the self-deceiver experiences the following tension. She is somehow aware of her self-deception as such. Yet also, she misrepresents that self-deception to herself as being a sincere commitment to the truth – so, in that sense, she is not aware of her self-deceit as such. To capture this tension, we require a theory of self-consciousness – independently defensible in its own right – that will meet this twofold requirement, of permitting the self-deceiver not to see what is right before her gaze. The rejection of literalism presupposes that no theory of self-consciousness can meet this twofold requirement.I argue that this twofold requirement can be met. The first part of this thesis offers a detailed defence of a theory of self-consciousness. The second part shows how this theory of self-consciousness can faithfully capture the tension of self-deception, while eschewing the Dynamic and Static Problems. It thereby claims to vindicate the literalist's position. (shrink)

The main chapters of this thesis develop and defend a version of two-dimensional semantics that provides an account of Kripkean a posteriori necessity.