Does the English demonstrative pronoun 'that' (including complex demonstratives of the form 'that F') have sense and reference? Unlike many other philosophers of language, Frege answers with a resounding 'No'. He held that the bearer of sense and reference is a so-called 'hybrid proper name' (Künne) that contains the demonstrative pronoun and specific circumstances of utterance such as glances and acts of pointing. In this paper I provide arguments for the thesis that demonstratives are hybrid proper names. After outlining why (...) Frege held the hybrid proper name view, I will defend it against recent criticism, and argue that it is superior to views that take demonstrative pronouns to be the bearer of semantic properties. (shrink)

J.L. Austin has demonstrated that people can do things—bring about social facts — with words. Here we describe how some people do things with things. This is a study of the symbolic use and situated history of material objects during a business negotiation between two German entrepreneurs: of the practical transformation of things-at-hand from objects of use into exemplars, or into forms-at-hand that can be used for the construction of transitory symbolic artifacts. Arranging boxes in a particular fashion can be (...) the equivalent of an illocutionary act, but unlike words things remain on the scene as indexical monuments to prior interactional arrangements. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to make two main points. The first point is methodological: Instead of attempting to give a classical analysis or reductive definition of the term “expertise”, we should attempt an explication and look for what may be called symptoms of expertise. What this comes to will be explained in due course. My second point is substantial: I want to recommend understanding as an important symptom of expertise. In order to give this suggestion content, I begin to (...) develop an account of understanding. Finally, I will draw attention to some consequences of this approach. (shrink)

This essay brings together questions from aesthetic theory and museum management. In particular, I relate a contextualist account of the value of copies to a pluralistic understanding of the purpose of museums. I begin by offering a new defence of the no longer fashionable view that the aesthetic (as opposed to the ethical, personal, monetary, historical, or other) value of artworks may be detached from questions regarding their provenance. My argument is partly based on a distinction between the process of (...) creating a work of art and the artwork in question.Next, I defend a pluralism about the purpose of museums and their exhibitions. I combine this with a pluralist account of the value of replicas which falls out of the above argument, exposing our preference for originality as being frequently fetishistic. I maintain that the importance of the provenance of artworks is relative to the specific purposes of any given exhibition or museum. Those that are primarily educational (such as encyclopaedic ones) are in many cases best served with high-quality replicas. This view may be extended to artefacts that are not artworks, such as fossils and dinosaur skeletons. Finally, I expound the variety of roles that replicas may play in museums and relate these to notions of authenticity. (shrink)

It is often claimed that nominalistic programmes to reconstruct mathematics fail, since they will at some point involve the notion of logical consequence which is unavailable to the nominalist. In this paper we use an idea of Goodman and Quine to develop a nominalistically acceptable explication of logical consequence.

In this paper I will introduce a practical explication for the notion of expertise. At first, I motivate this attempt by taking a look on recent debates which display great disagreement about whether and how to define expertise in the first place. After that I will introduce the methodology of practical explications in the spirit of Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the state of nature along with some conditions of adequacy taken from ordinary and scientific language. This eventually culminates in the (...) respective explication of expertise according to which this term essentially refers to a certain kind of service-relation. This is why expertise should be considered as a predominantly social kind. This article will end up with a discussion of advantages and prima facie plausible objections against my account of expertise. (shrink)

The book presents the case that cognitive science should turn its attention to developing theories of human cognition that cover the full range of human perceptual, cognitive, and action phenomena. Cognitive science has now produced a massive number of high-quality regularities with many microtheories that reveal important mechanisms. The need for integration is pressing and will continue to increase. Equally important, cognitive science now has the theoretical concepts and tools to support serious attempts at unified theories. The argument is made (...) entirely by presenting an exemplar unified theory of cognition both to show what a real unified theory would be like and to provide convincing evidence that such theories are feasible. The exemplar is SOAR, a cognitive architecture, which is realized as a software system. After a detailed discussion of the architecture and its properties, with its relation to the constraints on cognition in the real world and to existing ideas in cognitive science, SOAR is used as theory for a wide range of cognitive phenomena: immediate responses ; discrete motor skills ; memory and learning ; problem solving ; language ; and development. The treatments vary in depth and adequacy, but they clearly reveal a single, highly specific, operational theory that works over the entire range of human cognition, SOAR is presented as an exemplar unified theory, not as the sole candidate. Cognitive science is not ready yet for a single theory – there must be multiple attempts. But cognitive science must begin to work toward such unified theories. (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)

Les lecteurs ayant une simple connaissance de la littérature de recherche dans le domaine de la formation des enseignants au cours des 25 dernières années sont conscients de l’augmentation spectaculaire de l’utilisation de la «réflexivité» pour décrire les attributs souhaités ou les comportements des participants au programmes de développement professionnel pour les enseignants novices ou expérimentés. Notre intention est de tirer parti de nos propres expériences collectives de pratiques de recherche et d’enseignement pour cartographier comment et pourquoi nous avons d’abord (...) été interpellés par les nombreuses significations associées à ce terme et comment notre compréhension a changé au cours des quelque 25 dernières années. Nous pensons que ce type de «réflexion-sur-expérience» est mieux révélée grâce à l’utilisation d’un style narratif et donc nous avons délibérément utiliser un format conversationnel afin de faire part de notre histoire. (shrink)

This paper considers the implications for higher education of recent work on narrative theory, distributed cognition and artificial intelligence. These perspectives are contrasted with the educational implications of Heidegger's ontological phenomenology [being‐there and being‐aware (Da‐sein)] and with the classic and classical foundations of education which Heidegger and Gadamer once criticised. The aim is to prompt discussion of what teaching might become if psychological insights (about collective minds let loose to learn) are associated with every realm of higher education (not just (...) teacher training). (shrink)

. Implicit in the cognitive social learning model of personality as articulated by Walter Mischel, Albert Bandura, and others, is an epistemology which emphasizes the activity of the mind in the construction of knowledge. Using Mischel's five person variables as an outline, the epistemic implications of this model of personality are developed and then illustrated by application to William James's typology of the religious personality and to the current debate over hermeneutic and empirical approaches to studying human behavior. This approach (...) explicates the connection between personality characteristics and epistemological approaches in terms of cognitive social learning theory. (shrink)