My aim in this chapter is to extend the Realist account of the foundations of linguistics offered by Postal, Katz and others. I first argue against the idea that naive Platonism can capture the necessary requirements on what I call a ‘mixed realist’ view of linguistics, which takes aspects of Platonism, Nominalism and Mentalism into consideration. I then advocate three desiderata for an appropriate ‘mixed realist’ account of linguistic ontology and foundations, namely (1) linguistic creativity and infinity, (2) linguistics as (...) a theory of types (and not tokens) and (3) independence but structural respect between language and the linguistic competence thereof. My own brand of mixed realism, what I call ante rem realism, is defended along the lines of an ante rem or non-eliminative structuralism, the likes of which has been offered for mathematics by Resnik (1997) and Shapiro (1997). In other words, grammars describe a mind-independent (but not necessarily unconnected) linguistic reality in terms of linguistic patterns or structures also known as natural languages. I further amend this picture to allow for the possibility of a naturalistic account of language acquisition and evolution by arguing against a particular view of the type-token distinction. (shrink)

This dissertation concerns the foundations of epistemic modality. I examine the nature of epistemic modality, when the modal operator is interpreted as concerning both apriority and conceivability, as well as states of knowledge and belief. The dissertation demonstrates how phenomenal consciousness and gradational possible-worlds models in Bayesian perceptual psychology relate to epistemic modal space. The dissertation demonstrates, then, how epistemic modality relates to the computational theory of mind; metaphysical modality; deontic modality; logical modality; the types of mathematical modality; to the (...) epistemic status of undecidable propositions and abstraction principles in the philosophy of mathematics; to the apriori-aposteriori distinction; to the modal profile of rational propositional intuition; and to the types of intention, when the latter is interpreted as a modal mental state. Examining the nature of epistemic logic itself, I develop a novel approach to conditions of self-knowledge in the setting of the modal μ-calculus, as well as novel epistemicist solutions to Curry's, the liar, and the knowability paradoxes. Solutions to previously intransigent issues concerning the first-person concept; the distinction between fundamental and derivative truths; and the unity of intention and its role in decision theory, are developed along the way. (shrink)

Paul Benacerraf’s argument that mathematical realism is apparently incompatible with mathematical knowledge has been widely thought to also show that a priori knowledge in general is problematic. Although many philosophers have rejected Benacerraf’s argument because it assumes a causal theory of knowledge, some maintain that Benacerraf nevertheless put his finger on a genuine problem, even though he didn’t state the problem in its most challenging form. After diagnosing what went wrong with Benacerraf’s argument, I argue that a new, more challenging, (...) version of Benacerraf’s problem can be constructed. The new version—what I call the Defeater Version—of Benacerraf’s problem makes use of a no-defeater condition on knowledge and justification. I conclude by arguing that the best way to avoid the problem is to construct a theory of how a priori judgments reliably track the facts. I also suggest four different kinds of theories worth pursuing. (shrink)

W. V. Quine famously claimed that no statement is immune to revision. This thesis has had a profound impact on twentieth century philosophy, and it still occupies centre stage in many contemporary debates. However, despite its importance it is not clear how it should be interpreted. I show that the thesis is in fact ambiguous between three substantially different theses. I illustrate the importance of clarifying it by assessing its use in the debate against the existence of a priori knowledge. (...) I show how the three different readings of the thesis can be used to generate three substantially different and philosophically significant arguments against the a priori. I further challenge each one of these arguments against the a priori. (shrink)

Segundo um influente argumento contra a existência de conhecimento a priori, não há conhecimento a priori porque (i) nenhuma crença é imune à revisão, e (ii) se houvesse conhecimento a priori, algumas crenças seriam irrevisíveis. Uma versão deste argumento foi celebremente defendida por W. V. Quine e ainda é popular entre filósofos naturalistas. O objectivo deste artigo é examinar e rejeitar este argumento contra o a priori. O artigo começa por discutir a tese (i) e o seu papel no modelo (...) da Teia de Crenças de Quine. Defende-se que (i) enfrenta importantes desafios que colocam em risco o seu uso no argumento supra. A premissa (ii) do argumento é então discutida. Philip Kitcher é conhecido pela sua defesa de uma versão da premissa (ii). Os seus argumentos são analisados e rejeitados. A conclusão é que não temos uma boa razão para aceitar (ii), e consequentemente este argumento contra o a priori. O artigo termina com a proposta de uma caracterização do a priori perfeitamente compatível com (i). (shrink)

Quine's holistic empiricist account of scientific inquiry can be characterized by three constitutive principles: *noncontradiction*, *universal revisability* and *pragmatic ordering*. We show that these constitutive principles cannot be regarded as statements within a holistic empiricist's scientific theory of the world. This claim is a corollary of our refutation of Katz's [1998, 2002] argument that holistic empiricism suffers from what he calls the Revisability Paradox. According to Katz, Quine's empiricism is incoherent because its constitutive principles cannot themselves be rationally revised. Using (...) Gärdenfors and Makinson's logic of belief revision based on epistemic entrenchment, we argue that Katz wrongly assumes that the constitutive principles are *statements* within a holistic empiricist's theory of the world. Instead, we show that constitutive principles are best seen as *properties* of a holistic empiricist's theory of scientific inquiry and we submit that, without Katz's mistaken assumption, the paradox cannot be formulated. We argue that our perspective on the status of constitutive principles is perfectly in line with Quinean orthodoxy. In conclusion, we compare our findings with van Fraassen's [2002] argument that we should think of empiricism as a stance, rather than as a doctrine. (shrink)

This article explores Jürgen Habermas’s critical employment of Noam Chomsky’s insights and the philosophical assumptions that motivate or justify Habermas’s early enrichment of his universal pragmatics with material drawn from generative linguistics. The investigation of the influence Chomsky’s theory has exerted on Habermas aims to clarify what Habermas means by universalism, reason embedded in language and the universal core of communicative competence—away from various misinterpretations of Habermas’s rationalist commitments and from reductive, conventionalist readings of his notion of consensus. Much against (...) hasty and unexamined incriminations of Habermasian pragmatics, a turn to a neglected and scantly researched topic such as the philosophical affinity of some Chomskian and Habermasian themes (and to the philosophical justification of the points where Chomsky and Habermas part company) will retrieve the kind of depth and nuance that may lead us beyond facile and simplistic understandings of what discursively reaching consensus might mean from a Habermasian point of view. (shrink)

The following essay sets out the background developments in mathematics and set theory that inform Alain Badiou’s Being and Event in order to provide some context both for the original text and for comment on Chris Norris’s excellent exploration of Badiou’s work. I also provide a summary of Badiou’s overall approach.

Evidential holism begins with something like the claim that “it is only jointly as a theory that scientific statements imply their observable consequences.” This is the holistic claim that Elliott Sober tells us is an “unexceptional observation”. But variations on this “unexceptional” claim feature as a premise in a series of controversial arguments for radical conclusions, such as that there is no analytic or synthetic distinction that the meaning of a sentence cannot be understood without understanding the whole language of (...) which it is a part and that all knowledge is empirical knowledge. This paper is a survey of what evidential holism is, how plausible it is, and what consequences it has. Section 1 will distinguish a range of different holistic claims, Sections 2 and 3 explore how well motivated they are and how they relate to one another, and Section 4 returns to the arguments listed above and uses the distinctions from the previous sections to identify holism's role in each case. (shrink)

It has been widely argued that words are analogous to species such that words, like species, are natural kinds. In this paper, I consider the metaphysics of word-kinds. After arguing against an essentialist approach, I argue that word-kinds are homeostatic property clusters, in line with the dominant approach to other biological and psychological kinds.

The concern of this paper is not with the truth of any particular realist or anti-realist view, but rather with determining what it is to be a realist or anti-realist in the first place. While much skepticism has been voiced in recent years about the viability of such a project, my goal is to articulate interesting and informative conditions whereby any view in any domain of experience can count as either a realist or an anti-realist position.

A widespread intuition is that words, musical works, and flags are intentionally produced and that they’re abstract types that can have incorrect tokens. But some philosophers, notably Julian Dodd and Nicholas Wolterstorff, think intention-dependence isn’t necessary; tokens just need to have certain relevant intrinsic features to be tokens of a given type. I show how there’s an unappreciated puzzle that arises from these two views: if tokens aren’t intention-dependent and types can admit of correct and incorrect tokens, then some driftwood (...) that washes up and forms what seems like the word ‘cat’ may simultaneously be a misspelling of ‘act’ and innumerable other misspelt words. I consider various ways Dodd and Wolterstorff can respond to this counterintuitive result and argue that biting the bullet, as well as nearby views, are implausible. Thus, they need to give up one of the two commitments, and I argue that requiring the intention-dependence of tokens, rather than the mere possession of certain intrinsic properties, is the best option. (shrink)

Chomsky's criticism of Bloomfieldian structuralism's conception of linguistic reality applies equally to his own conception of linguistic reality. There are too many sentences in a natural language for them to have either concrete acoustic reality or concrete psychological or neural reality. Sentences have to be types, which, by Peirce's generally accepted definition, means that they are abstract objects. Given that sentences are abstract objects, Chomsky's generativism as well as his psychologism have to be given up. Langendoen and Postal's argument in (...) The Vastness of Natural Languages to show that there are more than denumerably many sentences is flawed. But, with the view that sentences are abstract objects, the flaws can be corrected. Once psychologism and generativism are abandoned, the revolution against Bloomfieldian structuralism can be brought to completion and linguistics can be put on a sound philosophical basis. (shrink)

Words are indispensable linguistic tools for beings like us. However, there is not much philosophical work done about what words really are. In this paper, I develop a new ontology for words. I argue that words are abstract artifacts that are created to fulfill various kinds of purposes, and words are abstract in the sense that they are not located in space but they have a beginning and may have an end in time given that certain conditions are met. What (...) follows from this two-fold argument is that words, from an ontological point of view, are more like musical works, fictional characters or computer programs, than numbers or sets. (shrink)

Abstract artifacts such as musical works and fictional entities are human creations; they are intentional products of our actions and activities. One line of argument against abstract artifacts is that abstract objects are not the kind of objects that can be created. This is so, it is argued, because abstract objects are causally inert. Since creation requires being caused to exist, abstract objects cannot be created. One common way to refute this argument is to reject the causal inefficacy of abstracta. (...) I argue that creationists should rather reject the principle that creation requires causation. Creation, in my view, is a non-causal relation that can be explained using an appropriate notion of ontological dependence. The existence and the creation of abstract artifacts depend on certain individuals with appropriate intentions, along with events of a certain kind that include but are not limited to creations of certain concrete objects. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze the semantics of the first person pronoun “I” from the perspective of the user/producer distinction. In the first part of the paper, I describe the Simple View and propose three interpretations of its thesis. In the second part, I analyze the notions of use and production of a linguistic token. In the next part, I show that all of the interpretations of SV are sensitive to counterexamples. In the end, I discuss possible answers of the (...) proponents of SV and argue against them. The first aim of this paper is to show that SV is wrong, and the second is to convince the reader that the user/producer distinction is of high importance in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Epistemology has recently witnessed a number of efforts to rehabilitate rationalism, to defend the existence and importance of a priori knowledge or warrant construed as the product of rational insight or apprehension (Bealer 1987; Bigelow 1992; BonJour 1992, 1998; Burge 1998; Butchvarov 1970; Katz 1998; Plantinga 1993). This effort has sometimes been coupled with an attack on naturalistic epistemology, especially in BonJour 1994 and Katz 1998. Such coupling is not surprising, because naturalistic epistemology is often associated with thoroughgoing empiricism and (...) the rejection of the a priori. In this paper, however, I shall present a conception of naturalistic epistemology that is entirely compatible with a priori justification or knowledge. The resulting conception, I claim, gives us a better appreciation of the respective merits of the rational and the empirical, as well as a better understanding of how moderate epistemological naturalism comports, at least in principle, with moderate rationalism. This paper defends moderate rationalism; but it does not defend everything rationalists have often wanted, only what it is reasonable to grant them. (shrink)

In a recent article, Mark Colyvan has criticized Jerrold Katz's attempt to show that Quinean holism is self-refuting. Katz argued that a Quinean epistemology incorporating a principle of the universal revisability of beliefs would have to hold that that and other principles of the system were both revisable and unrevisable. Colyvan rejects Katz's argument for failing to take into account the logic of belief revision. But granting the terms of debate laid down by Colyvan, the universal revisability principle still commits (...) Quineans to holding that one belief is both revisable and unrevisable: the belief that some beliefs are revisable. (shrink)

This paper examines the paradox of revisability. This paradox was proposed by Jerrold Katz as a problem for Quinean naturalised epistemology. Katz employs diagonalisation to demonstrate what he takes to be an inconsistency in the constitutive principles of Quine's epistemology. Specifically, the problem seems to rest with the principle of universal revisability which states that no statement is immune to revision. In this paper it is argued that although there is something odd about employing universal revisability to revise itself, there (...) is nothing paradoxical about this. At least, there is no paradox along the lines suggested by Katz. (shrink)

W.V. Quine is committed to the claim that all beliefs are rationally revisable; Jerrold Katz has argued that this commitment is unstable on grounds of self-application. The subsequent discussion of this issue has largely proceeded in terms of the logic of belief revision, but there is also an issue here for the treatment of Quine’s views in a doxastic modal system. In this paper I explore the treatment of Quinean epistemology in modal terms. I argue that a set of formal (...) revisability desiderata can be distilled from Quine’s epistemic writings, and that there are demonstrably coherent and non-trivial systems that meet these conditions. (shrink)

This paper defends the Quine-Putnam mathematical indispensability argument against two objections raised by Penelope Maddy. The objections concern scientific practices regarding the development of the atomic theory and the role of applied mathematics in the continuum and infinity. I present two alternative accounts by Stephen Brush and Alan Chalmers on the atomic theory. I argue that these two theories are consistent with Quine’s theory of scientific confirmation. I advance some novel versions of the indispensability argument. I argue that these new (...) versions accommodate Maddy’s history of the atomic theory. Counter-examples are provided regarding the role of the mathematical continuum and mathematical infinity in science. (shrink)

It is widely believed that platonists face a formidable problem: that of providing an intelligible account of mathematical knowledge. The problem is that we seem unable, if the platonist is right, to have the causal relationships with the objects of mathematics without which knowledge of these objects seems unintelligible. The standard platonist response to this challenge is either to deny that knowledge without causation is unintelligible, or to make room for causal interactions by softening the platonism at issue. In this (...) essay I argue that the idea of causal relations with fully platonist objects is unproblematic. (shrink)

There is an apparent conflict in Quine’s work between, on the one hand, his clear commitment to the rational revisability of logic and, on the other, his principle of charitable translation and ‘change of logic, change of subject’ argument. I argue that the apparent conflict is mostly resolved under close exegesis, but that the translation argument normatively rules out collaborative revision and allows only revision by individuals. However, I articulate a Neo-Quinean view that preserves the rational acceptability of collaborative revision. (...) On that view, everything is rationally revisable in some manner or other — it’s just that the logical principles that laypersons find (actually or potentially) obvious and tacitly use to govern their everyday inferences can’t be rationally revised quickly and all at once. Since, in Quine’s view, what most people find obvious resists change, rational changes to laymen’s logic must be gradual. (shrink)

Over the decades, the claim that everything is revisable (defended by Quine and others) has played an important role in Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Some time ago, Katz (1988) argued that this claim is paradoxical. This paper does not discuss this objection but rather argues that the claim of universal revisability allows for two different readings but in each case leads to a contradiction and is false.

Kant discovered a philosophical problem with mathematical proof. Despite being a priori , its methodology involves more than analytic truth. But what else is involved? This problem is widely taken to have been solved by Frege’s extension of logic beyond its restricted (and largely Aristotelian) form. Nevertheless, a successor problem remains: both traditional and contemporary (classical) mathematical proofs, although conforming to the norms of contemporary (classical) logic, never were, and still aren’t, executed by mathematicians in a way that transparently reveals (...) why these proofs—written in the vernacular to this very day—succeed in conforming to those norms. (shrink)

A feature of agnostic views—views that officially express ignorance about the existence of something —is that they are widely perceived to be epistemically more cautious than views that are committed to the entities in question. This is often seen as giving agnostics a debating advantage: all things being equal, fence-sitters have smaller argumentative burdens. Otávio Bueno argues in this way for what he calls “agnostic nominalism,” the view that we don’t know whether ontologically-independent Platonic objects exist. I show that agnostic (...) nominalism, so called, can be sustained only in ways that don’t give agnostic nominalists debating advantages: the position must either be deduced from antecedently-held broader sceptical assumptions or it requires manufacturing potential referents for one’s terms that artificially generate grounds for scepticism. Neither maneuver leads to an agnostic nominalism with a debating advantage over its nominalist opponents. (shrink)

A distinction between the epistemic practices in mathematics and in the empirical sciences is rehearsed to motivate the epistemic role puzzle. This is distinguished both from Benacerraf's 1973 epistemic puzzle and from sceptical arguments against our knowledge of an external world. The stipulationist position is described, a position which can address this puzzle. Methods of avoiding the stipulationist position by using pure logic to provide knowledge of mathematical abstracta are discussed and criticized.

It is our contention that an ontological commitment to propositions faces a number of problems; so many, in fact, that an attitude of realism towards propositions—understood the usual “platonistic” way, as a kind of mind- and language-independent abstract entity—is ultimately untenable. The particular worries about propositions that marshal parallel problems that Paul Benacerraf has raised for mathematical platonists. At the same time, the utility of “proposition-talk”—indeed, the apparent linguistic commitment evident in our use of 'that'-clauses (in offering explanations and making (...) predictions)—is also in need of explanation. We account for this with a fictionalist analysis of our use of 'that'-clauses. Our account avoids certain problems that arise for the usual error-theoretic versions of fictionalism because we apply the notion of semantic pretense to develop an alternative, pretense-involving, non-error-theoretic, fictionalist account of proposition-talk. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: Introduction Dretske's Adaptation of Information Theory to Knowledge Interesting Open Questions Current Philosophical Debates.

This paper aims to vindicate the thesis that cognitive computational properties are abstract objects implemented in physical systems. I avail of the equivalence relations countenanced in Homotopy Type Theory, in order to specify an abstraction principle for epistemic intensions. The homotopic abstraction principle for epistemic intensions provides an epistemic conduit into our knowledge of intensions as abstract objects. I examine, then, how intensional functions in Epistemic Modal Algebra are deployed as core models in the philosophy of mind, Bayesian perceptual psychology, (...) and the program of natural language semantics in linguistics, and I argue that this provides abductive support for the truth of homotopic abstraction. Epistemic modality can thus be shown to be both a compelling and a materially adequate candidate for the fundamental structure of mental representational states, comprising a fragment of the Language of Thought. (shrink)

Kaplan (1990; 2011) argues that there are no unspoken words. Hawthorne and Lepore (2011) put forward examples that purport to show that there can be such words. Here, I argue that Kaplan is correct, if we grant him a minor variation. While Hawthorne and Lepore might be right that there can be unspoken words, I will argue that they fail to show that there can be uninstantiated words.