Provides a comprehensive overview and introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Propositions.

The book is about logical analysis of natural language. Since we humans communicate by means of natural language, we need a tool that helps us to understand in a precise manner how the logical and formal mechanisms of natural language work. Moreover, in the age of computers, we need to communicate both with and through computers as well. Transparent Intensional Logic is a tool that is helpful in making our communication and reasoning smooth and precise. It deals with all kinds (...) of linguistic context in a fully compositional and anti-contextual way. (shrink)

It is plausible that the universe exists: a thing such that absolutely everything is a part of it. It is also plausible that singular, structured propositions exist: propositions that literally have individuals as parts. Furthermore, it is plausible that for each thing, there is a singular, structured proposition that has it as a part. Finally, it is plausible that parthood is a partial ordering: reflexive, transitive, and anti-symmetric. These plausible claims cannot all be correct. We canvass some costs of denying (...) each claim and conclude that parthood is not a partial ordering. Provided that the relevant entities exist, parthood is not anti-symmetric and proper parthood is neither asymmetric nor transitive. (shrink)

What does it mean to know how to do something? This book develops a comprehensive account of know-how, a crucial epistemic goal for all who care about getting things right, not only with respect to the facts, but also with respect to practice. It proposes a novel interpretation of the seminal work of Gilbert Ryle, according to which know-how is a competence, a complex ability to do well in an activity in virtue of guidance by an understanding of what it (...) takes to do so. This idea is developed into a full-fledged account, Rylean responsibilism, which understands know-how in terms of the normative guidance and responsible control of one's acts. Within the complex current debate about know-how, this view occupies a middle ground position between the intellectualist claim that know-how just is propositional or objectual knowledge and the anti-intellectualist claim that know-how just is ability. In genuine know-how, practical ability and guiding intellect are both necessary, but essentially intertwined. (shrink)

In this article, I use Edmund Gettier’s Ten Coins hypothetical scenario to illustrate some reasoning errors in the use of definite descriptions. The Gettier problem, central as it is to modern epistemology, is first and foremost an argument, which Gettier (Analysis 23(6):121–123, 1963) constructs to prove a contrary conclusion to a widely held view in epistemology. Whereas the epistemological claims in the case have been extensively analysed conceptually, the strategies and tools from other philosophical disciplines such as analytic philosophy of (...) language, logic and argumentation that Gettier deploys in the case have scarcely received any attention. This work abstracts from the epistemological content and examines Gettier’s handling of the definite description involved, and how that affects the cogency of his argument. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that a principal argument in favor of the existence of non-conceptual content (henceforth NCC) fails. That is, I do not accept that considerations regarding the richness of our perceptual experiences support the existence of NCC. I argue instead that the existence of NCC is empirically motivated. Here is an outline of the paper. First, I set out the distinction between conceptual content and NCC as we understand it. Second, I consider the richness argument (RA), and (...) argue that it fails. I argue in particular that RA (or RA-style arguments) are either self-defeating or confl ict with reasonably established accounts of early perceptual processing. Third, I tackle a residual phenomenological puzzle and offer a solution to it. Fourth, I argue that the existence of NCC enjoys empirical support. I argue in particular that states associated with early stages of visual perceptual processing have NCC. (shrink)

Frege’s writings contain arguments for the thesis (i) that a thought expressed by a sentence S is a structured object whose composition pictures the composition of S, and for the thesis (ii) that a thought is an unstructured object. I will argue that Frege’s reasons for both (i) and (ii) are strong. Frege’s explanation of the difference in sense between logically equivalent sentences rests on assumption (i), while Frege’s claim that the same thought can be decomposed differently makes (ii) plausible. (...) Thoughts are supposed to do work that requires that they be structured and work that requires that they be unstructured. But this cannot be! While the standard response to this problem is to reject either (i) or (ii), I propose a charitable repair in the spirit of Frege’s theory that accepts both. The key idea can be found in Frege’s Basic Laws of Arithmetic(BL, GGA). Frege argues that the thought expressed by a sentence is determined by the truth-conditions that can be derived from the semantic axioms for the sentence constituents. The fact that the same axiomatic truth-condition can be derived in different ways from different semantic axioms suggests a Fregean solution of the dilemma: A thought is a type that is instantiated by all sequences of senses (decomposed thoughts) that have the same axiomatic truth-conditions. This allows for multiple decomposability of the same thought (for different decomposed thoughts can have the same axiomatic truth-conditions) and for a notion of containment (the decomposed thought contains those senses whose semantic axioms are needed in the derivation of the truth-conditions). My proposal combines the virtues of (i) and (ii) without inheriting their vices. (shrink)

The paper gives a detailed reconstruction and discussion of Peirce’s doctrine of propositions, so-called Dicisigns, developed in the years around 1900. The special features different from the logical mainstream are highlighted: the functional definition not dependent upon conscious stances nor human language, the semiotic characterization extending propositions and quasi-propositions to cover prelinguistic and prehuman occurrences of signs, the relations of Dicisigns to the conception of facts, of diagrammatical reasoning, of icons and indices, of meanings, of objects, of syntax in Peirce’s (...) logic-as-semiotics. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a new semantic framework designed to capture a distinctly cognitive or epistemic notion of meaning akin to Fregean senses. Traditional Carnapian intensions are too coarse-grained for this purpose: they fail to draw semantic distinctions between sentences that, from a Fregean perspective, differ in meaning. This has led some philosophers to introduce more fine-grained hyperintensions that allow us to draw semantic distinctions among co-intensional sentences. But the hyperintensional strategy has a flip-side: it risks drawing semantic distinctions (...) between sentences that, from a Fregean perspective, do not differ in meaning. This is what we call the ‘new problem’ of hyperintensionality to distinguish it from the ‘old problem’ that faced the intensional theory. We show that our semantic framework offers a joint solution to both these problems by virtue of satisfying a version of Frege’s so-called ‘equipollence principle’ for sense individuation. Frege’s principle, we argue, not only captures the semantic intuitions that give rise to the old and the new problem of hyperintensionality, but also points the way to an independently motivated solution to both problems. (shrink)

The pragmatic framework developed by H.P. Grice in “Logic and Conversation” explains how a speaker can mean something more than, or different from, the conventional meaning of the sentence she utters. But it has been argued that the framework cannot give a similar explanation for cases where these pragmatic effects impact the understood content of an embedded clause, such as the antecedent of a conditional, a clausal disjunct, or the clausal complement of a verb. In this paper, I show that (...) such an explanation is available. One of the central arguments of the paper is that in a significant subset of cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of a global pragmatic requirement. In these cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of ‘acting locally’ to resolve a potential global pragmatic violation. These cases do not require us to posit application of pragmatic principles to the contents of embedded clauses. The account does, though, require the assumption that interpreters can identify and reason about the contents of unasserted sub-parts of sentences, an assumption that I motivate in section 3. Building on this, in section 4 of the paper, I argue that once we have recognized that interpreters can, and do, reason independently about the contents of non-asserted clauses, it becomes unproblematic to assume that in some cases, Gricean conversational principles do apply directly to these contents, providing an alternative route to account for local pragmatic effects. In revisiting the ideas of this paper in my response to the commentaries, I consider in more detail the revisions to Grice’s broader program that are necessitated by these moves, in particular acknowledging the problematicity of Grice’s notion of what is said. I argue that the starting point for Gricean reconstructions should instead be merely what is expressed, which carries no pragmatic commitments regarding what is speaker meant. (shrink)

There is a long-standing and rarely contested view that Gricean conversational reasoning—the kind of reasoning that supports the identification of conversational implicatures—cannot produce pragmatically generated modification of the contents of embedded clauses. The goal of this paper is to argue against this view: to argue that embedded pragmatic effects can be seen as continuous with ordinary, utterance-level, conversational implicature. I will further suggest, though, that embedded pragmatic effects do force on us a particular conception of semantics. Specifically, I will argue (...) that an adequate account of the data requires a semantic framework that posits structured contents. (shrink)

An important issue for visual argumentation is its relationship to propositions, since it has been argued that, in order to be arguments, images should be propositional. The first part of the paper will approach this debate from a theoretical perspective. After quickly surveying the field on the issue, I will address the relationship between images and propositions. Three specific questions will be examined: can propositions accurately account for the way images express arguments?; are verbal propositions necessary to reconstruct arguments that (...) images alone cannot convey, due to their lacking linguistic tools?; are images essentially non-propositional because they don’t have truth-value? The second part of the paper will include a detailed analysis of two posters. From these analyses, I will ultimately conclude that some images can display a visual argument without necessarily being propositional. (shrink)

David Chalmers’ two-dimensionalism is an ambitious philosophical program that aims to “ground” or “construct” Fregean meanings and restore “the golden triangle” of apriority, necessity, and meaning that Kripke seemingly broke. This paper aims to examine critically what Chalmers’ theory can in reality achieve. It is argued that the theory faces severe challenges. There are some gaps in the overall arguments, and the reasoning is in some places somewhat circular. Chalmers’ theory is effectively founded on certain strong philosophical assumptions. It is (...) concluded that it is unclear whether the theory can deliver all it promises. (shrink)

I argue that Frege Problems in thought are best modeled using graph-theoretic machinery; and that these problems can arise even when subjects associate all the same qualitative properties to the object they’re thinking of twice. I compare the proposed treatment to similar ideas by Heck, Ninan, Recanati, Kamp and Asher, Fodor, and others.

The distinction between a merely ‘rigidifying’ dthat and a directly-referential take on dthat-terms is well known, and is explicitly highlighted by Kaplan in Afterthoughts, his 1989 commentary on Demonstratives. What is not equally widely recognized is that Afterthoughts also oscillates between three different directly referential proposals. This essay discusses the semantic and philosophical implications of these different directly-referential interpretations of ‘dthat’, paying particular attention to the relationships between syntactic and propositional structure, the structure and makeup of contexts in the semantics (...) of indexical languages, the significance of context shifting devices and of so-called operators on character, and the aims and scope of propositional semantics. (shrink)

Formal semantics and pragmatics as they have developed since the late 1960's have been shaped by fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, philosophers, and logicians, among others, and in turn have had noticeable effects on developments in syntax, philosophy of language, computational linguistics, and cognitive science.In this paper I describe the environment in which formal semantics was born and took root, highlighting the differences in ways of thinking about natural language semantics in linguistics and in philosophy and logic. With Montague as (...) a central but not solo player in the story, I reflect on crucial developments in the 1960's and 70's in linguistics and philosophy, and the growth of formal semantics and formal pragmatics from there. I discuss innovations, key players, and leading ideas that shaped the development of formal semantics and its relation to syntax, to pragmatics, and to the philosophy of language in its early years, and some central aspects of its early impact on those fields. (shrink)

The standard argument against ordered tuples as propositions is that it is arbitrary what truth-conditions they should have. In this paper we generalize that argument. Firstly, we require that propositions have truth-conditions intrinsically. Secondly, we require strongly equivalent truth-conditions to be identical. Thirdly, we provide a formal framework, taken from Graph Theory, to characterize structure and structured objects in general. The argument in a nutshell is this: structured objects are too fine-grained to be identical to truth-conditions. Without identity, there is (...) no privileged mapping from structured objects to truth-conditions, and hence structured objects do not have truth-conditions intrinsically. Therefore, propositions are not structured objects. (shrink)

Unbound anaphoric pronouns or ‘E-type pronouns’ have presented notorious problems for semantic theory, leading to the development of dynamic semantics, where the primary function of a sentence is not considered that of expressing a proposition that may act as the object of propositional attitudes, but rather that of changing the current information state. The older, ‘E-type’ account of unbound anaphora leaves the traditional notion of proposition intact and takes the unbound anaphor to be replaced by a full NP whose semantics (...) is assumed to be known (e.g. a definite description). In this paper, I argue that there are serious problems with any version of the E-type account as well as the (original form of the) dynamic account. I will explore a new account based on structured propositions, which can be considered a conservative extension of a traditional proposition-based semantics, but which at the same time incorporates some crucial insights of the dynamic account. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue for a new account of presuppositions which is based on double indexing as well as minimal representational contexts providing antecedent material for anaphoric presuppositions, rather than notions of context defined in terms of the interlocutors’ pragmatic presuppositions or the information accumulated from the preceding discourse. This account applies in particular to new phenomena concerning the presupposition of quantifier domains. But it is also intended to be an account of presuppositions in general. The account differs (...) from the Satisfaction Theory and the Binding Theory of presuppositions in that it can be viewed as a conservative extension of traditional static semantics and in that it does not involve the notion of pragmatic presupposition. (shrink)

To talk about simple concepts presupposes that the notion of concept has been aptly explicated. I argue that a most adequate explication should abandon the set-theoretical paradigm and use a procedural approach. Such a procedural approach is offered by Tichý´s Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL). Some main notions and principles of TIL are briefly presented, and as a result, concepts are explicated as a kind of abstract procedure. Then it can be shown that simplicity, as applied to concepts, is well definable (...) as a property relative to conceptual systems, each of which is determined by a finite set of simple (‘primitive’) concepts. Refinement as a method of replacing simple concepts by compound concepts is defined. (shrink)

The author defends the view that the notion of concept, if used in the logical tradition, should be explicated procedurally . He argues that Tichý’s Transparent Intensional Logic is an apt tool for such an explication and derives the respective definition. Some consequences of this definition concern the notions of emptiness, simple concepts, empirical concepts and algorithmic concepts.

We propose a formal framework to examine the relationship between models and observations. To make our analysis precise,models are reduced to first-order theories that represent both terminological knowledge – e.g., the laws that are supposed to regulate the domain under analysis and that allow for explanations, predictions, and simulations – and assertional knowledge – e.g., information about specific entities in the domain of interest. Observations are introduced into the domain of quantification of a distinct first-order theory that describes their nature (...) and their organization and takes track of the way they are experimentally acquired or intentionally elaborated. A model mainly represents the theoretical knowledge or hypotheses on a domain, while the theory of observations mainly represents the empirical knowledge and the given experimental practices. We propose a precise identity criterion for observations and we explore different links between models and observations by assuming a degree of independence between them. By exploiting some techniques developed in the field of social choice theory and judgment aggregation, we sketch some strategies to solve inconsistencies between a given set of observations and the assumed theoretical hypotheses. The solutions of these inconsistencies can impact both the observations – e.g., the theoretical knowledge and the analysis of the way observations are collected or produced may highlight some unreliable sources – and the models – e.g. empirical evidences may invalidate some theoretical laws. (shrink)

The dominant account of propositions holds that they are structured entities that have, as constituents, the semantic values of the constituents of the sentences that express them. Since such theories hold that propositions are structured, in some sense, like the sentences that express them, they must provide an answer to what I will call Soames’ Question: “What level, or levels, of sentence structure does semantic information incorporate?”. As it turns out, answering Soames’ Question is no easy task. I argue in (...) this paper that the two most promising ways of answering it, the Logical Form Account and the LF Account, are both unsatisfactory. This result casts doubt on the very idea that propositions are structured. (shrink)

In this paper, I criticize Structured Propositionalism, the most widely held theory of the nature of propositions according to which they are structured entities with constituents. I argue that the proponents of Structured Propositionalism have paid insufficient attention to the metaphysical presuppositions of the view – most egregiously, to the notion of propositional constituency. This is somewhat ironic, since the friends of structured propositions tend to argue as if the appeal to constituency gives their view a dialectical advantage. I criticize (...) four different approaches to providing a metaphysics of propositional constituency: set-theoretic, mereological, hylomorphic, and structure-making. Finally, I consider the option of taking constituency in a deflationary, metaphysically ‘lightweight’ sense. I argue that, though invoking constituency in a lightweight sense may be useful for avoiding the ontological problems that plague the ‘heavyweight’ conception, it no longer proffers a dialectical advantage to Structured Propositionalism. (shrink)

Presentists believe that only present things exist. But opponents insist this view has unacceptable implications: if only present things exist, we can’t express singular propositions about the past, since the obvious propositional constituents don’t exist, nor can we account for temporal passage, or the openness of the future. According to such opponents, and in spite of the apparent ‘common sense’ status of the view, presentism should be rejected on the basis of these unacceptable implications. In this paper, I present and (...) defend a version of presentism that avoids the unacceptable implications. The basic strategy I employ is familiar—I postulate presently existing entities to serve as surrogates for non-present entities—but some of the details of my proposal are more novel, and their application to these problems is certainly novel. One overarching thesis of this paper is that Thisness Presentism is preferable to other versions of presentism since it solves important problems facing standard iterations of the view. And I assume that this is a good positive reason in favour of the underlying thisness ontology. (shrink)

The contents of representations in non-human animals, human core cognition, and perception cannot precisely be characterized by sentences of a natural language. However, this fact does not stop us from giving imprecise characterizations of these contents through natural language. In this paper, I develop an account of the precision of content characterizations by appealing to possible-world semantics combined with set and measurement theory.

We investigate synonymy in the strong sense of content identity. This notion is central in the philosophy of language and in applications of logic. We motivate, uniformly axiomatize, and characterize several “benchmark” notions of synonymy in the messy class of all possible notions of synonymy. This class is divided by two intuitive principles that are governed by a no-go result. We use the notion of a scenario to get a logic of synonymy which is the canonical representative of one division. (...) In the other division, the so-called conceptivist logics, we find, e.g., the well-known system of analytic containment. We axiomatize four logics of synonymy extending AC, relate them semantically and proof-theoretically to SF, and characterize them in terms of weak/strong subject matter preservation and weak/strong logical equivalence. This yields ways out of the no-go result and novel arguments—independent of a particular semantic framework—for each notion of synonymy discussed. This points to pluralism about meaning and a certain non-compositionality of truth in logic programs and neural networks. And it unveils an impossibility for synonymy: if it is to preserve subject matter, then either conjunction and disjunction lose an essential property or a very weak absorption law is violated. (shrink)

It is a common view among philosophers of language that both propositions and sentences are structured objects. One obvious question to ask about such a view is whether there is any interesting connection between these two sorts of structure. The author identifies two theses about this relationship. Identity (ID) – the structure of a sentence and the proposition it expresses are identical. Determinism (DET) – the structure of a sentence determines the structure of the proposition it expresses. After noting that (...) ID entails DET, the author argues against DET (and therefore also against ID). This argument is based on considerations to do with unarticulated constituents, but it is not ultimately empirical. As well as answering a question suggested by contemporary theories of propositions, the conclusion is significant because some, but not all, of the theories of propositions currently popular entail ID and/or DET. Unless there is a response to the argument here, those theories are refuted. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe in things, propositions, which are the things that we believe, assert etc., and which are the contents of sentences. The act-type theory of propositions is an attempt to say what propositions are, to explain how we stand in relations to them, and to explain why they are true or false. The core idea of the act-type theory is that propositions are types of acts of predication. The theory is developed in various ways to offer explanations of the (...) important properties of propositions. I present the core idea of the theory, and some developments of it. I discuss the relationship between the theory and the content–force distinction. I also present an important type of objection that has been raised to the explanations offered by the act-type theory. (shrink)

Bayesian confirmation theory is our best formal framework for describing inductive reasoning. The problem of old evidence is a particularly difficult one for confirmation theory, because it suggests that this framework fails to account for central and important cases of inductive reasoning and scientific inference. I show that we can appeal to the fragmentation of doxastic states to solve this problem for confirmation theory. This fragmentation solution is independently well-motivated because of the success of fragmentation in solving other problems. I (...) also argue that the fragmentation solution is preferable to other solutions to the problem of old evidence. These other solutions are already committed to something like fragmentation, but suffer from difficulties due to their additional commitments. If these arguments are successful, Bayesian confirmation theory is saved from the problem of old evidence, and the argument for fragmentation is bolstered by its ability to solve yet another problem. (shrink)

This paper deals with two issues. First, it identifies structured propositions with logical procedures. Second, it considers various rigorous definitions of the granularity of procedures, hence also of structured propositions, and comes out in favour of one of them. As for the first point, structured propositions are explicated as algorithmically structured procedures. I show that these procedures are structured wholes that are assigned to expressions as their meanings, and their constituents are sub-procedures occurring in executed mode. Moreover, procedures are not (...) mere aggregates of their parts; rather, procedural constituents mutually interact. As for the second point, there is no universal criterion of the structural isomorphism of meanings, hence of co-hyperintensionality, hence of synonymy for every kind of language. The positive result I present is an ordered set of rigorously defined criteria of fine-grained individuation in terms of the structure of procedures. Hence procedural semantics provides a solution to the problem of the granularity of co-hyperintensionality. (shrink)

As I walk into a restaurant to meet up with a friend, I look around and see all sorts of things in my immediate environment—tables, chairs, people, colors, shapes, etc. As a result, I know of these things. But what is the nature of this knowledge? Nowadays, the standard practice among philosophers is to treat all knowledge, aside maybe from “know-how”, as propositional. But in this paper I will argue that this is a mistake. I’ll argue that some knowledge is (...) constituted, not by beliefs toward propositions, but by awareness of properties and objects. Seeing isn’t believing, but it is knowing. After further characterizing this type of knowledge, I will make the case for it. Then I will consider a variety of objections. Finally, I will indicate how our recognition of this knowledge may answer other questions, and solve other problems, in philosophy. (shrink)

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)

Brentano (1874) described intentionality in a number of different ways: as ‘the intentional inexistence of an object’, ‘reference to a content’, ‘direction towards an object’, and ‘immanent objectivity’. All these phrases were intended to mean the same thing, but such elegant variation can give rise to confusion. In my Elements of Mind (2001) I tried to give a simpler description: intentional states all involve directedness upon an object and what I call (following Searle 1992) aspectual shape. My aim in doing (...) this was to introduce an understanding of intentionality that (a) allows theorists of intentionality to agree on the fundamentals of the phenomenon, but disagree about the details; and (b) leaves the question open whether all mental states are intentional. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that the understanding one has of a proposition or a propositional content of a representational vehicle is a species of what contemporary epistemologists characterise as objectual understanding. Second, we demonstrate that even though this type of understanding differs from linguistic understanding, in many instances of successful communication, these two types of understanding jointly contribute to understanding a communicated thought.

Here, I offer a rapid overview of the theory of metaphor, in order to situate the contributions to this volume in relation to one another and within the field more generally.

There is a long-standing debate whether propositions, sentences, statements or utterances provide an answer to the question of what objects logical formulas stand for. Based on the traditional understanding of logic as a science of valid arguments, this question is firstly framed more exactly, making explicit that it calls not only for identifying some class of objects, but also for explaining their relationship to ordinary language utterances. It is then argued that there are strong arguments against the proposals commonly put (...) forward in the debate. The core of the problem is that an informative account of the objects formulas stand for presupposes a theory of formalization; that is, a theory that explains what formulas may adequately substitute for an inference in proofs of validity. Although such theories are still subject to research, some consequences can be drawn from an analysis of the reasons why the common accounts featuring sentences, propositions or utterances fail. Theories of formalization cannot refer to utterances qua expressions of propositions; instead they may refer to sentences and rely on additional information about linguistic structure and pragmatic context. (shrink)

Existentialism concerning singular propositions is the thesis that singular propositions ontologically depend on the individuals they are directly about in such a way that necessarily, those propositions exist only if the individuals they are directly about exist. Haecceitism is the thesis that what non-qualitative facts there are fails to supervene on what purely qualitative facts there are. I argue that existentialism concerning singular propositions entails the denial of haecceitism and that this entailment has interesting implications for debates concerning the philosophy (...) of language, the nature of propositions, and the metaphysics of modality. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise a problem for standard precisifications of the Relational Analysis of attitude reports. The problem I raise involves counterfactual attitude verbs. such as ‘wish’. In short, the trouble is this: there are true attitude reports ‘ S wishes that P ’ but there is no suitable referent for the term ‘that P ’. The problematic reports illustrate that the content of a subject’s wish is intimately related to the content of their beliefs. I capture this fact (...) by moving to a framework in which ‘wish’ relates subjects to sets of pairs of worlds, or paired propositions, rather than—as is standardly assumed—sets of worlds. Although other types of counterfactual attitude reports, for example those involving ‘imagine’, may be similarly problematic, at this stage it is unclear whether they can be handled the same way. (shrink)

Jeffrey Brower has recently articulated a way to make sense of the doctrine of divine simplicity using resources from contemporary truthmaker theory. Noël Saenz has advanced two objections to Brower’s account, arguing that it violates constraints on adequate metaphysical explanations at various points. I argue that Saenz’s objections fail to show that Brower’s account is explanatorily inadequate.

The aim of this paper is to lay the groundwork for extending the idea of transparent introspection to wishes. First, I elucidate the notion of transparent introspection and highlight its advantages over rival accounts of self-knowledge. Then I pose several problems that seem to obstruct the extension of transparent introspection to wishes. In order to overcome these problems, I call into question the standard propositional attitude analysis of non-doxastic attitudes. My considerations lead to a non-orthodox account of attitudes in general (...) and wishes in particular in light of which the problems presented in Sect. 2 disappear. (shrink)

This paper discusses a problem for Russellian propositions. According to Russellianism, each word in a sentence contributes its referent to the proposition expressed by the sentence. Russellian propositions have normally been conceived of as problematic for two reasons, viz. they cannot account for the unity of the proposition and they have problems with non-referring singular names. In this paper, I argue that Russellianism also faces a problem with respect to properties. It is inconsistent with both traditional realism and trope-theories. The (...) only theory of properties which is consistent with Russellianism is Platonism. Moreover, it is argued that Russellianism needs a particularly implausible version of Platonism. (shrink)

In recent work, Adlam (2022b), Chen & Goldstein (2022), and Meacham (2023) have defended accounts of laws that take laws to be primitive global constraints. A major advantage of these accounts is that they’re able to accommodate the many different kinds of laws that appear in physical theories. In this paper I’ll present these three accounts, highlight their distinguishing features, and note some key differences that might lead one to favor one of these accounts over the others. I’ll conclude by (...) briefly discussing a version of a “constraint” account that I think is especially attractive. (shrink)

Deep appreciation of the relevance of emotion to epistemology requires a rich account of how emotional mental states such as happiness, sadness and desire interact with cognitive states such as belief and doubt. Analytic philosophy since Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell has assumed that such mental states are propositional attitudes, which are relations between a self and a proposition, an abstract entity constituting the meaning of a sentence. This chapter shows the explanatory defects of the doctrine of propositional attitudes, and (...) proposes instead that beliefs, desires, and emotions should be construed naturalistically using current understanding of brain mechanisms. Mental states are patterns of neural activity, not relations between dubious entities such as selves and propositions. From this perspective, it becomes easy to see how cognition and emotion are intertwined, and hence how emotions can be integral to epistemology. I begin by reviewing some of the ways in which emotions are relevant to epistemology: as frequent contributors to the growth of knowledge, as sometime impediments to knowledge acquisition, and as components of knowledge about persons and morality. I then argue that propositional attitudes do not exist, because the selves and the propositions that they purportedly relate do not exist. Thus the doctrine of propositional attitudes is as useless for epistemology as it is for explaining human action. I argue for an alternative construal of mental states as patterns of neural activity, and July 23, 2007 describe how it is possible to give a theoretically rich and empirically supported account of the neurophysiological interconnections of cognition and emotion. Finally, I discuss the epistemological significance of this naturalistic, materialist reconstrual of cognitions and emotions. (shrink)

Empty names are a problem for Russellians. I describe three ways to approach solving the problem. These are positing gappy propositions as contents, nonsingular propositions as contents, or denying that sentences containing empty names have contents. I discuss methods for deciding between solutions. I then argue for some methods over others and defend one solution using those methods. I reject the arguments that either intuitions about truth value, truth, content, or meaningfulness can decide between the solutions. I give an alternative (...) argument which does decide between the three solutions. The alternative is based on the idea that a sentence and its internal negation are contrary: they cannot both be true, but they might both be false. I argue from Russellian premises to the conclusion that such sentences cannot be assigned truth values when they contain empty names. The argument shows that no Russellian should assign a truth value to a sentence containing an empty name, and therefore that no Russellian should assign a proposition as the content of such a sentence. This shows that Russellians should conclude that sentences containing empty names do not have contents, i.e. the no proposition view. (shrink)

In order to fulfil their essential roles as the bearers of truth and the relata of logical relations, propositions must be public and shareable. That requirement has favoured Platonist and other nonmental views of them, despite the well-known problems of Platonism in general. Views that propositions are mental entities have correspondingly fallen out of favour, as they have difficulty in explaining how propositions could have shareable, objective properties. We revive a mentalist view of propositions, inspired by Artificial Intelligence work on (...) perceptual algorithms, which shows how perception causes persistent mental entities with shareable properties that allow them to fulfil the traditional roles of (one core kind of) propositions. The clustering algorithms implemented in perception produce outputs which are (implicit) atomic propositions in different minds. Coordination of them across minds proceeds by game-theoretic processes of communication. The account does not rely on any unexplained notions such as mental content, representation, or correspondence (although those notions are applicable in philosophical analysis of the result). (shrink)