Arthur Collins's succinct, revisionist exposition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason brings a new clarity to this notoriously difficult text.

Arthur Collins's succinct, revisionist exposition of Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ brings a new clarity to this notoriously difficult text. Until recently most readers, ascribing broadly Cartesian assumptions to Kant, have concluded that the _Critique_ advances an idealist philosophy, because Kant calls it "transcendental idealism" and because the work abounds in apparent confirmations of that interpretation. Collins maintains not only that this reading of Kant is false but also that it conceals Kant's real achievements. To counter it, he addresses the (...) themes and passages in the _Critique_ that seem to require an idealist thesis and shows how they may be better understood without ascribing any idealist philosophy to Kant. His account coheres with Kant's explicit "refutations" of idealism, it fits Kant's rejection of the imputation of idealism to him by early critics and readers, and it validates Kant's contention that the second edition of the _Critique_ changes the expression but not the doctrine of the first. (shrink)

Action explanations like ‘I am heading to the ferry because the bridge is closed,’ are supposed to require restatement: ‘I am... because I believe the bridge is closed,’ because (i) the objective claim may be false though the intended explanation is correct, and (ii) because objective circumstances have to be cognitively mediated if they are to bear on action. This supposition is rejected here. Restatements cannot withdraw the objective claim without withdrawing the explanation. In the context of reason‐giving, belief statements (...) do not function as assertions about the inner life. The fact that belief statements may be true though the belief itself is false creates the illusion of distinctive subject matters. The illusion is exploited by conceptions of belief positing stored representations. Even if there were such representations, retrieved for the sake of expressing previously acquired beliefs, the expression of belief must endorse p and cannot merely advert to the existence and content of a representation. The reverse of the standard philosophical view about restatement is actually correct. Wherever an agent correctly adduces a belief that an objective circumstance obtains in explaining his action, a de‐psychologizing restatement that merely makes the objective claim must be ascribable to the agent. (shrink)

Brian Garrett constructs cases satisfying Andy Hamilton’s definition of weak q‐memory. This does not establish that a peculiar kind of memory is at least conceptually coherent. Any ‘apparent memory experiences’ that satisfy the definition turn out not to involve remembering anything at all. This conclusion follows if we accept, as both Hamilton and Garrett do, a variety of first‐person authority according to which memory judgements may be false, but not on the ground that someone other than the remembering subject had (...) the remembered experience. Garrett’s brain‐bisection illustration sounds convincing, but only because we retain the idea that the subjects created by implanting a hemisphere each in two different bodies are entitled to say that they remember experiences before the surgery in the ordinary sense. To that extent the illustration presents a case of ordinary memory, not q‐memory. (shrink)

Since we know that there are four prime numbers less than 8 we know that there are numbers. This ‘short argument’ is correct but it is not an ontological claim or part of philosophy of mathematics. Both realists (Quine) and nominalists (Field) reject the short argument and adopt the idea that the existence of numbers might be posited to explain known mathematical truths. Philosophers operate with a negative conception of what numbers are: they are not in space and time, not (...) related causally to us, not perceivable, etc. This preliminary outlook does not actually characterize a kind of existing thing at all. It creates the atmosphere of weirdness characteristic of both fictionalism and Platonism. Positing things for the sake of explanation makes sense in empirical contexts, but the intelligibility of positing cannot not survive the move to philosophy of mathematics. Modal realism is a model for the unsatisfactory thinking that generates ontological commitment in mathematics. (shrink)

Since we know that there are four prime numbers less than 8 we know that there are numbers. This ‘short argument’ is correct but it is not an ontological claim or part of philosophy of mathematics. Both realists and nominalists reject the short argument and adopt the idea that the existence of numbers might be posited to explain known mathematical truths. Philosophers operate with a negative conception of what numbers are: they are not in space and time, not related causally (...) to us, not perceivable, etc. This preliminary outlook does not actually characterize a kind of existing thing at all. It creates the atmosphere of weirdness characteristic of both fictionalism and Platonism. Positing things for the sake of explanation makes sense in empirical contexts, but the intelligibility of positing cannot not survive the move to philosophy of mathematics. Modal realism is a model for the unsatisfactory thinking that generates ontological commitment in mathematics. (shrink)

On the general matter of contextual semantics, the seminal work is David Lewis's "Scorekeeping in a Language Game," Journal of Philosophical Logic, 1979, reprinted in his Philosophical Papers, Vol. I, Oxford University Press, 1983. In later notes, this will be called "Scorekeeping," and I'll refer to the reprinting.