Volume 47, Issue 3, November 2018, Page 403-427.

Etye Steinberg has recently raised a problem for Joseph Heath’s Market Failures Approach. In this paper we consider a response by Heath. We argue that Heath’s response not only leaves the original problem intact, but also raises a second one, analogous to stakeholder theory’s so-called “identification problem.”.

Many people claim that we can gain knowledge from reading novels and other forms of narrative fiction. In a trivial sense, this claim seems uncontroversial. There is no doubt that reading Pride and Prejudice can teach me, for example, what the novel is about or give me some insight into the character of Regency English. This is because a novel, like any other text, constitutes direct evidence for propositions about its own content and language. But it is widely questioned whether (...) such a work could ever give us knowledge of any of the general propositions it expresses about the world outside the text, for it is commonly held that fictional narratives do not have the resources to justify such propositions, however.. (shrink)

Coherence is a term of art in both epistemology and literary criticism, and in both contexts judgments of coherence carry evaluative significance. However, whereas the epistemic use of the term picks out a property of belief sets, the literary use can pick out properties of various elements of a literary work, including its plot, characters, and style. For this reason, some have claimed that literary critics are not concerned with the same concept of coherence as epistemologists. In this article I (...) argue against this claim. Although various nonepistemic notions of coherence figure in literary criticism, the epistemic concept has a mirror image in the literary–critical concept of thematic coherence. Moreover, evidence from literary criticism suggests that thematic coherence can be valuable from a literary-evaluative standpoint because it can be valuable from an epistemic standpoint, in particular by enhancing the credibility of a work's themes or author. My analysis of the notion of thematic coherence thus provides novel support for literary cognitivism, the view that a work's literary-aesthetic merits can depend on its epistemic merits. (shrink)

Questions about the meaning of life are widely assumed to be much older than the phrase itself. Many philosophers see nothing anachronistic, for instance, in talking about Aristotle's view on the meaning of life or looking to Ecclesiastes for evidence of what makes life meaningless, though neither Aristotle nor Ecclesiastes mentions meaning or meaninglessness as such. On this common way of thinking, nothing very philosophically important hangs on the fact that we now attach the term meaning to the idea. So, (...) it's no real surprise that the question of when and why meaning ever came to be used in this way has received little attention among philosophers. For those who think it deserves more, Steven Cassedy's new book What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning? will be welcome. Though it may not be obvious from the title, which to a philosopher is likely to signal a theory or conceptual analysis of meaning, the book is in fact an historical study of the word meaning (and close synonyms thereof) as used in connection with the term life (and close synonyms thereof). According to Cassedy, the book's aim is to explain how a word that ‘fundamentally has to do with signs, words, stories, and other things that, well, mean or signify something’ (p. 4) came to acquire its modern-day ‘metaphysical’ sense—i.e., that sense in which it is now used to gesture portentously toward something like the purpose or value of life. The book's focus on the language of meaning distinguishes it from the type of historical approach found, for example, in Michael Ruse's On Purpose, which tracks the history of some metaphysical idea associated with the term (teleology in Ruse's case) rather than the term itself. Indeed, in this respect, Cassedy's book may be the first of its kind. (shrink)