In epistemology and in philosophy of language there is fierce debate about the role of context in knowledge, understanding, and meaning. Many contemporary epistemologists take seriously the thesis that epistemic vocabulary is context-sensitive. This thesis is of course a semantic claim, so it has brought epistemologists into contact with work on context in semantics by philosophers of language. This volume brings together the debates, in a set of twelve specially written essays representing the latest work by leading figures in the (...) two fields. All future work on contextualism will start here. Contributors: Kent Bach, Herman Cappelen, Andy Egan, Michael Glanzberg, John Hawthorne, Ernest Lepore, Peter Ludlow, Peter Pagin, Georg Peter, Paul M. Pietroski, Gerhard Preyer, Jonathan Schaffer, Jason Stanley, Brian Weatherson, Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

"This book represents a continuation of the research project in philosophy of language and semantics represented in the journal "Protosociology" at the J. W. ...

Many of the things we do, we do together with other people. Think of carpooling and playing tennis. In the past two or three decades it has become increasingly popular to analyze such collective actions in terms of collective intentions. This volume brings together ten new philosophical essays that address issues such as how individuals succeed in maintaining coordination throughout the performance of a collective action, whether groups can actually believe propositions or whether they merely accept them, and what kind (...) of evidence, if any, disciplines such as cognitive science and semantics provide in support of irreducibly collective states.The theories of the Big Four of collective intentionality -- Michael Bratman, Raimo Tuomela, John Searle, and Margaret Gilbert -- and the Big Five of Social Ontology -- which in addition to the Big Four includes Philip Pettit -- play a central role in almost all of these essays. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including dynamical systems theory, economics, and psychology, the contributors develop existing theories, criticize them, or provide alternatives to them.Several essays challenge the idea that there is a straightforward dichotomy between individual and collective level rationality, and explore the interplay between these levels in order to shed new light on the alleged discontinuities between them. These contributions make abundantly clear that it is no longer an option simply to juxtapose analyses of individual and collective level phenomena and maintain that there is a discrepancy. Some go as far as arguing that on closer inspection the alleged discontinuities dissolve. (shrink)

Pre-reflective Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind delves into the relations between the current debates on consciousness within analytical philosophy and the debates taking place in continental philosophy in the twentieth century and in particular within the work of Sartre. Examining the return of the problem of subjectivity in philosophy of mind and the idea that phenomenal consciousness could not be reduced to functional or cognitive properties this volume aims to rethink borders between what counts as ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ (...) when the nature of the mental is at stake. (shrink)

Seventeen specially written essays by eminent philosophers and linguists appear for the first time in this anthology, all with the central theme of logical form -- a fundamental issue in analytic philosophy and linguistic theory. Logical Form and Language brings together exciting new contributions from diverse points of view, which illuminate the lively current debate about this topic.

This volume breaks new grounds by bringing together a great variety of innovative contributions on triangulation, epistemology, and mind. The notion of triangulation, developed by Donald Davidson during the last two decades of his life, has changed our understanding of the relationship between subjective, intersubjective, and objective, and shed new light on concepts such as externalism, internalism, communication, interpretation, and language. At the same time, however, it has been strongly criticized for several aspects. The papers collected in this volume written (...) by established contributors aim to provide new insights into the contemporary debate on triangulation. The upshot is not only a deeper understanding of Davidson s ideas but also a new appreciation of some central problems of epistemology and the philosophy of mind with regard to adjoining disciplines such as, for instance, cognitive sciences and the philosophy of language.". (shrink)

Together with its introduction, Language, Mind and Epistemology examines Davidson's unified stance towards philosophy by joining American and European authors ...

This volume offers a reappraisal of Donald Davidson's influential philosophy of thought, meaning, and language, Twelve specially written essays by leading philosophers in the field illuminate a range of themes and problems relating to these ...

Reality and Humean Supervenience confronts the reader with central aspects in the philosophy of David Lewis, whose work in ontology, metaphysics, logic, probability, philosophy of mind, and language articulates a unique and systematic foundation for modern physicalism.

This volume features a critical evaluation of the recent work of the philosopher, Prof. Raimo Tuomela and it also offers it offers new approaches to the collectivism-versus-individualism debate. It specifically looks at Tuomela's book Social Ontology and its accounts of collective intentionality and related topics. The book contains eight essays written by expert contributors that present different perspectives on Tuomela’s investigation into the philosophy of sociality, social ontology, theory of action, and decision and game theory. In addition, Tuomela himself gives (...) a comprehensive response to each essay and defends his theory in terms of the new arguments presented here. Overall, readers will gain a deeper insight into group reasoning and the "we-mode" approach, which is used to account for collective intention and action, cooperation, group attitudes, social practices, and institutions as well as group solidarity. This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers and graduate students and researchers interested in contemporary philosophy of sociality, sociological theory, social ontology as well as the philosophy of mind, decision and game theory, and cognitive science. Tuomela’s book stands as a model of excellence in social ontology, an especially intractable field of philosophical inquiry that benefits conspicuously from the devotion of Tuomela’s keen philosophical mind. His book is must reading in social ontology. J. Angelo Corlett, Julia Lyons Strobel. (shrink)

This book brings together analytically inspired philosophers working on the continent with English-speaking philosophers to address specific issues regarding subjectivity and consciousness.

The circle between belief and meaning has revolutionized our understanding of communication. In this article I will sketch from the triangulation model of radical interpretation an answer to the question: “How does semantics take effect in social science?”, that is, it is to show “How do we link the mental, language, and the social?” I resystemize the principle of charity by the principle of natural epistemic justice and complete triangulation with the social frame of reference. Therefore, to break into the (...) circle between belief and meaning leads us to the structure of elementary systems of communication as the framework within which we ascribe attitudes and actions. In this framework, together with the reformulation of the task of RI, we find an answer of the Burge-problem that the intelligible redescription and explanation of behavior take also effects on social considerations. In the procedure of RI also the problem of background theories emerges, and we border on the epistemic capacity of speakers that limits our understanding in general. In the last step it is shown – looking back to the controversy between individualism and holism in social science – that group-predicates can not instantiate ontologically to individual entities. (shrink)

Cantus firmus der analytischen Sprachphilosophie als der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts ist die Theorie des Sprachverstehens, die für die Human- und die Sozialwissenschaft immer mehr in den Mittelpunkt tritt. Das Buch führt in die Problemsituation der sprachanalytischen Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie ein, die dann eintritt, wenn die metaphysische Bestimmung der Sprache und die Zurückführung der Rekonstruktion von Verstehen mit semantischen Begriffen, die sich auf den Ausdrucksgebrauch und die Satzwahrheit als Analysans beziehen, strittig wird. Die Problemsituation wird konstruktiv an den beiden Traditionen (...) der analytischen Philosophie, der klassischen Debatten logische versus begriffliche Analyse, semantische versus pragmatische Präsuppositionen und der nach-empiristischen Bedeutungstheorie dargestellt. Eine Orientierung über die sprachanalytische Handlungstheorie ergänzt die Untersuchung. Die Perspektive geht dahin, dass in der Frankfurter Schule der Sprechakttheorie eine Sprachpragmatik Weichen für eine Protosoziologie stellt. (shrink)

The ten contributions in this volume range widely over topics in the philosophy of mathematics. The four papers in Part I (entitled "Set Theory, Inconsistency, and Measuring Theories") take up topics ranging from proposed resolutions to the paradoxes of naïve set theory, paraconsistent logics as applied to the early infinitesimal calculus, the notion of "purity of method" in the proof of mathematical results, and a reconstruction of Peano's axiom that no two distinct numbers have the same successor. Papers in the (...) second part ("The Challenge of Nominalism") concern the nominalistic thesis that there are no abstract objects. The two contributions in Part III ("Historical Background") consider the contributions of Mill, Frege, and Descartes to the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)