A close reading of Descartes’ works, particularly his Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii, calls into question the common interpretation of Peirce’s ‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’ and ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’ as being anti-Cartesian. In particular, Descartes’ conception of intuition differs from Peirce’s, and on one plausible reading of Descartes his intuitionism actually mirrors Peirce’s inferentialism in key respects. Given these similarities between Descartes and Peirce, the dogmatic status of the anti-Cartesian interpretation of Peirce becomes evident.

Price defends a form of global expressivism that aspires to be both naturalistic and thoroughly anti-representational. I argue that although Price achieves the latter aspiration, his minimalist treatment of semantic notions prevents his global expressivism from being genuinely naturalistic. To do this, I propose two demands that any view must meet in order to be considered naturalistic—a Deflationary Demand and an Objectivity Demand—and show how the indexical nature of Price’s use of disquotational schemata prevents him from meeting the Objectivity Demand. (...) I conclude by extrapolating from my critique of Price’s global expressivism to the claim that similar points might apply to other forms of semantic minimalism. (shrink)