506 research outputs found
Perspectives on dialogue: Introduction to this special issue
We briefly summarize the papers in this volume, draw attention to the variety of perspectives that they bring to the subject of dialogue, identify a number of common themes, and conclude with a discussion of directions for further research
Distributed utterances
I propose an apparatus for handling intrasentential change in context. The standard approach has problems with sentences with multiple occurrences of the same demonstrative or indexical. My proposal involves the idea that contexts can be complex. Complex contexts are built out of (âsimpleâ) Kaplanian contexts by ordered n-tupling. With these we can revise the clauses of Kaplanâs Logic of Demonstratives so that each part of a sentence is taken in a different component of a complex context.
I consider other applications of the framework: to agentially distributed utterances (ones made partly by one speaker and partly by another); to an account of scare-quoting; and to an account of a binding-like phenomenon that avoids what Kit Fine calls âthe antinomy of the variable.
Introducing Exclusion Logic as a Deontic Logic
This paper introduces Exclusion Logic - a simple modal logic without negation or disjunction. We show that this logic has an efficient decision procedure. We describe how Exclusion Logic can be used as a deontic logic. We compare this deontic logic with Standard Deontic Logic and with more syntactically restricted logics
Bridging the Two Plans in the Semantics for Relevant Logic
Part of the Synthese Library book series (SYLI, volume 418)This paper considers how the two plans in the semantics for relevant logic are related to each other. The so-called American plan, classical-style four-valued semantics, is intuitive, but weak. The so-called Australian plan, two-valued frame semantics, is very powerful, but the semantic devices employed need some explanation. Examining R. Routleyâs 1984 paper âAmerican plan completed, â this paper argues that the American plan provides an explanatory and ontological basis for the Australian plan, and that the latter is just a developed form of the former
On tacit knowledge for philosophy of education
This article offers a detailed reading Gascoigne and Thorntonâs book Tacit Knowledge (2013), which aims to account for the tacitness of tacit knowledge (TK) while preserving its status as knowledge proper. I take issue with their characterization and rejection of the existential-phenomenological Backgroundâwhich they presuppose even as they dismissâand their claim that TK can be articulated âfrom withinââwhich betrays a residual Cartesianism, the result of their elision of conceptuality and propositionality. Knowledgeable acts instantiate capacities which we might know we have and of which we can be aware, but which are not propositionally structured at their âcoreâ. Nevertheless, propositionality is necessary to what Robert Brandom calls, in Making It Explicit (1994) and Articulating Reasons (2000), âexplicitationâ, which notion also presupposes a tacit dimension, which is, simply, the embodied person (the knower), without which no conception of knowledge can get any purchase. On my view, there is no knowledgeable act that can be understood as such separately from the notion of skilled corporeal performance. The account I offer cannot make sense of so-called âknowledge-basedâ education, as opposed to systems and styles which supposedly privilege âcontentlessâ skills over and above âknowledgeâ, because on the phenomenological and inferentialist lines I endorse, neither the concepts âknowledgeâ nor âskillâ has any purchase or meaning without the other
Semantic inferentialism as (a form of) active externalism
Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it is taken for granted that externalist accounts of meaning and mental content are, in principle, orthogonal to the matter of whether cognition itself is bound within the biological brain or whether it can constitutively include parts of the world. Accordingly, Clark and Chalmers (Analysis 58(1):7â19, 1998) distinguish these varieties of externalism as âpassiveâ and âactiveâ respectively. The aim here is to suggest that we should resist the received way of thinking about these dividing lines. With reference to Brandomâs (1994, 2000, Inquiry 47:236â253, 2008) broad semantic inferentialism, we show that a theory of meaning can be at the same time a variety of active externalism. While we grant that supporters of other varieties of content externalism (e.g., Putnam 1975 and Burge (Philosophical Review 95:3â45, 1986) can deny active externalism, this is not an
option for semantic inferentialists: On this latter view, the role of the environment (both in its social and natural form) is not âpassiveâ in the sense assumed by the alternative approaches to content externalism
How Reasoning Aims at Truth
Many hold that theoretical reasoning aims at truth. In this paper, I ask what it is for reasoning to be thus aim-directed. Standard answers to this question explain reasoningâs aim-directedness in terms of intentions, dispositions, or rule-following. I argue that, while these views contain important insights, they are not satisfactory. As an alternative, I introduce and defend a novel account: reasoning aims at truth in virtue of being the exercise of a distinctive kind of cognitive power, one that, unlike ordinary dispositions, is capable of fully explaining its own exercises. I argue that this account is able to avoid the difficulties plaguing standard accounts of the relevant sort of mental teleology
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