Attitude Ascriptions and Acceptable Translations

Critical notice of Mark Richard's "Context and the Attitudes"

[Book Review] Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Language, edited by Haukioja Jussi

Book review of Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Language, edited by Haukioja Jussi (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. pp. 204.

Borg’s Minimalism and the Problem of Paradox

According to Emma Borg, minimalism is (roughly) the view that natural language sentences have truth conditions, and that these truth conditions are fully determined by syntactic structure and lexical content. A principal motivation for her brand of minimalism is that it coheres well with the popular view that semantic competence is underpinned by the cognition of a minimal semantic theory. In this paper, I argue that the liar paradox presents a serious problem for this principal motivation. Two lines of response to the problem are discussed, and difficulties facing those responses are raised. I close by issuing a challenge: to construe the principal motivation for Borg’s version of minimalism in such a way so as to avoid the problem of paradox

Folk Semantic Intuitions, Arguments from Reference and Eliminative Materialism

In a series of papers, Machery, Mallon, Nichols and Stich critique so-called arguments from reference, arguments that assume a theory of reference in order to establish substantive conclusions. The critique is that, due to cross-cultural variation in semantic intuitions giving rise to methodological problems in the theory of reference, all arguments from reference have an unjustified assumption. I examine an important example of an argument from reference, an argument of Churchland’s in support of eliminative materialism. I suggest that extant responses to the critique are unsatisfactory, and provide an alternative response: one might justify the assumption of a theory of reference in an argument from reference by appealing to an appropriate explication of the relevant commonsense concept

The Austerity Framework and Semantic Normativity

According to Herman Cappelen’s Austerity Framework, conceptual engineering doesn’t involve concepts, and barely involves engineering. I begin by raising two objections to the Austerity Framework as it stands: the framework cannot account for important normative aspects of conceptual engineering; and it doesn’t give us an adequate response to Strawson-style objections that conceptual engineering serves only to change the subject. I then supplement the Austerity Framework with an account of semantic normativity, which builds on the speaker/semantic meaning distinction, and show that so-supplemented the Austerity Framework successfully overcomes the two objections. I tentatively conclude that semantic normativity should play a key role in how we understand conceptual engineering

On Strawson’s critique of explication as a method in philosophy

In the course of theorising, it can be appropriate to replace one concept—a folk concept, or one drawn from an earlier stage of theorising—with a more precise counterpart. The best-known account of concept replacement is Rudolf Carnap’s ‘explication’. P.F. Strawson famously critiqued explication as a method in philosophy. As the critique is standardly construed, it amounts to the objection that explication is ‘irrelevant’, fails to be ‘illuminating’, or simply ‘changes the subject’. In this paper, I argue that this is an unfair characterisation of Strawson’s critique, spelling out the critique in more detail and showing that, fully understood, it is not undermined by extant responses. In light of both the critique and extant responses, I close by making some substantive comments about what explication can, and cannot, be used to do in philosophy

What ought a fruitful explicatum to be?

Many concepts are inadequate for serious inquiry, so theorists often seek to engineer new concepts. The method of explication, which involves replacing concepts with more fruitful alternatives, is a model of this process. In this paper, I develop an account of fruitfulness, the Relevant-Goals Account of Fruitfulness. The account is in the spirit of extant proposals, but develops and extends them in important ways. In particular, while it applies to explications in general, the account allows us to derive substantive details for specific explications. This is achieved through a supplementary view, Contextualism, that specifies which theoretical goals are relevant in any given case. I close by discussing how the Relevant-Goals Account fits into the dynamic nature of inquiry