PROXY FUNCTIONS,TRUTH AND REFERENCE

Quines ontological relativity is related to Tarskis theory of truth in two ways: Quine repudiates term-by-term-correspondence, as does Tarskis rule of truth; and Quines proxy argument in support of relativity finds exact formulation in Tarskis truth definition.Unfortunately, relativity is threatened by the fact that the proxy argument doesnt comply with the rule of truth (Tarskis celebrated condition (T)). Despite Quines express allegiance to (T), use of proxy schemes does not generate all of the true sentences condition (T) requires.A possible adjustment is to drop (T), retain the satisfaction definition and proxy argument, and appeal to the theory of observation and indeterminacy of reference as grounds of relativity. But as we shall see Quines theories of assent to observation sentences and of reference-learning dont square easily with his naturalism. The first attributes intentional attitudes to observers; and the second assumes a holistic context principle and a concept of individuation which do not withstand scrutiny as empirical notions. Both appear to violate Quines behavorist canon.A saving alternative is a theory of term-reference that appears in Roots of Reference and affords a return to behaviorism, and reinstatement of the proxy argument and relativity in a way compatible with Tarskis (T).     

Tarski and the Metalinguistic Liar

I offer an interpretation of a familiar, but poorly understood portion of Tarskis work on truth – bringing to light a number of unnoticed aspects of Tarskis work. A serious misreading of this part of Tarski to be found in Scott Soames Understanding Truth is treated in detail. Soamesreading vies with the textual evidence, and would make Tarskis position inconsistent in an unsubtle way. I show that Soames does not finally have a coherent interpretation of Tarski. This is unfortunate, since Soames ultimately arrogates to himself a key position that he has denied to Tarski and which is rightfully Tarskis own.     

Metaphysics and the interpretation of persons: Davidson on thinking and Conceptual Schemes

Certain metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions are shown to play a role in the defense of Davidson's claims that an empirically constructed theory of truth provides an adequate theory of meaning for any natural language. Dadivson puts forward demonstrative arguments in favor of these presuppositions in On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, Thought and Talk, and The Method of Truth in Metaphysics. These arguments are examined and found to include controversial and dubitable assumptions as premises. It is then suggested that both these controversial assumptions and Davidson's metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions can be partially defended, however, by dialectical, interpretive, and historical arguments that elucidate the nature of persons.     

Beyond verisimilitude: A linguistically invariant basis for scientific progress

This paper proposes a solution to David Miller's Minnesotan-Arizonan demonstration of the language dependence of truthlikeness (Miller 1974), along with Miller's first-order demonstration of the same (Miller 1978). It is assumed, with Peter Urbach, that the implication of these demonstrations is that the very notion of truthlikeness is intrinsically language dependent and thus non-objective. As such, truthlikeness cannot supply a basis for an objective account of scientific progress. I argue that, while Miller is correct in arguing that the number of true atomic sentences of a false theory is language dependent, the number of known sentences (under certain straightforward assumptions) is conserved by translation; degree of knowledge, unlike truthlikeness, is thus a linguistically invariant notion. It is concluded that the objectivity of scientific progress must be grounded on the fact (noted in Cohen 1980) that knowledge, not mere truth, is the aim of science.For criticism and comments I am indebted to Noretta Koertge, David Miller, and an anonymous Synthese referee.     

Becoming: A modest proposal

In this paper I attempt a new approach to an old technical term: becoming. I show how the theory that becoming is coming-to-be could be supported by a semantic derivation of the nominalization becoming from its verbal counterpart, by investigating the properties of the present progressive constructions in which becoming as a verbal appears. My theory denies that dates, or qualitative change, play an essential role in the analysis of becoming.     

On two arguments for the indeterminacy of personal identity

Both arguments are based on the breakdown of normal criteria of identity in certain science-fictional circumstances. In one case, normal criteria would support the identity of person A with each of two other persons, B and C; and it is argued that, in the imagined circumstances, A=B and A=C have no truth value. In the other, a series or spectrum of cases is tailored to a sorites argument. At one end of the spectrum, persons A and B are such that A=B is clearly true; at the other end, A and B are such that the identity is clearly false. In between, normal criteria of identity leave the truth or falsehood of A=B undecided, and it is argued that in these circumstances A=B has no truth value.These arguments are to be understood counterfactually. My claim is that, so understood, neither establishes its conclusion. The first involves a pair of counterfactual situations that are equally possible or tied. If A=B and A=C have no truth value, a counterfactual conditional with one of them as consequent and an antecedent that is true in circumstances in which either is true should have no truth value. Intuitively, however, any such counterfactual is false. The second argument can be seen to invite an analogous response. If this is right, however, there is an important disanalogy between this and the classical paradox of the heap. If the disanalogy is only apparent, the argument shows at most that the existence of persons can be indeterminate.     

On the nature of meaning and its indeterminacy: Davidson''s view in perspective

In order to illustrate the nature of the indeterminacy of meaning, Donald Davidson sometimes compares it to the fact that we can measure length or temperature on different scales. In the following paper I try to explain first why we are supposed to expect such an analogy, given the semantics of the word meaning and of the word length or temperature. In the second part I examine how close the analogy is by distinguishing different forms of indeterminacy of meaning (viz., the indeterminacy of reference and the indeterminacy of truth) and ask whether both forms have an equivalent in a theory of measurement. I shall conclude that this is indeed the case.I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for his or her detailed comments on a first version of this paper, which helped me to clarify my views considerably.     

Lying and intersubjective truth: A communication based approach to understanding lying

This project was undertaken as a response to a perceived deficiency regarding the role of communication in a large block of the phenomenological discourse on lying. The arguments presented here attempt to make the communication process an explicit, rather than an implicit component of this discussion. First, a lie is explained as a communicative act that is identified by making a simple comparison between two contradictory realities, the reality presented by the lie, and some sort of true reality. Existing discussions of lying are examined and judged to be deficient because they limit their explanations of this true reality to subjective and objective standards of truth. Intersubjectivity is presented as an alternative truth standard, and it is argued that lies can only be discovered and understood through a process of interpretation or negotiation (dialogue) by human interactants.     

What is a Correspondence Theory of Truth?

It is often thought that instances of the T-schema such as snow is white is true if and only if snow is white state correspondences between sentences andthe world, and that therefore such sentences play a crucial role in correspondence theories oftruth. I argue that this assumption trivializes the correspondence theory: even a disquotationaltheory of truth would be a correspondence theory on this conception. This discussionallows one to get clearer about what a correspondence theory does claim, and toward the end of thepaper I discuss what a true correspondence theory of truth would involve.     

Three theories of nominalized predicates

By the term nominalization I mean any process which transforms a predicate or predicate phrase into a noun or noun phrase, e.g. feminine is transformed into feminity. I call these derivative nouns abstract singular terms. Our aim is to provide a model-theoretic interpretation for a formal language which admits the occurrence of such abstract singular terms.     

Tye’s Representationalism: Feeling the Heat?

According to Tyes PANIC theory of consciousness, perceptualstates of creatures which are related to a disjunction ofexternal contents will fail to represent sensorily, andthereby fail to be conscious states. In this paper I arguethat heat perception, a form of perception neglected in therecent literature, serves as a counterexample to Tyesradical externalist claim. Having laid out Tyes `absentqualia scenario, the PANIC theory from which it derivesand the case of heat perception as a counterexample, Idefend the putative counterexample against three possibleresponses: (1) that heat perception represents general(i.e. non-disjunctive) intrinsic properties of objects,(2) that heat perception represents the non-specific heatenergy that is transferred between a subjects body andanother body and (3) that heat perception exclusivelyrepresents heat properties of the subjects own body.     

Theor of free choice permission

I argue that the conjunctive distribution of permissibility over or, which is a puzzling feature of free-choice permission is just one instance of a more general class of conjunctive occurrences of the word, and that these conjunctive uses are more directly explicable by the consideration that or is a descendant of oper than by reference to the disjunctive occurrences which logicalist prejudices may tempt us to regard as semantically more fundamental. I offer an account of how the disjunctive uses of or may have come about through an intermediate discourse-adverbial use of or, drawing a parallel with but, which, etymologically, is disjunctive rather than conjunctive and whose conjunctive uses seem to represent just such a discourse-adverbial application.     

Early German approaches to experimental reading research: The contributions of Wilhelm Wundt and Ernst Meumann

Summary Wundt looked at the reading process from a predominantly theoretical perspective. He opposed the total shape theory formulated by Erdmann and Dodge and insisted on the occurrence of attention shifts during word recognition. As an alternative to the total shape theory, he formulated a two-stage theory of word recognition. An initial, apperceptive phase of reading is concerned with the active analysis of visually salient local details, and a second, assimilative phase fills in the unanalyzed parts of words on the basis of a passive evocation of earlier experiences with graphemic input. Meumann looked at the reading process from the point of view of an educational psychologist. His review of experimental reading research presents most of the basic issues which are still controversial today. In his recommendations for the teaching of reading, he emphasized the importance of analyzing words into their constituent sounds and of articulatory awareness as a precondition for the firm establishment of connections between graphemes and speech sounds. The review discusses some of the reasons why the experimentally based approach to the psychology of reading failed to evoke the interest of German educators after World War I.     

The relativity of perceptual knowledge

Since the most promising path to a solution to the problem of skepticism regarding perceptual knowledge seems to rest on a sharp distinction between perceiving and inferring, I begin by clarifying and defending that distinction. Next, I discuss the chief obstacle to success by this path, the difficulty in making the required distinction between merely logical possibilities that one is mistaken and the real (Austin) or relevant (Dretske) possibilities which would exclude knowledge. I argue that this distinction cannot be drawn in the ways Austin and Dretske suggest without begging the questions at issue. Finally, I sketch and defend a more radical way of identifying relevant possibilities that is inspired by Austin's controversial suggestion of a parallel between saying I know and saying I promise: a claim of knowledge of some particular matter is relative to a context in which questions about the matter have been raised.     

Analytic/synthetic and semantic theory

A somewhat simplified version of Jerrold J. Katz's theory of the analytic/synthetic distinction for natural languages is presented. Katz's account is criticized on the following grounds. (1) the antonymy operator is not well defined; it leaves certain sentences without readings. (2) The account of negation is defective; it has the consequence that certain nonsynonymous sentences are marked as synonymous. (3) The account of entailment is defective; it has the consequence that analytic sentences entail synthetic ones. (4) Katz's account of indeterminable sentences is criticized; it has the consequence that certain logical truths are not marked as analytic. (5) Katz's semantics provides no account of truth, so that he is unable to show that analytic sentences are true and that indeterminable sentences are not.     

Indicative Conditionals

Adams Thesis has much evidence in its favour, but DavidLewis famously showed that it cannot be true, in all but the most trivial of cases, if conditionals are proprositions and their probabilities are classical probabilities of truth. In this paper I show thatsimilar results can be constructed for a much wider class of conditionals. The fact that these results presupposethat the logic of conditionals is Boolean motivates a search for a non-Boolean alternative. It is arguedthat the exact proposition expressed by a conditional depends on the context in which it is uttered. Consequentlyits probability of truth will depend not only on the probabilities of the various propositions it mightexpress, but also on the probabilities of the contexts determining which proposition it does in fact express.The semantic theory developed from this is then shown to explain why agents degrees of belief satisfyAdams Thesis. Finally the theory is compared with proposals for a three-valued logic of conditionals.     

Toulmin on Ideals of Natural Order

In this paper I criticize Toulmin's concept of Ideals of Natural Order and his account of the role these Ideals play in scientific explanation as given in his book, Foresight and Understanding. I argue that Toulmin's account of Ideals of Natural Order as those theories taken to be self evident by scientists at a given time introduces an undesirable subjectivism into his account of scientific explanation. I argue also that the history of science, especially the recent history of microphysics, does not support Toulmin's contentions about the supposed self-evidence of the basic explanatory theories in science.     

MacIntyre and the Idea of an Educated Public

Some years ago, 1985, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a paper onThe Idea of an Educated Public in which he argued that the only route open for educators for the future, in order to emerge out of the current moral crisis created by the emotivist modernist culture is to bring back the idea of an educated public from the Scottish Enlightenment and to regard education as education into such a public. The notion of an educated public, in effect, reappears also in all his later books on moral philosophy, particular his latest,Three Rival Theories of Moral Enquiry, where he takes up his original proposal that educated publics should grow around universities and canvasses the new idea that under contemporary conditions what we may need is not one universal university but three kinds contextualized within the three rival kinds of cultural and moral programmes he identifies, and, correspondingly, three kinds of educated public. This paper tries to trace the evolution of MacIntyre's idea of an educated public throughout his work, (1) arguing that there is one particular perspective on the idea which he strangely omits, that represented by Dewey/Habermas, and (2) critiquing his final solution on the basis of its possibility and political desirability.