Centering on Demonstrative Thought

The nature of perceptual demonstratives, the ‘that F’ component of judgments of the form ‘that F is G’ based on perceptual input, has been a topic of interest for many philosophers. Another related, though distinct, question concerns the nature of demonstrative judgments based not on current perceptual input, but instead derived from memory. I argue that the account put forward by John Campbell fails to adequately account for memory-based demonstrative thought.     

Perceptual Demonstrative Thought: A Property-Dependent Theory

Topoi - The paper presents a new theory of perceptual demonstrative thought, the property-dependent theory. It argues that the theory is superior to both the object-dependent theory (Evans,...     

仁爱思想与孔子的主体意识

孔子的仁爱思想深刻体现出了对一般社会民众命运的关注,对整个人类社会和谐发展的关切.仁爱思想的内在规定性,投注了孔子的主体意识;仁爱思想的外在实践,彰显了孔子的主体意识;仁爱之"道"的执着追求,张扬了孔子的主体意识.故而说,孔子写下了我国先秦时期精神启蒙的"仁爱"经典篇章.     

Acquaintance and assurance

I criticize Richard Fumerton??s fallibilist acquaintance theory of noninferential justification.     

Taste and Acquaintance

The analogy between gustatory taste and critical or aesthetic taste plays a recurring role in the history of aesthetics. Our interest in this article is in a particular way in which gustatory judgments are frequently thought to be analogous to critical judgments. It appears obvious to many that to know how a particular object tastes we must have tasted it for ourselves; the proof of the pudding, we are all told, is in the eating. And it has seemed just as obvious to many philosophers that aesthetic judgment requires first‐person experience. In this article we argue that, despite its initial appeal, the claim that gustatory and critical judgments are analogous in this way is mistaken. The two sorts of judgments are, as a matter of fact, similar in their epistemology, but earlier theorists have got things entirely backward—neither gustatory judgment nor aesthetic judgment requires first‐hand acquaintance with their objects. Our particular focus in this article is on arguing that first‐person experience is not required to know how an item of food or drink tastes. In fact, there are a wide variety of ways in which we can acquire this knowledge.     

Aesthetic Acquaintance

If, as Richard Wollheim says, the Acquaintance Principle is ‘a well-entrenched principle in aesthetics,’ it would be surprising if there were not something true at which those who have asserted it have been aiming. I argue that the Acquaintance Principle cannot be true on any traditional epistemic interpretation, nor on any usability interpretation of the sort Robert Hopkins has recently suggested. I then argue for an interpretation of the principle that treats acquaintance as the end to which judgments of aesthetic value are the means as opposed to the other way around.     

Rape Perceptions, Gender Role Attitudes, and Victim-Perpetrator Acquaintance

The connection between rape perceptions, gender role attitudes, and victim-perpetrator acquaintance was examined. One hundred fifty Israeli students rated their perceptions of the victim, the perpetrator, the situation, and the appropriate punishment, after reading scenarios in which rape was committed by a neighbor, an ex-boyfriend, and a current life partner. Significant negative correlations were found between gender-role attitudes and four measures of rape perceptions. “Traditionals” minimized the severity of all rapes more than “Egalitarians” did. As the acquaintance level increased, there was a greater tendency to minimize the severity of the rape, in the perceptions of the victim, the situation, and the punishment; the situation was characterized less as rape, and was perceived as less violating of the victim's rights and less psychologically damaging. Women tended to have more egalitarian attitudes than men did, and women were less likely to minimize the severity of the rape in the measures of perceptions of the situation and the appropriate punishment.     

Higher-Order Intentionality and Higher-Order Acquaintance

I argue against such “Higher-Order Intentionalist” theories of consciousness as the higher-order thought and inner sense views on the ground that they understand a subject’s awareness of his or her phenomenal characters to be intentional, like seeming-seeing, rather than “direct”, like seeing. The trouble with such views is that they reverse the order of explanation between phenomenal character and intentional awareness. A superior theory of consciousness takes the relation of awareness to be nonintentional.     

Conceptual Art and the Acquaintance Principle

The Acquaintance Principle has been the subject of extensive debate in philosophical aesthetics. In one of the most recent developments, it has become popular to claim that some works of conceptual art are counterexamples to it. It is further claimed that this is a genuinely new problem in the sense that it is a problem even for versions of the Acquaintance Principle modified to deal with previous objections. I argue that this is essentially correct; however, the claim as it stands needs some work. I draw attention to, and defend, two assumptions on which the claim rests but which have so far gone unrecognized. I also address an objection that has recently been made to the claim and threatens to raise further complications for it. In doing this, we arrive at a fuller, more robust version of the initial claim.     

Demonstrative utterances

Conclusion We have worked out a small part of a program originally devised by Kaplan which included a clarification of the phrase y intends to demonstrate x. The analysis of demonstrative utterances, combined with a theory of deferred ostensive reference, enabled us to account for a much larger class of utterances (accompained by a relevant gesture) than expected. Regrettably, the analysis forces more questions on us than it answers. Although I have used the term gesture quite freely without providing any sort of explication, there is much more to say about gestures and their relation to speech. Especially questions concerning the ontological nature of gestures (What kind of a thing is a gesture anyway?), their epistemological status (How can we tell gestures apart from other actions?), and their semantic status (What makes a gesture have meaning?) have remained largely unexplored. To my knowledge, no philosopher in the analytic tradition has addressed those issues in any systematic manner.     

我与斯特劳森哲学的因缘

斯特劳森的去世引发了我对自己求学道路的回忆,其中的每一步都与斯特劳森有着密切的关系。被誉为“当代最卓越的分析心灵”的斯特劳森,是执著地从事综合而系统的思考和推理的少数几位分析哲学家中的翘楚。斯特劳森的贡献正在于把描述的形而上学对概念图式及其基本结构的探索与对康德关于经验的普遍必然结构的阐发结合起来,在语言哲学的背景下促成了先验论证的复兴,从而变革和扩展了传统的经验概念。如果说康德是用现象与物自身的区分来证成自由的话,那么斯特劳森哲学的总问题实际上就是在一个只有现象没有物自身的世界中人的自由何以可能以及自由的本性为何的问题。正是秉承维特根斯坦的影响,斯特劳森对怀疑主义的反驳和对自然主义的辩护本身已经在某种程度上回答了有关保守主义的置疑。