Perception,meaning, and mind

Earlier versions of this paper were read in the Philosophy department at the University of Helsinki, in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, at Vanderbilt University, at the Indiana Philosophical Association, and at the Institute for Logic and Cognitive Science at the University of Houston. I am grateful for very helpful comments on each of these occasions, and I am especially appreciative to John Haugeland, Mark Johnson, and George McClure for their comments and suggestions. Thanks, too, to Robert Solomon who urged me to amplify my claims about perceptual meaning.     

A representational account of mutual belief

Although the notion of common or mutual belief plays a crucial role in game theory, economics and social philosophy, no thoroughly representational account of it has yet been developed. In this paper, I propose two desiderata for such an account, namely, that it take into account the possibility of inconsistent data without portraying the human mind as logically and mathematically omniscient. I then propose a definition of mutual belief which meets these criteria. This account takes seriously the existence of computational limitations. Finally, I point out that the epistemic logic (or theory) needed to make the definition work is subject to the Kaplan/Montague Paradox of the Knower. I argue that this is not a defect of the account, and I discuss briefly the bearing of recent work on the paradox of the Liar upon this problem.Much of this work was carried out with the support of a grant from the National Science Foundation to the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Texas at Austin (Grant No. IRI-8719064). Much thanks to Tyler Burge, Nicholas Asher, and Brian Skyrms for their criticisms and suggestions.     

Relevant logic and the theory of information

This paper provides an interpretation of the Routley-Meyer semantics for a weak negation-free relevant logic using Israel and Perry's theory of information. In particular, Routley and Meyer's ternary accessibility relation is given an interpretation in information-theoretic terms.I am indebted to Max Cresswell for invariable conversations relating to the topic and encouraging me to provide a philosophical explanation of the ternary semantics for relevant logic and to Errol Martin also for useful discussions and encouragement. I am also grateful to Greg Restall who made his work available to me while I was finishing this project. While working on this project, I was supported by a grant from the Centre for Information Science Research at The Australian National University. I am grateful to John Slaney and Michael McRobbie for securing this grant. I gave an earlier version of this paper to the Basser School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney and to the philosophy department at Victoria University of Wellington. I thank all those in attendance especially John Bacon, Norman Foo, Abhaya Nayak, Kim Sterelny, and James Maclaurin.     

Does natural law have non-normative foundations?

This paper addresses one aspect of the natural law theory of Germain Grisez. According to Grisez, practical reason identifies the goods of human life prior to the invocation of any moral or normative notions. It can thus provide a non-normative foundation for moral theory. I present Grisez’s position and argue that the apparently non-normative aspect of natural law cannot support the moral position built upon it. I argue, in particular, that practical principles, as Grisez understands them, are best understood as speech acts. If this is correct, it is possible to develop a sceptical challenge to Grisez’s position. I am grateful to Michael Frede, Robert George, Richard Holton, Philip Pettit, and two anonymous reviewers for many helpful comments on this paper. This paper was presented at a seminar in the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University in November 1987, and I am grateful for the comments I received from the audience—in particular, Germain Grisez—on that occasion.     

Belief in discourse representation theory

Conclusion I hope I have convinced the reader that DR theory offers at least some exciting potential when applied to the semantics of belief reports. It differs considerably from other approaches, and it makes intuitively acceptable predictions that other theories do not. The theory also provides a novel approach to the semantics of other propsitional attitude reports. Further, DR theory enables one to approach the topic of anaphora within belief and other propositional attitude contexts in a novel way, thus combining the semantics developed here with one of the theory's original motivations (Kamp, 1981a). However, these are unfortunately topics that I must reserve for another time.I am grateful to Dan Bonevac, Irene Heim, Richard Larson, Stan Peters, Rich Thomason and especially Hans Kamp and an anonymous reviewer for the Journal of Philosophical Logic for comments on previous drafts of this paper, as well as to The Center for Cognitive Science for research support.     

Leibniz's complete propositional logic

Conclusion I have shown (to my satisfaction) that Leibniz's final attempt at a generalized syllogistico-propositional calculus in the Generales Inquisitiones was pretty successful. The calculus includes the truth-table semantics for the propositional calculus. It contains an unorthodox view of conjunction. It offers a plethora of very important logical principles. These deserve to be called a set of fundamentals of logical form. Aside from some imprecisions and redundancies the system is a good systematization of propositional logic, its semantics, and a correct account of general syllogistics. For 1686 it was quite an accomplishment. It is a pity that Leibniz himself did not fully appreciate what he had achieved. It does seem to me that this was due in part, as the Kneales urge (Note 4), to his having kept the focus of his attention on traditional syllogistics. It is a great pity that he did not polish GI 195–200 for publication. The publication of GI 195, 198, and 200 would have most likely promoted further research.This paper was conceived in a Seminar on the Generales Inquisitiones offered by Professor Klaus Jacobi at the University of Freiburg during the 1987 winter semester. I am grateful to him for having allowed me to participate in that exciting seminar. I am grateful to all the seminar participants, especially to Professor Jacobi, Professor Klaus Erich Kaehler, Doctor Helmut Pape, and Herr Hans-Peter Engelhart for sustained and illuminating discussions of some passages of the GI. Jacobi was extremely kind in reading the second version of this paper with a highly refined comb. I am most grateful to him for having pointed out typos, stylistic infelicities, and conceptual obscurities. He also provided advice on the translation, and, most generously and cooperatively, offered suggestions for improving the exposition and the arguments.     

Theoretical functions in physical science

The aim of this paper is to give an account of theoreticity which captures the preanalytic conception of a theoretical function, which is precise and yet which expresses what is significant about theoretical functions. The point of departure for this account is a recent discussion of the topic by Balzer and Moulines. On the basis of criticism of this discussion and on the basis of an examination of laboratory measurement, an account of theoreticity is proposed.I am grateful to the members of the philosophy seminar at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, to Barbara Davidson and particularly to Wolfgang Balzer and this journal's referee for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.     

Review essay: The roots and roles of normative governance

All quotation are from Gibbard's book; pages are identified by parenthesized numbers. I am grateful to colleagues and students, and most especially to the students in my graduate seminar on rationality, more than half of which was spent in examining Gibbard's book, for ideas and suggestions.     

An Alternative Model of Political Reasoning

The primary instrument of dispute management in political liberalism is a form of political thinking and talking that tries to reconcile opposed positions with an impartial settlement based on fair arrangements and mutual respect, one that is careful to treat rival views equitably, and reasoned through from start to finish with open methods that lead to a public justification understandable to the disputants. But this model of reasoning is notoriously deficient in resolving disputes among radically different communities. A more effective form of political reasoning for these disputes that yet respects the background values of liberalism is found in the languages of state depicted in realist accounts of international relations. These languages avoid liberal appeals to be reasonable, reciprocity controlled by moral criteria, and the quest for common reasons. They represent a deliberative search for an accord that will meet the interests of the disputing parties as they define these interests and understand the settlements, and in this sense are welcome models to manage divisive issues in pluralist democracies. A complete version of political reasoning would contain both liberal and realpolitik models and a mechanism to adjudicate the appropriate uses of each model.I do not know how even to begin thanking my spring 2003 graduate seminar for the wonderful discussions that allowed me to refine my thinking on this research project. In different ways the following individual members of the seminar were helpful: Amanda Dipaolo, Dimitria Gatzia, Michael McFall, Michael McKeon, Roald Nashi, Paul Prescott, Joshua Vermette, Amy Widestrom, and the two regular auditors, Cyril Ghosh and Darrell Driver. I have also profited from numerous discussions with other graduate students, including, early in this project, Steven Benko and, more constantly, Ali Shomali. Faculty colleagues who have commented on the work and suggested literatures for me to read and references to track include James Bennett, Hans Schmidt, Peg Hermann, Elizabeth Cohen, Jim Watts, Jim Wiggins, David Miller and Thomas Green. I am particularly grateful to Everita Silina, a graduate student who has been a constant friend and invaluable research assistant for the past five years. The Miami International Relations Theory group provided a critical venue to try out portions of this paper at the University of Miami campus on April 23, 2004. I then presented a later version of the paper to a Philosophy Department colloquium at the University of Miami on April 22, 2005. The comments made by those who attended one or both of the sessions were very helpful. I am also grateful to Ken Baynes and Ned McClennen for allowing me to be an unlisted third instructor in their seminar on “law, economics and public reason” in the fall semester 2004 at Syracuse University, and for the opportunity to present some of this work at one of the seminar meetings. If anything demonstrates the importance of a good collective setting on intellectual work this seminar was one such demonstration.     

Semantics for relevance logic with identity

Models are constructed for a variety of systems of quantified relevance logic with identity. Models are given for systems with different principles governing the transitivity of identity and substitution, and the relative merits of these principles are discussed. The models in this paper are all extensions of the semantics of Fine's Semantics for Quantified Relevance Logic (Journal of Philosophical Logic 17 (1988)).I am indebted to J. M. Dunn for reading earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful to Nuel D. Belnap, Jr., Robert K. Meyer, Timothy Day, and Adriano Palma for discussing the topic with me and to Kit Fine for helpful correspondence. Moreover, I am grateful to an anonymous referee for many useful suggestions. A slightly different version presented in a seminar in the philosophy department of the Research School for Social Sciences at The Australian National University. While working on this paper I was funded by postdoctoral fellowship 456-89-0128 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.     

Vacuous truth

Special thanks go to Paul Humphreys for his criticisms and helpful comments. Also Richard Gale, Gerald Massey, Nicholas Rescher, David Blumenfeld, James Humber, Richard Ketchum, and Wolfgang Dietel made helpful comments on an earlier version. Each found something in need of repair. Finally, I would like to thank the Hambidge Center and the Center for the Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh for providing in 1988 the setting and the resources that made this paper possible.     

In defence of fact-dependency

G.A. Cohen and David Estlund claim that, because of their fact-dependent nature, constructivist theories of justice do not qualify as moral theories about fundamental values such as justice. In this paper, I defend fact-dependent, constructivist theories of justice against this fact-independency critique. I argue that constructivists can invoke facts among the grounds for accepting fundamental principles of justice while maintaining that the foundation of morality has to be non-empirical. My claim is that constructivists ultimately account for the normativity of fact-dependent principles by referring to a fact-independent, moral conception of the person, which is not a principle of justice.1^?1. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Annual Dutch Conference for Practical Philosophy, the practical philosophy seminar at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and the seminar of the Horizon research group at Utrecht University. I am grateful for the comments and questions I received on these occasions.     

On Being Responsible and Holding Responsible

A number of philosophers have recently argued that we should interpret the debate over moral responsibility as a debate over the conditions under which it would be “fair” to blame a person for her attitudes or conduct. What is distinctive about these accounts is that they begin with the stance of the moral judge, rather than that of the agent who is judged, and make attributions of responsibility dependent upon whether it would be fair or appropriate for a moral judge to react to the agent in various (negative) ways. This is problematic, I argue, because our intuitions about whether and when it would be fair to react negatively to another are sensitive to a host of considerations that appear to have little or nothing to do with an agent’s responsibility or culpability for her attitudes or behavior. If this is correct, then theories which make attributions of responsibility dependent upon the appropriateness of our reactions as moral judges will turn out to be fundamentally misguided. I am grateful to Barbara Herman, T. M. Scanlon, and two anonymous reviewers for The Journal of Ethics for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to Pamela Hieronymi and the members of her Fall 2201 graduate seminar on moral responsibility at UCLA, and to the audience members at Simon Fraser University, for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this material. My biggest debt of gratitude goes to Jean Roberts, for stimulating discussion and insightful commentary on multiple drafts of this paper.     

Time and modality in the logic of agency

Recent theories of agency (sees to it that) of Nuel Belnap and Michael Perloff are examined, particularly in the context of an early proposal of the author.Elements of this paper formed the contents of lectures I gave in New Zealand and Australia in 1989. I would like again to thank Graham Oddie at Massey University, in Palmerston North, Jack Copeland at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, John Bacon at the University of Sydney, and Graham Priest at the University of Queensland for their kindness and the gracious receptions they and their colleagues gave me. My thanks go to Graham Oddie and Krister Segerberg, who organized a workshop on Events, Processes, Actions at Lake Taupo, New Zealand, in November 1989, and invited me to participate with a preliminary version of this paper. In June 1990, I presented a fuller specimen at the annual meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy, in Wakulla Springs, Florida. Bob Beard at Florida State University organized that splendid gathering, and I am grateful to him for the opportunity to speak at it.For the past several years, Nuel Belnap has sent me copies and updates of his and Michael Perloff's papers. I would like to record my gratitude to him for this and also, especially, for extended comments on the penultimate draft of the present paper. With a few exceptions, I have not tried to take these into account here; I hope that discussions of points on which we disagree will find their way into print in due course.I would also like to acknowledge and thank a referee for a number of helpful suggestions.My largest debt is to Krister Segerberg, who as professor and head of the philosophy department at the University of Auckland invited me to spend a sabbatical autumn (antipodal spring) with him in 1989. It was he who suggested — and then insisted — that I contribute to his seminar on modal logic and agency a session or two on Belnap and Perloff's theories, and then he encouraged me to write this paper. I would like to express my deep gratitude as well to Krister and Anita Segerberg for their hospitality and companionship during my stay in New Zealand.     

EXPLANATORY MODESTY

Although I certainly have differences with some of my commentators, I am grateful for the time, effort, and attention that each has devoted to my book, Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. They have helpfully pointed out features of my positions that need clarification and elaboration. I am also grateful to the editor of Zygon, Willem Drees, for this opportunity to undertake that task here.     

Conceptual dependency as the language of thought

Roger Schank's research in AI takes seriously the ideas that understanding natural language involves mapping its expressions into an internal representation scheme and that these internal representations have a syntax appropriate for computational operations. It therefore falls within the computational approach to the study of mind. This paper discusses certain aspects of Schank's approach in order to assess its potential adequacy as a (partial) model of cognition. This version of the Language of Thought hypothesis encounters some of the same difficulties that arise for Fodor's account.An ancestor of this paper was written while I was on sabbatical leave from the University of Michigan, Flint, during which time I held a fellowship in the Computer Science Department of Wright State University. Revisions were made while I held a Visiting Lectureship at the University of Waikato. I am grateful to these three institutions for their support, and to James H. Fetzer, David Hemmendinger, and Edwin Hung for helpful comments on earlier versions.     

States, state types, and the causation of behavior

An earlier version of this paper has been read at a conference on Mental Causation which was held on March 12–14, 1990, at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, as an integral part of the work of the research group Mind and Brain. I am very grateful to ZiF for the financial support that made it possible for me to take part in the research group. Thanks also to the organizers of the conference Peter Bieri and Jaegwon Kim.     

A systematical approach to Leibniz's theory of relations and relational sentences

I am grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung for support during the years 1983–84 in which I worked by the Leibniz-Forschungsstelle at Münster collecting the materials for the present essay.     

Constant colors in the head

I defend a version of color subjectivism — that colors are sortals for certain neural events — by arguing against a sophisticated form of color objectivism and by showing how a subjectivist can legitimately explain the phenomenal fact that colors seem to be properties of external objects.I am very grateful to C. L. Hardin and Mohan Matthen for reading early drafts of this paper — in Hardin's case, two drafts. They both helped me to become clearer about the issues and improved the argument considerably. I am grateful to Ran Lahav and Paul Pietroski for incisive comments on more recent drafts, and to others for comments made in discussion.     

Evidence and inference in educational assessment

Educational assessment concerns inference about students' knowledge, skills, and accomplishments. Because data are never so comprehensive and unequivocal as to ensure certitude, test theory evolved in part to address questions of weight, coverage, and import of data. The resulting concepts and techniques can be viewed as applications of more general principles for inference in the presence of uncertainty. Issues of evidence and inference in educational assessment are discussed from this perspective.Probability isn't really about numbers; it's about the structure of reasoning.Presidential address to the Psychometric Society, presented June 25, 1994, in Champaign, Illinois.Supported by (1) Contract No. N00014-91-J-4101, R&T 4421573-01, from the Cognitive Science Program, Cognitive and Neural Sciences Division, Office of Naval Research, (2) the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, Student Testing (CRESST), Educational Research and Development Program, cooperative agreement number R117G10027 and CFDA catalog number 84.117G, as administered by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, and (3) the Statistical and Psychometric Research Division of Educational Testing Service. I am grateful for comments and suggestions from Henry Braun, Drew Gitomer, Richard Patz, Jonathan Troper, and Howard Wainer.