真值条件内容非实在论

错误论和非事实论是用语义方式表述的两种不同形态的非实在论,当中涉及"真"、"假"、"指称"、"真值条件"这样的语义概念。布高西昂认为,针对真值条件内容概念的错误论和非事实论是内在地不一致的,从而可以先验地予以拒绝。本文详细分析布高西昂的论证,揭示其论证的缺陷,以及分析布高西昂与其批评者达维特之间的争议,消除他们对用于表述非实在论的语义概念的误解,尝试为真值条件内容非实在论给出一致的表述。     

A repair of Frege’s theory of thoughts

Frege’s writings contain arguments for the thesis (i) that a thought expressed by a sentence S is a structured object whose composition pictures the composition of S, and for the thesis (ii) that a thought is an unstructured object. I will argue that Frege’s reasons for both (i) and (ii) are strong. Frege’s explanation of the difference in sense between logically equivalent sentences rests on assumption (i), while Frege’s claim that the same thought can be decomposed differently makes (ii) plausible. Thoughts are supposed to do work that requires that they be structured and work that requires that they be unstructured. But this cannot be! While the standard response to this problem is to reject either (i) or (ii), I propose a charitable repair in the spirit of Frege’s theory that accepts both. The key idea can be found in Frege’s Basic Laws of Arithmetic(BL, GGA). Frege argues that the thought expressed by a sentence is determined by the truth-conditions that can be derived from the semantic axioms for the sentence constituents. The fact that the same axiomatic truth-condition can be derived in different ways from different semantic axioms suggests a Fregean solution of the dilemma: A thought is a type that is instantiated by all sequences of senses (decomposed thoughts) that have the same axiomatic truth-conditions. This allows for multiple decomposability of the same thought (for different decomposed thoughts can have the same axiomatic truth-conditions) and for a notion of containment (the decomposed thought contains those senses whose semantic axioms are needed in the derivation of the truth-conditions). My proposal combines the virtues of (i) and (ii) without inheriting their vices.     

Practical knowledge and the subjectivity of truth in Kant and Kierkegaard: The cover of skepticism

Kant developed a distinctive method of philosophical argumentation, the method of transcendental argumentation, which continues to have contemporary philosophical promise. Yet there is considerable disagreement among Kant's interpreters concerning the aim of transcendental arguments. On ambitious interpretations, transcendental arguments aim to establish certain necessary features of the world from the conditions of our thinking about or experiencing the world; they are world‐directed. On modest interpretations, transcendental arguments aim to show that certain beliefs have a special status that renders them invulnerable to skeptical doubts; they are belief‐directed. This paper brings Kierkegaard's thesis of the “subjectivity of truth” to bear on these questions concerning the aim of transcendental arguments. I focus on Kant's argument for the postulate of God's existence in his Critique of Practical Reason and show that Kierkegaard's thesis of the subjectivity of truth can help us construe the argument as both belief and world directed. Yet I also argue that Kierkegaard's thesis of the subjectivity of truth can help us understand the source of our dissatisfaction with Kant's transcendental arguments: It can help us understand that dissatisfaction as an expression of what Stanley Cavell calls the “cover of skepticism,” the conversion of metaphysical finitude into intellectual lack.     

The dynamic lexicon in a truth-conditional framework; or how to have Your cake and eat it

A fundamental principle of all truth-conditional approaches to semantics is that the meanings of sentences of natural language can be compositionally specified in terms of truth conditions, where the meanings of the sentences’ parts (words/lexical items) are specified in terms of the contribution they make to such conditions their host sentences possess. Thus, meanings of words fit the meanings of sentences at least to the extent that the stability of what a sentence might mean as specified in a theory is in accord with the stability of what a word might mean as similarly specified. In this paper, I shall be concerned with Ludlow’s (2014) idea that, in fact, there need be no such sympathy between words and sentences. He proposes that we can square what he calls a dynamic lexicon, where word meaning is not stable at all, with a traditional truth-conditional approach of the kind indicated, where sentence meaning is delivered via ‘absolute truth conditions’. I share Ludlow’s aspiration to accommodate dynamic features of word meaning with a truth conditional approach, but not his belief that the marriage is an easy deal. Thus, I shall present a problem for Ludlow’s position and show how resolving this problem leads to an alternative picture of how the meaning of a sentence may be truth-conditionally specified with all relevant dynamic features of the lexicon retained.     

Generalising the probabilistic semantics of conditionals

Conclusion If assertibility rules are to be important in semantic theory, hypotheses such as this one will need to beiinvestigated. And Slote's observation (see note 12) that what matters for assertibility is not belief but knowledge will turn out to have powerful consequences.Adams' rule is the first well understood assertibility rule in philosophical semantics. I think we should be led by its successes to look for more. In this paper, I have built on his assertibility rule and offered two more. But it is worth observing, finally, that their interest lies, in part, in the contrast with semantic rules stated in terms of truth conditions. Much recent discussion of assertibility conditions derives from Dummett's anti-realist claim that we should perhaps substitute assertibility conditions for truth conditions in general; see Dummett (1973), Wright (1976). This notion of assertibility is not the one I have been working with here: for the anti-realist notion of an assertibility condition is of a condition whose obtaining provides epistemic warrant for the sentence asserted. Dummett and Wright's assertibility conditions are thus to do with the justification of the belief expressed by a sentence and not directly with the justification for asserting it. ¹⁷ But realists may be interested in a more modest role for assertibility conditions — in my sense — which are not derived, by way of ASS, from truth conditions. Realism need not be the claim that all declarative sentences can be given truth conditions; it requires only the view that truth conditions account for the central class of cases. The proposals in this paper presuppose a realist treatment of the antecedents and consequents of unembedded conditionals, and a realist view of the sentences within the scope of the epistemic modality. What could be more central than that?I am very grateful to an anonymous referee for this journal and to its editor for helpful comments on earlier drafts.     

Relative truth and the first person

In recent work on context-dependency, it has been argued that certain types of sentences give rise to a notion of relative truth. In particular, sentences containing predicates of personal taste and moral or aesthetic evaluation as well as epistemic modals are held to express a proposition (relative to a context of use) which is true or false not only relative to a world of evaluation, but other parameters as well, such as standards of taste or knowledge or an agent. I will argue that the sentences that apparently give rise to relative truth should be understood by relating them in a certain way to the first person. More precisely, such sentences express what I will call ‘first-person-based genericity’, a form of generalization that is based on an essential first-person application of the predicate. The account differs from standard relative truth account in crucial respects: it is not the truth of the proposition expressed that is relative to the first person; the proposition expressed by a sentence with a predicate of taste rather has absolute truth conditions. Instead it is the propositional content itself that requires a first-personal cognitive access whenever it is entertained. This account, I will argue, avoids a range of problems that standard relative truth theories of the sentences in question face and explains a number of further peculiarities that such sentences display.     

Supervaluations and the Propositional Attitude Constraint

For the sentences of languages that contain operators that express the concepts of definiteness and indefiniteness, there is an unavoidable tension between a truth-theoretic semantics that delivers truth conditions for those sentences that capture their propositional contents and any model-theoretic semantics that has a story to tell about how indetifiniteness in a constituent affects the semantic value of sentences which imbed it. But semantic theories of both kinds play essential roles, so the tension needs to be resolved. I argue that it is the truth theory which correctly characterises the notion of truth, per se. When we take into account the considerations required to bring model theory into harmony with truth theory, those considerations undermine the arguments standardly used to motivate supervaluational model theories designed to validate classical logic. But those considerations also show that celebration would be premature for advocates of the most frequently encountered rival approach – many-valued model theory.     

How Morality Can Be Absent from Moral Arguments

What is a moral argument? A straightforward answer is that a moral argument is an argument dealing with moral issues, such as the permissibility of killing in certain circumstances. I call this the thin sense of ‘moral argument’. Arguments that we find in normative and applied ethics are almost invariably moral in this sense. However, they often fail to be moral in other respects. In this article, I discuss four ways in which morality can be absent from moral arguments in the thin sense. If these arguments suffer from an absence of morality in at least one of these ways, they are not moral arguments in what I will call the thick sense of ‘moral argument’. Because only moral arguments in the thick sense could possibly qualify as proper responses to moral problems, the absence of morality in thin arguments means that these arguments will fail to give us a reason to do whatever they claim that we ought to do, even if we see no independent reason to question the truth of the premises or the logical validity of the argument.     

XIV—Moral Non-Cognitivism and the Grammar of Morality

This paper investigates the linguistic basis for moral non-cognitivism, the view that sentences containing moral predicates do not have truth conditions. It offers a new argument against this view by pointing out that the view is incompatible with our best empirical theories about the grammatical encoding of illocutionary force potentials. Given that my arguments are based on very general assumptions about the relations between the grammar of natural languages and a sentence's illocutionary function, my arguments are broader in scope than the familiar semantic objections to non-cognitivism relating to the so-called Frege-Geach problem: even if a solution to the Frege-Geach problem has been found, my arguments still stand.     

Logic For Expressivists

In this paper I offer solutions to two problems which our moral practice engenders for expressivism, the meta-ethical doctrine according to which ethical statements aren't propositional, susceptible of truth and falsity, but, rather, express the speaker's non-cognitive attitudes. First, the expressivist must show that arguments which are valid when interpreted propositionally are valid when construed expressivistically, and vice versa. The second difficulty is the Frege-Geach problem. Moral arguments employ atomic sentences, negations, disjunctions, etc., and, by expressivist lights, the meaning of a moral sentence depends on the attitude that it expresses. Since one's attitude varies as one asserts a claim, or negates it, or cites it as a disjunct, etc., the meaning of the relevant phrase changes as well, so the argument equivocates. (Formal proofs are provided in appendices to the paper.)     

Aristotle on the Homonymy of Being

A number of philosophers endorse, without argument, the view that there's something it's like consciously to think that p , which is distinct from what it's like consciously to think that q . This thesis, if true, would have important consequences for philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In this paper I offer two arguments for it.
The first argument claims it would be impossible introspectively to distinguish conscious thoughts with respect to their content if there weren't something it's like to think them. This argument is defended against several objections.
The second argument uses what I call "minimal pair" experiences—sentences read without and with understanding—to induce in the reader an experience of the kind I claim exists. Further objections are considered and rebutted.     

Ontological realism and sentential form

The standard argument for the existence of distinctively mathematical objects like numbers has two main premises: (i) some mathematical claims are true, and (ii) the truth of those claims requires the existence of distinctively mathematical objects. Most nominalists deny (i). Those who deny (ii) typically reject Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment. I target a different assumption in a standard type of semantic argument for (ii). Benacerraf’s semantic argument, for example, relies on the claim that two sentences, one about numbers and the other about cities, have the same grammatical form. He makes this claim on the grounds that the two sentences are superficially similar. I argue that these grounds are not sufficient. Other sentences with the same superficial form appear to have different grammatical forms. I offer two plausible interpretations of Benacerraf’s number sentence that make use of plural quantification. These interpretations appear not to incur ontological commitments to distinctively mathematical objects, even assuming Quine’s criterion. Such interpretations open a new, plural strategy for the mathematical nominalist.     

Contextualism,Invariantism and Semantic Blindness

Epistemic contextualism, many critics argue, entails that ordinary speakers are blind to the fact that knowledge claims have context-sensitive truth conditions. This attribution of blindness, critics add, seriously undermines contextualism. I show that this criticism and, in general, discussions about the error theory entailed by contextualism, greatly underestimates the complexity and diversity of the data about ordinary speakers’ inter-contextual judgments, as well as the range of explanatory moves that are open to both invariantists and contextualists concerning such judgments. Contextualism does entail that some speakers suffer from semantic blindness; however, at its roots, this blindness concerns not the context-sensitivity of knowledge claims, but the question whether knowledge sentences possess context-independent truth conditions. I argue that this blindness should not be deemed problematic, but that invariantism entails an error theory that is, by comparison, much more troubling.     

Counting by Identity: A Reply to Liebesman

David Liebesman (AJP, 2015) argues that we never count by identity. He generalizes from an argument that we don't do so with sentences indicating fractions, or with measurement sentences on their supposed count readings. In response, I argue that measurement sentences aren't covered by the thesis that we count by identity, in part because they don't have count readings. Then I use the data to which Liebesman appeals, in his argument that we don't count by identity using measurement sentences, in order to rebut his argument that we don't count by identity using sentences indicating fractions.     

RELATIVISM AND ANTI-REALISM

I characterise a relativist account of truth as one according to which the truth value of a sentence can vary without its meaning changing. Relativism is to be contrasted with absolutism, which states that the truth values of sentences cannot change, so long as their meanings remain constant. I argue that absolutism follows from the realist account of meaning and truth conditions. According to realism, the meaning of a sentence consists in objective truth conditions and sentences are true if and only if certain objective conditions obtain. Relativism is a consequence of anti-realism. Anti-realists believe that the meanings of sentences consist in recognisable conditions and that sentences are true if and only if certain recognisable conditions obtain. I contrast the sorts of relativism which results from partial, empiricism-based anti-realisms, and global anti-realism, which is linked to a coherence theory of knowledge. I offer a few remarks on how global anti-realists can restrict the scope of their relativism.     

Propositions, semantic values, and rigidity

Jeffrey King has recently argued: (i) that the semantic value of a sentence at a context is (or determines) a function from possible worlds to truth values, and (ii) that this undermines Jason Stanley's argument against the rigidity thesis, the claim that no rigid term has the same content as a non-rigid term. I show that King's main argument for (i) fails, and that Stanley's argument is consistent with the claim that the semantic value of a sentence at a context is (or determines) a function from worlds to truth values.     

Does the Quine/duhem Thesis Prevent Us from Defining Analyticity?

Quine claims that holism (i.e., the Quine-Duhem thesis) prevents us from defining synonymy and analyticity (section 2). In Word and Object, he dismisses a notion of synonymy which works well even if holism is true. The notion goes back to a proposal from Grice and Strawson and runs thus: R and S are synonymous iff for all sentences T we have that the logical conjunction of R and T is stimulus-synonymous to that of S and T. Whereas Grice and Strawson did not attempt to defend this definition, I try to show that it indeed gives us a satisfactory account of synonymy. Contrary to Quine, the notion is tighter than stimulus-synonymy – particularly when applied to sentences with less than critical semantic mass (section 3). Now according to Quine, analyticity could be defined in terms of synonymy, if synonymy were to make sense: A sentence is analytic iff synonymous to self-conditionals. This leads us to the following notion of analyticity: S is analytic iff, for all sentences T, the logical conjunction of S and T is stimulus-synonymous to T; an analytic sentence does not change the semantic mass of any theory to which it may be conjoined (section 4). This notion is tighter than Quine's stimulus-analyticity; unlike stimulus-analyticity, it does not apply to those sentences from the very center of our theories which can be assented to come what may, even though they are not synthetic in the intuitive sense (section 5).