On Mixed Inferences and Pluralism about Truth Predicates

A familiar view concerning sentences about the ethical or comical is that they are not truth-apt – not capable of being true or false. Against this view Peter Geach famously noted that such sentences may figure in true (or false) conditionals and so must thereby be truth-apt. In response to Geach's argument, Crispin Wright proposed a pluralism about truth predicates, a pluralism which sees Geach's conditional clauses as being true in a sense that avoids realism about the entities involved. I defend Wright's proposal against an interesting recent attack by Christine Tappolet, and show that, pace Tappolet, Wright's proposed pluralism is compatible with the Tarskian idea that validity is necessary truth-preservation.     

Minimalist semantics in meta-ethical expressivism

James Dreier (Philos Perspect 18:23–44, 2004) states what he calls the “Problem of Creeping Minimalism”: that metaethical Expressivists can accept a series of claims about meaning, under which all of the sentences that Realists can accept are consistent with Expressivism. This would allow Expressivists to accept all of the Realist’s sentences, and as Dreier points out, make it difficult to say what the difference between the two views is. That Expressivists can accept these claims about meaning has been suggested by Simon Blackburn on behalf of his “quasi-realist”. I argue against the assumption that there is a way to interpret the Realist’s sentences in a way that renders them consistent with Expressivism.     

Maybe There Are No Subject-Predicate Sentences in Chinese

In this essay, I argue for the conclusion that the Chinese sentences that are regularly translated into subject-predicate sentences in English may be understood as all non-subject-predicate sentences. My argument is based on the premise that some grammatical features are crucial to yield the sense of contrast between the completeness of subject and the incompleteness of predicate. The absence of such grammatical features in Chinese makes it impossible to establish any criterion for the distinction between subject and predicate in Chinese.     

Indicating a Translation for ‘Bedeutung’

The translation of both ‘bedeuten’ and ‘Bedeutung’ in Frege's works remains sufficiently problematic that some contemporary authors prefer to leave these words untranslated. Here a case is made for returning to Russell's initial choice of ‘to indicate’ and ‘indication’ as better alternatives than the more usual ‘meaning’, ‘reference’, or ‘denotation’. It is argued that this choice has the philosophical payoff that Frege's controversial doctrines concerning the semantic values of sentences and predicative expressions are rendered far more comprehensible by it, and that this translational strategy fulfills the desiderata of offering a translation which is acceptable both before and after Frege introduced the distinction between sense and reference or, as this paper would have it, between the sense of an expression and what it indicates.     

Are verbs tensed or tenseless?

Conclusion We have seen that we cannot de-tense a sentence like (15) simply by changing its verb, since the tense of such a sentence is determined by a temporal adverb. More importantly, we have seen that de-tensing is a process of removing certain temporal restrictions from the truth-conditions of tensed sentences, and that tensed and tenseless forms of a verb do not differ in sense. Once we understand this, and once we realize that it is an historical accident that the tense of sentences in English if often indicated by means of the grammatical device of inflecting verbs, tensed verbs no longer seem to be the sort of item that needs to be purged from ordinary language in constructing its tenseless analogue. Indeed, although the distinction between tensed and tenseless verbs may still be of philosophic interest, this distinction hardly seems to deserve the pivotal role assigned to it in the literature.     

On Moderate Pluralism About Truth and Logic

According to moderate truth pluralism, truth is both One and Many. There is a single truth property that applies across all truth-apt domains of discourse, but instances of this property are grounded in different ways. Propositions concerning medium-sized dry goods might be true in virtue of corresponding with reality while propositions pertaining to the law might be true in virtue of cohering with the body of law. Moderate truth pluralists must answer two questions concerning logic: (Q1) Which logic governs inferences concerning each truth-apt domain considered separately? (Q2) Which logic governs inferences that involve several truth-apt domains? This paper has three objectives. The first objective is to present and explain the moderate pluralist’s answers to (Q1) and (Q2). The second objective is to argue that there is a tension between these answers. The answer to (Q1) involves a commitment to a form of logical pluralism. However, reflection on the moderate truth pluralist’s answer to (Q2) shows that they are committed to taking logic to be topic neutrality. This, in turn, forces a commitment to logical monism. It would seem that the moderate truth pluralist cannot have it both ways. The third objective is constructive in nature. I offer an account of what moderate truth pluralists should say about logic and how they might resolve the tension in their view. I suggest that, just like moderate truth pluralists distinguish truth proper and “quasi-truth,” they should endorse a distinction between logic proper and “quasi-logic.” Quasi-truth is truth-like in the sense that instances of quasi-truth ground instances of truth. Quasi-logic is logic-like in the sense that it concerns arguments that are necessarily truth-preserving but are not generally so in a topic neutral way. I suggest that moderate truth pluralists should be monists about truth proper and logic proper but pluralists about quasi-truth and quasi-logic. This allows them to say that logic proper is topic neutral while still accommodating the idea that, for different domains, different arguments may be necessarily truth-preserving.     

Which Desires Are Relevant to Well‐Being?

The desire‐satisfaction theory of well‐being says, in its simplest form, that a person's level of welfare is determined by the extent to which their desires are satisfied. A question faced by anyone attracted to such a view is, Which desires? This paper proposes a new answer to this question by characterizing a distinction among desires that isn't much discussed in the well‐being literature. This is the distinction between what a person wants in a merely behavioral sense, in that the person is, for some reason or other, disposed to act so as to try to get it, and what a person wants in a more robust sense, the sense of being genuinely attracted to the thing. I try to make this distinction more clear, and I argue for its axiological relevance by putting it to work in solving four problem cases for desire satisfactionism. The theory defended holds that only desires in the latter, genuine‐attraction sense are relevant to welfare.     

THE UNDERDETERMINATION/INDETERMINACY DISTINCTION AND THE ANALYTIC/SYNTHETIC DISTINCTION

Two of W. V. Quine's most familiar doctrines are his endorsement of the distinction between underdetermination and indeterminacy, and his rejection of the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths. The author argues that these two doctrines are incompatible. In terms wholly acceptable to Quine, and based on the underdetermination/indeterminacy distinction, the author draws an exhaustive and exclusive distinction between two kinds of true sentences, and then argues that this corresponds to the traditional analytic/synthetic distinction. In an appendix the author expands on one aspect of the underdetermination/indeterminacy distinction, as construed here, and discusses, in passing, some of Quine's more general views on truth.     

The Structure of Frege's Thoughts

Fregean thoughts (i.e. the senses of assertoric sentences) are structured entities because they are composed of simpler senses that are somehow ordered and interconnected. The constituent senses form a unity because some of them are ‘saturated’ and some ‘unsaturated’. This paper shows that Frege's explanation of the structure of thoughts, which is based on the ‘saturated/unsaturated’ distinction, is by no means sufficient because it permits what I call ‘wild analyses’, which have certain unwelcome consequences. Wild analyses are made possible because any ‘unsaturated’ sense that is a mode of presentation of a concept together with any ‘saturated’ sense forms a thought. The reason is that any concept can be applied to any object (which is presented by a ‘saturated’ sense). This stems from the fact that Frege was willing to admit only total functions. It is also briefly suggested what should be done to block wild analyses.     

How to Be an Ethical Expressivist

Expressivism promises an illuminating account of the nature of normative judgment. But worries about the details of expressivist semantics have led many to doubt whether expressivism's putative advantages can be secured. Drawing on insights from linguistic semantics and decision theory, I develop a novel framework for implementing an expressivist semantics that I call ordering expressivism. I argue that by systematically interpreting the orderings that figure in analyses of normative terms in terms of the basic practical attitude of conditional weak preference, the expressivist can explain the semantic properties of normative sentences in terms of the logical properties of that attitude. Expressivism's problems with capturing the logical relations among normative sentences can be reduced to the familiar, more tractable problem of explaining certain coherence constraints on preferences. Particular attention is given to the interpretation of wide‐scope negation. The proposed solution is also extended to other types of embedded contexts—most notably, disjunctions.     

Kant on Truth-Aptness

Many scholars claimed that, according to Immanuel Kant, some judgements lack a truth-value: analytic judgements, judgements about items of which humans cannot have experience, judgements of perception, and non-assertoric judgements. However, no one has undertaken an extensive examination of the textual evidence for those claims.

Based on an analysis of Kant's texts, I argue that: ? according to Kant, only judgements of perception are not truth-apt. All other judgements are truth-apt, including analytic judgements and judgements about items of which humans cannot have experience.

? Kant sometimes states that truth-apt judgements are actual bearers of truth or falsity only when they are taken to state what is actually the case. Kant calls these judgements assertoric. Other texts ascribe truth and falsity to judgements, regardless of whether they are assertoric.

Kant's views on truth-aptness raise challenges for correspondentist and coherentist interpretations of Kant's theory of truth; they rule out the identification of Kant's crucial notion of objective validity with truth-aptness; and they imply that Kant was not a verificationist about truth or meaning.     

Accessing ambiguous words during sentence comprehension

In five experiments visual processing of sentences containing either a more frequent or a less frequent usage of an ambiguous word was examined. When prior or subsequent context was pragmatically related to the relevant sense of the ambiguous word, sentences intending the more frequent sense produced longer ambiguity detection times and shorter immediate comprehension times than sentences intending the less frequent sense. This relative frequency effect was not obtained in comprehension of corresponding unambiguous sentences containing relatively high or low frequency unambiguous synonyms of the senses. These results suggest that access of ambiguous word-senses tends to occur in order of relative frequency, and that multiple access of senses tends only to occur for low frequency usages. When the preceding verb imposed selection constraints on which sense could follow, the frequency effect did not occur consistently; and it was virtually eliminated when biasing context took the form of a previous sentence containing an unambiguous synonym of the relevant sense. Implications for models of access of unambiguous words in sentences, as well as for models of processing ambiguous sentences, are considered.     

What is Literature? Revisited: Sartre on the Language of Literature

This article argues that Sartre's distinction in What Is Literature? between prose and poetry should be understood in the light of his earlier distinction in The Imaginary between two kinds of meaning. Sartre argues against the “Cartesian picture” of consciousness in The Imaginary, specifically concerning our experience of images. Not only is a mental image not an “inner object” mediating between consciousness and the world, even a picture drawn on paper should not be understood as an object standing between the viewer and what this picture represents. Our experience, Sartre argues, is that of seeing things in a picture rather than seeing through it, such that the meaning of pictures and images in general is embodied in them and cannot be separated from them. He then goes on to contrast this kind of embodied meaning (which he calls “sense”) with a kind of meaning that can be completely grasped independently of its expression (which he calls “signification”) and identify the two with painting and language respectively. It is for this reason, this article argues, that Sartre later sees poetry as a deviation from language's proper function. This rigid distinction is maintained by Sartre until the end of his career, and the change that some commentators found in him are its outcome rather than a revolt against it. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty has demonstrated more convincingly that sense and signification are both essential aspects of linguistic meaning, and their relation is much more dynamic and complimentary than Sartre would have allowed.     

WHEN BETTER IS WORSE. On the therapy/enhancement distinction in sports

The standard therapy/enhancement distinction is usually related to health purposes and some sense of normality. In this paper, I will challenge the basis of the distinction arguing that only the first part of it is related to health and, consequently, the distinction should be better understood as differentiating between qualitative and quantitative consequences of interventions. As health and normality are broad concepts inside of which it is possible to make some ulterior distinctions, I will propose three different senses of normality in order to more easily grasp the therapy/enhancement distinction. As with the distinction between therapy and enhancement, the difference between sports- and non-sports-persons is usually stated in terms of health and normality. I will challenge this assumption, too. In my opinion, the main difference between people, sportspeople and athletes should be related to the practice itself. Once the practice of a sport is taken seriously, along with its tough and demanding lifestyle, it is possible to properly analyse the distinction between people who practice and do not practice sport; the different levels at which they participate—quite obviously—have little to do with health purposes. Finally, I will revisit the standard therapy/enhancement distinction in sport in order to provide a way to easily reformulate this distinction allowing embarrassing blunders to be avoided and athletes’ health to be adequately cared for. I will conclude this paper with two open questions related to the use of the therapy/enhancement distinction for sport purposes and the challenge that it represents for some basic values of sport.     

How big is big? Relative and absolute properties in memory

Previous studies of semantic memory have overlooked an important distinction among so-called “property statements”. Statements with relative adjectives (e.g., Flamingos are big) imply a comparison to a standard or reference point associated with an immediate superordinate category (a flamingo is big for a bird), while the truth of statements with absolute adjectives (e.g., Flamingos are pink) is generally independent of such a standard. To examine the psychological consequences of this distinction, we asked subjects in Experiment 1 to verify sentences containing either relative or absolute adjectives embedded in either predicate-adjective (PA) constructions (e.g., A flamingo is big (pink)) or predicate-noun (PN) constructions (e.g. A flamingo is a big (pink) bird), where the predicate noun was the immediate superordinate. Reaction times (RTs) and errors for relative sentences decreased when the superordinate was specified, but remained constant for absolute sentences. These data also suggest that the truth value of relative sentences depends, not just on the superordinate, but also on a more global standard for everyday, human-oriented objects. Experiment 2 extends these results in showing that ratings of the truth of relative sentences are a function of the difference in size between an instance and its superordinate standard (e.g., between the size of a flamingo and that of an average bird) and the difference between the instance and the standard for everyday objects. Experiment 3 replicated these findings using reaction time as the dependent measure.     

Filling gaps: Decision principles and structure in sentence comprehension

The correct grammatical characterization of sentences containing filler-gap dependencies is a topic of considerable theoretical interest in linguistics. In some grammatical frameworks, these dependencies are representef in terms of conditions on the permissible indexing of structures (or alternative structure evaluation conditions) which a representation must adhere to in order to be well-formed. In other frameworks, constraints on permissible filler-gap dependencies are simply inherent in the set of phrase structure rules contained in the grammar of a language.The processing of sentences with multiple (potential) filler-gap dependencies was investigated in two experiments. The first experiment provided evidence for three claims. First, the human sentence processor abides by a strategy of assigning the most recent potential filler to a gap. Hence, ‘recent filler’ sentences where this assignment proves to be correct takes less time to comprehend than ‘distant filler’ sentences where this decision turns out to be incorrect. Second, the recent filler strategy is itself just a special case of a more general strategy of assigning the most salient potential filler to a gap. Third, unambiguous sentences in which a filler-gap assignment is disambiguated by ‘control’ information specified by individual verbs gives rise to the same recent filler errors as ambiguous sentences. This suggests that tentative filler-gap assignments are made by the processor before all of the relevant constraints on permissible filler-gap dependencies are consulted by the processor.The second experiment tested an alternative hypothesis that the more complex ‘distant filler’ sentences took longer to comprehend in the first experiment only because these sentences often contained verbs which license two adjacent gaps. The experiment showed that there was a significant recent filler effect in sentences that did not contain adjacent gaps and that this effect did not interact with verb class.The finding that the processor delays use of verb-control information is extremely surprising. It may be explained by the fact that this information is only relevant to one type of gap (‘equi-gaps’) and what type of gap the processor is dealing with often can not be determined unambiguously at the time when it initially encounters a gap in its left-to-right processing of a sentence.If our interpretation of these findings is correct, they argue for a considerable amount of structure in the sentence comprehension system. Further, they favor a view of sentence processing in which processing operations involving constraints on the permissible indexing (or evaluation) of structures lag behind the processor's structure building operations. Hence, the results favor those grammatical theories which preserve this distinction over grammatical theories which provide a uniform characterization of all syntactic well-formedness conditions.     

Categoricity

After a short preface, the first of the three sections of this paper is devoted to historical and philosophic aspects of categoricity. The second section is a self-contained exposition, including detailed definitions, of a proof that every mathematical system whose domain is the closure of its set of distinguished individuals under its distinguished functions is categorically characterized by its induction principle together with its true atoms (atomic sentences and negations of atomic sentences). The third section deals with applications especially those involving the distinction between characterizing a system and axiomatizing the truths of a system.     

Dependence and a Kantian conception of dignity as a value

Kantian moral concepts concerning respect for human dignity have played a central role in articulating ethical guidelines for medical practice and research, and for articulating some central positions within bioethical debates more generally. The most common of these Kantian moral concepts is the obligation to respect the dignity of patients and of human research subjects as autonomous, self-determining individuals. This article describes Kant’s conceptual distinction between dignity and autonomy as values, and draws on the work of several contemporary Kantian philosophers who employ the distinction to make sense of some common moral intuitions, feelings, and norms. Drawing on this work, the article argues that the conceptual distinction between dignity and autonomy as values is indispensable in the context of considering our obligations to those who are dependent and vulnerable.