The Liar Paradox and the Inclosure Schema

In Beyond the Limits of Thought [2002], Graham Priest argues that logical and semantic paradoxes have the same underlying structure (which he calls the Inclosure Schema). He also argues that, in conjunction with the Principle of Uniform Solution (same kind of paradox, same kind of solution), this is sufficient to ‘sink virtually all orthodox solutions to the paradoxes’, because the orthodox solutions to the paradoxes are not uniform. I argue that Priest fails to provide a non-question-begging method to ‘sink virtually all orthodox solutions’, and that the Inclosure Schema cannot be the structure that underlies the Liar paradox. Moreover, Ramsey was right in thinking that logical and semantic paradoxes are paradoxes of different kinds.     

Relativism, sceptical paradox, and semantic blindness

Relativism about knowledge attributions is the view that a single occurrence of ‘S knows [does not know] that p’ may be true as assessed in one context and false as assessed in another context. It has been argued that relativism is equipped to accommodate all the data from speakers’ use of ‘know’ without recourse to an error theory. This is supposed to be relativism’s main advantage over contextualist and invariantist views. This paper argues that relativism does require the attribution of semantic blindness to speakers, viz. to account for sceptical paradoxes and epistemic closure puzzles. To that end, the notion of semantic blindness is clarified by distinguishing between content-blindness and index-blindness, and it is argued that the attribution of index-blindness required by the relativist account is implausible. Along the way, it is shown that error-theoretic objections from speakers’ inter-contextual judgments fail against relativism.     

Monism and Material Constitution

Are the sculpture and the mass of gold which permanently makes it up one object or two? In this article, we argue that the monist, who answers ‘one object’, cannot accommodate the asymmetry of material constitution. To say ‘the mass of gold materially constitutes the sculpture, whereas the sculpture does not materially constitute the mass of gold’, the monist must treat ‘materially constitutes’ as an Abelardian predicate, whose denotation is sensitive to the linguistic context in which it appears. We motivate this approach in terms of modal analyses of material constitution, but argue that ultimately it fails. The monist must instead accept a deflationary, symmetrical use of ‘materially constitutes’. We argue that this is a serious cost for her approach.     

Semantic relationism, belief reports and contradiction

In his book Semantic Relationism, Kit Fine propounds an original and sophisticated semantic theory called ‘semantic relationism’ or ‘relational semantics’, whose peculiarity is the enrichment of Kaplan’s, Salmon’s and Soames’ Russellian semantics (more specifically, the semantic content of simple sentences and the truth-conditions of belief reports) with coordination, “the very strongest relation of synonymy or being semantically the same”. In this paper, my goal is to shed light on an undesirable result of semantic relationism: a report like “Tom believes that Cicero is bald and Tom does not believe that Tully is bald” is correct according to Fine’s provided truth-conditions of belief reports, but its semantic content is (very likely) a contradiction. As I will argue in the paper, even the resort to the notion of token proposition, introduced in Fine’s recent article “Comments on Scott Soames’ ‘Coordination Problems’”, does not suffice to convincingly eliminate the contradiction; moreover, it raises new difficulties.     

Intentional Objects,Pretence, and the Quasi-Relational Nature of Mental Phenomena: A New Look at Brentano on Intentionality

Abstract

Brentano famously changed his mind about intentionality between the 1874 and 1911 editions of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (PES). The 1911 edition repudiates the 1874 view that to think about something is to stand in a relation to something that is within in the mind, and holds instead that intentionality is only like a relation (it is ‘quasi-relational’). Despite this, Brentano still insists that mental activity involves ‘the reference to something as an object’, much as he did in the 1874 edition of PES. The question is what Brentano might have meant by this, given that he rejects a relational account of intentionality. The present paper suggests an answer. It draws on recent work on pretence theory to provide a model of Brentano’s notion of the quasi-relational nature of mental phenomena, as well as of the notion of mental reference to an object, and argues that the model helps to explain why Brentano might have been able discern a clear continuity between the views of the 1874 and 1911 editions of PES, despite the differences.     

Truth in the Tractatus

My paper takes issue both with the standard view that the Tractatus contains a correspondence theory and with recent suggestions that it features a deflationary or semantic theory. Standard correspondence interpretations are mistaken, because they treat the isomorphism between a sentence and what it depicts as a sufficient condition of truth rather than of sense. The semantic/deflationary interpretation ignores passages that suggest some kind of correspondence theory. The official theory of truth in the Tractatus is an obtainment theory – a sentence is true iff the state of affairs it depicts obtains. This theory differs from deflationary theories in that it involves an ontology of states of affairs/facts; and it can be transformed into a type of correspondence theory: a sentence is true iff it corresponds to, i.e. depicts an obtaining state of affairs (fact). Admittedly, unlike correspondence theories as commonly portrayed, this account does not involve a genuinely truth-making relation. It features a relation of correspondence, yet it is that of depicting, between a meaningful sentence and its sense – a possible state of affairs. What makes for truth is not that relation, but the obtaining of the depicted state of affairs. This does not disqualify the Tractatus from holding a correspondence theory, however, since the correspondence theories of Moore and Russell are committed to a similar position. Alternatively, the obtainment theory can be seen as a synthesis of correspondence, semantic and deflationary approaches. It does justice to the idea that what is true depends solely on what is the case, and it combines a semantic explanation of the relation between a sentence and what it says with a deflationary account of the agreement between what the sentence says and what obtains or is the case if it is true     

Two cheers for Tanhā

The central character in Sartre's 1938 novel La Nausée, Antoine Roquentin, has lost his sense of things, and now the world appears to him as utterly unstable. Roquentin suffers from what he calls ‘nausea,’ a condition caused by an ontological intuition that the self, as well as the world through which that ‘self’ moves, lacks a substantial nature. The novel portrays Sartre's own philosophical account of the self in La transcendence de l'égo. Here Sartre argues that Husserl's account of consciousness is not radical enough; the ‘I’ or ego is a pseudo-source of activity (and Sartre thus draws very close to a particularly Buddhist account of personal identity). My essay questions Roquentin's response to his ontological insight: why is this the occasion for ‘nausea’? Why doesn't Roquentin (as King Milinda famously does) celebrate and embrace his ‘non-self’? I argue that Sartre's depiction of Roquentin's ailment, and the unsatisfactory solution he provides, misunderstands both the aggregate nature of things as well as authentically rendered consciousness-only (vijñaptimātra).     

Definability and the Structure of Logical Paradoxes

Graham Priest 2002 argues that all logical paradoxes that include set-theoretic paradoxes and semantic paradoxes share a common structure, the Inclosure Schema, so they should be treated as one family. Through a discussion of Berry's Paradox and the semantic notion ‘definable’, I argue that (i) the Inclosure Schema is not fine-grained enough to capture the essential features of semantic paradoxes, and (ii) the traditional separation of the two groups of logical paradoxes should be retained.     

The Concept of Number: Multiplicity and Succession between Cardinality and Ordinality

Abstract

This article sets out to analyse some of the most basic elements of our number concept - of our awareness of the one and the many in their coherence with multiplicity, succession and equinumerosity. On the basis of the definition given by Cantor and the set theoretical definition of cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers provided by Ebbinghaus, a critical appraisal is given of Frege’s objection that abstraction and noticing (or disregarding) differences between entities do not produce the concept of number. By introducing the notion of subject functions, an account is advanced of the (nominalistic) reason why Frege accepted physical, kinematic and spatial properties (subject functions) of entities, but denied the ontic status of their quantitative properties (their quantitative subject function). With reference to intuitionistic mathematics (Brouwer, Weyl, Troelstra, Kreisel, Van Dalen) the primitive meaning of succession is acknowledged and connected to an analysis of what is entailed in the term ‘Gleichzahligkeit’ (‘equinumerosity’). This expression enables an analysis of the connections between ordinality and cardinality on the one hand and succession and wholeness (totality) on the other. The conceptions of mathematicians such as Frege, Cantor, Dedekind, Zermelo, Brouwer, Skolem, Fraenkel, Von Neumann, Hilbert, Bernays and Weyl, as well as the views of the philosopher Cassirer, are discussed in order to arrive at an assessment of the relation between ordinality and cardinality (also taking into account the relation between logic and arithmetic) - and on the basis of this evaluation, attention is briefly given to the definition of an ordered pair in axiomatic set theory (with reference to the set theory of Zermelo-Fraenkel) and to the defmition of an ordered pair advanced by Wiener and Kuratowski.     

Embedded taste predicates

Wide-ranging semantic flexibility is often considered a magic cure for contextualism to account for all kinds of troubling data. In particular, it seems to offer a way to account for our intuitions regarding embedded perspectival sentences. As has been pointed out by Lasersohn [2009. “Relative Truth, Speaker Commitment, and Control of Implicit Arguments.” Synthese 166 (2): 359â374], however, the semantic flexibility does not present a remedy for all kinds of embeddings. In particular, it seems ineffective when it comes to embeddings under operators with truth evaluative adverbs such as ‘correctly believes that’ and ‘incorrectly believes that’ and under factive verbs. This paper takes a closer look at the problematic embedding data with respect to predicates of personal taste. It argues that there is indeed no semantic solution for contextualism but a pragmatic way out.     

Fate and the Fortune of the Categories: Kant on the Usurpation and Schematization of Concepts

In the early steps of the Transcendental Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant briefly addresses the threat posed by usurpatory concepts such as ‘fate’ and ‘fortune’. Commentators have largely passed over these remarks, but in this paper I argue that a careful analysis of the reasons why ‘fate’ and ‘fortune’ are usurpatory reveals an important point about the relation between the Deduction and the Principles chapters of the Critique. In particular, I argue that ‘fate’ and ‘fortune’ are usurpatory because they are unable to discriminate between the particular contents of experience, and that this requires that Kant provide an account of how the categories are able to accomplish this task. And this in turn shows that the justificatory work begun in the Deduction can be completed only in the Schematism and Principles.     

Towards a theory of communicative competence

In this, the second of two articles outlining a theory of communicative competence, the author questions the ability of Chomsky's account of linguistic competence to fulfil the requirements of such a theory. ‘Linguistic competence’ for Chomsky means the mastery of an abstract system of rules, based on an innate language apparatus. The model by which communication is understood on this account contains three implicit assumptions, here called ‘monologism’, ‘a priorism’, and ‘elementarism’. The author offers an outline of a theory of communicative competence that is based on the negations of these assumptions. In opposing the first two assumptions he introduces distinctions, respectively, between semantic universals which process experiences and those that make such processing possible, and between semantic universals which precede all socialization and those that are linked to the conditions of potential socialization. Against elementarism, he argues that the semantic content of all possible natural languages does not consist of combinations of a finite number of meaning components. Differences in systems of classification preclude this, and such differences can be seen to infect all respects of intercultural comparison. Using the notion of ‘performative utterance’, the author elucidates the role of dialogue‐constitutive universals as part of the formal apparatus required of a”; speaker's capacity to communicate. He then notes what would be required of a general semantics based on a theory of communicative competence; and finally points out how this theory might be used for social analysis.     

Semantic closure

This paper argues for tlie claims that a) a natural language such as English is semanticaly closed b) semantic closure implies inconsistency. A corollary of these is that the semantics of English must be paraconsistent. The first part of the paper formulates a definition of semantic closure which applies to natural languages and shows that this implies inconsistency. The second section argues that English is semeantically closed. The preceding discussion is predicated on the assumption that there are no truth value gaps. The next section of the paper considers whether the possibility of these makes any difference to the substantive conclusions of the previous sections, and argues that it does not. The crux of the preceding arguments is that none of the consistent semantical accounts that have been offered for solving the semantical paradoxes is a semantic ofEnglish. The final section of the paper produces a general argument as to why this must always be the case.     

Perception naturalised: relocation and the sensible qualities

This paper offers a partial defence of a Sellarsian-inspired form of scientific realism. It defends the relocation strategy that Sellars adopts in his project of reconciling the manifest and scientific images. It concentrates on defending the causal analysis of perception that is essential to his treatment of sensible qualities. One fundamental metaphysical issue in perception theory concerns the nature of the perceptual relation; it is argued that a philosophical exploration of this issue is continuous with the scientific investigation of perceptual processes. Perception, it is argued, can, and should, be naturalised. A challenge for any account of perception arises from the fact that a subject’s experiences are connected with particular objects. We need to supply principled grounds for identifying which external physical object the subject stands in a perceptual relation to when they have an experience. According to the particularity objection presented in the paper, naive realism (or disjunctivism) does not constitute an independently viable theory since, taken on its own, it is unable to answer the objection. In appealing to a ‘direct experiential relation’, it posits a relation that cannot be identified independently of the underlying causal facts. A proper understanding of one central function of perception, as guiding extended patterns of actions, supports a causal analysis of perception. It allows us to draw up a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for perceiving that avoids well-known counterexamples. An analysis of this kind is congruent with the scientific account, according to which experiences are interpreted as inner states: sensible qualities, such as colours, are in the mind (but not as objects of perception). A Sellarsian version of the relocation story is thus vindicated.

     

A Contextualist Approach to Higher‐Order Vagueness

According to contextualism about vagueness, the content of a vague predicate is context sensitive. On this view, when item a is in the penumbra of the vague predicate ‘F’, speakers may (truly) utter ‘Fa’, or they may (truly) utter ‘not‐Fa’, without contravening the literal meaning of ‘F’. Unlike its more popular variants, the version of contextualism I defend rejects the principle of tolerance, a principle according to which small differences should not affect the applicability of a vague predicate. My goal is to show how such a rejection allows for a plausible treatment of higher‐order vagueness, and for a dissolution of paradoxes of higher‐order vagueness.     

Against Fallibilism

In this paper I argue for a doctrine I call ‘infallibilism’, which I stipulate to mean that If S knows that p, then the epistemic probability of p for S is 1. Some fallibilists will claim that this doctrine should be rejected because it leads to scepticism. Though it's not obvious that infallibilism does lead to scepticism, I argue that we should be willing to accept it even if it does. Infallibilism should be preferred because it has greater explanatory power than fallibilism. In particular, I argue that an infallibilist can easily explain why assertions of ‘p, but possibly not-p’ (where the ‘possibly’ is read as referring to epistemic possibility) is infelicitous in terms of the knowledge rule of assertion. But a fallibilist cannot. Furthermore, an infallibilist can explain the infelicity of utterances of ‘p, but I don't know that p’ and ‘p might be true, but I'm not willing to say that for all I know, p is true’, and why when a speaker thinks p is epistemically possible for her, she will agree (if asked) that for all she knows, p is true. The simplest explanation of these facts entails infallibilism. Fallibilists have tried and failed to explain the infelicity of ‘p, but I don't know that p’, but have not even attempted to explain the last two facts. I close by considering two facts that seem to pose a problem for infallibilism, and argue that they don't.     

Making Sense of Sense Containment

Proposition 5.122 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (‘If p follows from q, the sense of [p] is contained in the sense of [q]’) has been the source of much puzzlement among interpreters, so much so that no fully satisfactory account is yet available. This is unfortunate, if only because the containment account of logical consequence has a venerable tradition behind it. Pasquale Frascolla’s interpretation of proposition 5.122 is based on a valid argument and one true premise. However, the argument explains sense containment only in an indirect way, leaving some crucial questions unanswered. Besides, Frascolla does not address the issue of how to make sense containment notationally perspicuous, an essential theme in Wittgenstein’s reflections. In this paper, we elaborate on Frascolla’s account by looking at the issue through the Tractarian notion of logical space. Our analysis shows that, for containment to be fully appreciated, one should adopt a negative perspective on the notion of sense (which is taken into consideration also by Wittgenstein), in line with the exclusionary theory of conceptual content, as labelled by Ian Rumfitt. Besides this, we introduce and discuss two methods—one envisaged by Wittgenstein himself—for making sense containment notationally perspicuous.     

What is Genetic Information,and why is it Significant? A Contextual,Contrastive, Approach

abstract Is genetic information of special ethical significance? Does it require special regulation? There is considerable contemporary debate about this question (the ‘genetic exceptionalism’ debate). ‘Genetic information’ is an ambiguous term and, as an aid to avoiding conflation in the genetic exceptionalism debate, a detailed account is given of just how and why ‘genetic information’ is ambiguous. Whilst ambiguity is a ubiquitous problem of communication, it is suggested that ‘genetic information’ is ambiguous in a particular way, one that gives rise to the problem of ‘significance creep’ (i.e., where claims about the significance of certain kinds of genetic information in one context influence our thinking about the significance of other kinds of genetic information in other contexts). A contextual and contrastive methodology is proposed: evaluating the significance of genetic information requires us to be sensitive to the polysemy of ‘genetic information’ across contexts and then examine the contrast in significance (if any) of genetic, as opposed to nongenetic, information within contexts. This, in turn, suggests that a proper solution to the regulatory question requires us to pay more attention to how and why information, and its acquisition, possession and use, come to be of ethical significance.