Sanford Goldberg

What do speech reports tell us about the act being reported? When such a question is pursued in connection with reports of the form ‘S said that p,’ answers typically focus on the semantic content of the speech act. Indeed, there is a familiar line of research that aims to exploit our understanding of speech reports, in order to reach conclusions about the semantic content of sentences or expressions. In this chapter I want to focus attention on another matter: the illocutionary force of the act being reported. In particular, I want to argue that there is a use of speech reports of a related form, reflection on which can help us discern aspects of the force of the act being reported. The use I have in mind is what I call the buck-passing use of speech reports, as when one speaker, challenged to defend a claim or belief of hers, does so by reporting another speaker as having said so. The thesis of this paper is that the legitimacy of this practice depends on two key pragmatic features of the reported speech. This result can be seen as establishing a non-trivial desideratum for theories of the illocutionary force of the type of act in question.

Agents and Lives offers a new and important rethinking of the traditional "humanist" view of literature. That tradition's valuation of literature for its "moral import" is extended in a wider, more complex, open and exploratory understanding of those terms. Goldberg's argument ranges across literature since the Renaissance, focusing on examples from George Eliot's novels and Pope's poetry. An appendix assesses the relationship of his argument to recent accounts of literature offered by moral philosophers such as Iris Murdoch, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty.

My dissertation presents an argument for and defense of the doctrine of transparency about mental content. This doctrine holds that for any thought a thinker knows the content of her thought in an immediate and non-inferential way; and that for any thoughts a thinker can discriminate between thoughts with different contents. ;In the opening chapter I give an argument in support of the doctrine of transparency. The suggestion is that Crispin Wright's argument for a "minimalist" realism about intentional states can be extended into an argument for transparency as well. I concede that Wright's minimalism is not free from objections; but I suggest that a proper modification of his position avoids the major objections and leaves the case for transparency intact. The resulting notion of transparency flows from the avowability of the intentional. ;However, in the past twenty years there have been a number of theories of meaning and reference on the basis of which many people have given up the doctrine of transparency. My next three chapters address these theories. In these chapters I defend my conception of transparency against arguments, from claims of the theories in question, to the conclusion that the doctrine of transparency is false. The claims themselves include theses about the normativity of meaning, the nature of demonstrative content, and the external constitution of content. In each chapter I argue that if they are to be part of a successful argument against transparency, the theses in question must be given a construal which is objectionable on independent grounds; and there are alternative construals of the theses on which they are perfectly compatible with the doctrine of transparency. ;If my central contention is correct, the doctrine of transparency can be defended without appeal to any Cartesian dogma about access to one's own ideas. In particular, the doctrine can be defended by appeal to our practices of belief-attribution. Yet, even as we make such an appeal, self-knowledge is more than just a reflection of such practices. Making sense of and defending the resulting picture is the unifying theme of the dissertation