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992Frege on demonstrativesPhilosophical Review 86 (4): 474-497. 1977.Demonstratives seem to have posed a severe difficulty for Frege’s philosophy of language, to which his doctrine of incommunicable senses was a reaction. In “The Thought,” Frege briefly discusses sentences containing such demonstratives as “today,” “here,” and “yesterday,” and then turns to certain questions that he says are raised by the occurrence of “I” in sentences (T, 24-26). He is led to say that, when one thinks about oneself, one grasps thoughts that others cannot grasp, that cannot be co…Read more
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36Can’t We All Just be Compatibilists?: A Critical Study of John Martin Fischer’s My WayThe Journal of Ethics 12 (2): 157-166. 2008.My aim in this study is not to praise Fischer's fine theory of moral responsibility, but to (try to) bury the “semi” in “semicompatibilism”. I think Fischer gives the Consequence Argument (CA) too much credit, and gives himself too little credit. In his book, The Metaphysics of Free Will, Fischer gave the CA as good a statement as it will ever get, and put his finger on what is wrong with it. Then he declared stalemate rather than victory. In my view, Fischer’s view amounts to sophisticated comp…Read more
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148Moore's paradoxAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (3). 2008.G. E. Moore famously noted that saying 'I went to the movies, but I don't believe it' is absurd, while saying 'I went to the movies, but he doesn't believe it' is not in the least absurd. The problem is to explain this fact without supposing that the semantic contribution of 'believes' changes across first-person and third-person uses, and without making the absurdity out to be merely pragmatic. We offer a new solution to the paradox. Our solution is that the truth conditions of any moorean utte…Read more
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215The problem of the essential indexical: and other essaysOxford University Press. 1993.A collection of twelve essays by John Perry and two essays he co-authored, this book deals with various problems related to "self-locating beliefs": the sorts of beliefs one expresses with indexicals and demonstratives, like "I" and "this." Postscripts have been added to a number of the essays discussing criticisms by authors such as Gareth Evans and Robert Stalnaker. Included with such well-known essays as "Frege on Demonstratives," "The Problem of the Essential Indexical," "From Worlds to Situ…Read more
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947Personal Identity (edited book)University of California Press. 1975.Contents PART I: INTRODUCTION 1 John Perry: The Problem of Personal Identity, 3 PART II: VERSIONS OF THE MEMORY THEORY 2 John Locke: Of Identity and ...
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91Indexicals and DemonstrativesIn Bob Hale, Crispin Wright & Alexander Miller (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 486--612. 1997.When you use the word “I” it designates you; when I use the same word, it designates me. If you use “you” talking to me, it designates me; when I use it talking to you, it designates you. “I” and “you” are indexicals. The designation of an indexical shifts from speaker to speaker, time to time, place to place. Different utterances of the same indexical designate different things, because what is designated depends not only on the meaning associated with the expression, but also on facts about th…Read more
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594Evading the SlingshotIn and J. Larrazabal J. Ezquerro A. Clark (ed.), Philosophy and Cognitive Science: Categories, Consciousness, and Reasoning, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1996.The topic of this essay is “the slingshot,” a short argument that purports to show that sentences1 designate (stand for, refer to) truth values. Versions of this argument have been used by Frege 2, Church 3, Quine4 and Davidson5; thus it is historically important, even if it immediately strikes one as fishy. The argument turns on two principles, which I call substitution and redistribution. In “Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising Situations,”6 Jon Barwise and I rejected both principles, as part…Read more
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53”Self-beliefs” are beliefs of the sort one ordinarily has about oneself, and expresses with the first person. These contrast with the beliefs one has in ”Casta˜neda cases,” in which one has a belief about oneself without knowing it. This paper advances an account of the nature of self-belief. According to this account, self-belief is a special case of interacting with things via notions that serve as repositories for information about objects with certain important relations to the knower, and a…Read more
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18Interfacing SituationsIn Jerry Seligman & Dag Westerstahl (eds.), Logic, Language and Computation, Center For the Study of Language and Inf. pp. 1--443. 1996.
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128Frege on identity, cognitive value, and subject matterIn Studies in language and information, Center For the Study of Language and Information. 2019.Frege continues by explaining what bothered him in the Begriffsschrift, and motivated his treatment of identity in that work.2 He goes on to criticize that account. By the end of the paragraph, he has introduced his key concept of sinn, abandonning not only the Begriffsschrift account of identity, but its basical semantical framework. In the Begriffsschrift Frege’s main semantic concept was content [Inhalt ]. Already in the Begriffsschrift, he is struggling with this concept. In §3 he..
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23Defenses for the mind-brain identity theory: causal differencesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (3): 362-362. 1978.
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132Reflexivity, Indexicality and NamesIn M. Anduschus, Albert Newen & Wolfgang Kunne (eds.), Direct Reference, Indexicality, and Propositional Attitudes, Csli Press. pp. 3--19. 1997.It has been persuasively argued by David Kaplan and others that the proposition expressed by statements like (1) is a singular proposition, true in just those worlds in which a certain person, David Israel, is a computer scientist. Call this proposition P . The truth of this proposition does not require that the utterance (1) occur, or even that Israel has ever said anything at all. Marcus, Donnellan, Kripke and others have persuasively argued for a view of proper names that, put in Kaplan’s ter…Read more
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35Intentionality and its puzzlesIn Samuel D. Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 1994.Intentionality is a term for a feature exhibited by many mental states and activities: being directed at objects. Two related things are meant by this. First, when one desires or believes or hopes, one always believes or desires or hopes something. Let’s assume that belief report 1) is true
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74Précis of Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (1). 2004.In Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness I argue that the Zombie Argument, the Knowledge Argument, and the Modal Argument do not provide people with broadly common-sensical views about consciousness and the mental, and an inclination towards physicalism, any reasons not to be physicalists. That is, they do not support the doctrine of neo-dualism, advocated by Chalmers, Jackson, and others: although the mind may be the brain, qualia, the what-its-like properties of experiences that makes them …Read more
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140Compatibilist OptionsIn and D. Shier M. O'Rourke J. K. Campbell (ed.), Freedom and Determinism, Mit Press. pp. 231. 2004.…those who accept that responsibility for a situation implies an ability to bring it about and, perhaps, an ability to prevent it, must explain how agents are able to do other than they are caused to do. Without it, they can give no defense of their counterexamples. With it, they can be confident that.
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503Themes From Kaplan (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1989.This anthology of essays on the work of David Kaplan, a leading contemporary philosopher of language, sprang from a conference, "Themes from Kaplan," organized by the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University.
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48Situation semantics was originally conceived as an alternative to extensional model theory and possible world semantics especially suited to the analysis of various problematic constructions, including naked-infinitive perception verbs (Barwise 1981) and belief-reports (Barwise and Perry 1981a, 1981b). In its earliest forms, the central ideas were.
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44Directing intentionsIn Joseph Almog & Paolo Leonardi (eds.), The philosophy of David Kaplan, Oxford University Press. pp. 187--201. 2010.
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79Broadening the Mind (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1): 223-231. 1998.The main topic of Jerry Fodor’s The Elm and the Expert,1, and the title of the first chapter, is “If Psychological processes are computational, how can psychological laws be intentional?” I focus on the first and second chapters; The first is devoted to setting up the question, the second to answering it
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29Return of the zombies?In Simone Gozzano & Christopher S. Hill (eds.), New Perspectives on Type Identity: The Mental and the Physical, Cambridge University Press. pp. 251. 2012.
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Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
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Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |