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143Moore'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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132Knowledge, Possibility, and ConsciousnessMIT Press. 2001.A defense of antecedent physicalism, which argues against the idea that if everything that goes on in the universe is physical, our consciousness and feelings ..
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127Reflexivity, Indexicality and NamesIn W. Künne, A. Newen & M. Anduschus (eds.), Direct Reference, Indexicality and Propositional Attitudes, Csli Publications. 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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123Frege 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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122`Borges and I' and `I'Amherst Lecture in Philosophy 2 1-16. 2007.In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “Borges and I,” one character, referred to in the first person, complains about his strained and complex relation with another character, called “Borges.” But the characters are both presumably the author of the short story. I try to use ideas from the philosophy of language to explain how Borges uses language to express complex thoughts, and then discuss two interpretations of the story
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119Myself and "I"In Marcelo Stamm (ed.), Philosophie in Synthetischer Absicht, . pp. 83--103. 1998.In this essay I distinguish three kinds of self-knowledge. I call these three kinds agent-relative knowledge, self-attached knowledge and knowledge of the person one happens to be. These aspects of self-knowledge dier in how the knower or agent is represented. Most of what I say will be applicable to beliefs as well as knowledge, and to other kinds of attitudes and thoughts, such as desire, as well.1 Agent-relative knowledge is knowledge from the perspective of a particular agent. To have this s…Read more
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115Radical minimalism, moderate contextualismIn G. Preyer (ed.), Context Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism, Oxford University Press. pp. 94--111. 2007.
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113Executions, Motivations, and AccomplishmentsPhilosophical Review 102 (4). 1993.Brutus wanted to kill Caesar. He believed that Caesar was an ordinary mortal, and that, given this, stabbing him (by which we mean plunging a knife into his heart) was a way of killing him. He thought that he could stab Caesar, for he remembered that he had a knife and saw that Caesar was standing next to him on his left, in the Forum. So Brutus was motivated to stab the man to his left. He did so, thereby killing Caesar.
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111Information is a notion of wide use and great intuitive appeal, and hence, not surprisingly, different formal paradigms claim part of it, from Shannon channel theory to Kolmogorov complexity. Information is also a widely used term in logic, but a similar diversity repeats itself: there are several competing logical accounts of this notion, ranging from semantic to syntactic. In this chapter, we will discuss three major logical accounts of information.
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105Relative Identity and NumberCanadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (1): 1-14. 1978.I argue for the consistency of frege's treatments of identity and number. Specifically, I argue that geach is wrong in suggesting that frege's insights about number should have led him to the doctrine of relative identity.
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98IndexicalsIn Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement, Simon and Schuster Macmillan. pp. 257--258. 1996.
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92Can’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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91Indexicals and DemonstrativesIn Bob Hale & Crispin Wright (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, 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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89Rip Van winkle and other charactersEuropean Review of Philosophy 2 13-39. 1996.In this essay I first review Kaplan’s theory of linguistic character, and then explain and motivate a concept of doxastic character. I then develop some concepts for dealing with the topic of belief retention and then, finally, discuss Rip Van Winkle. I come down on Kaplan’s side with respect to the Frege-inspired strategy, narrowly construed. But I advocate something like the Frege-inspired strategy, if it is construed more broadly. On my view it is remarkably easy to retain a belief, and I thi…Read more
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88Using IndexicalsIn Michael Devitt & Richard Hanley (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 314--334. 2006.In this essay I examine how we use indexicals. The key function of indexicals, I claim, is to help the audience --- that is the hearers or readers of the utterance with whom the speaker intends to be communicating---to find supplementary channels of information about the object to which the indexical refers. To keep the discussion manageable, I will oversimplify the epistemology of conversation. I ignore the fact that people sometimes lie and sometimes make mistakes. I talk freely about what one…Read more
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81Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers, 1956-1972 (review)Journal of Philosophy 73 (13): 416-428. 1976.This is a volume of philosophical studies, centred on problems of personal identity and extending to related topics in the philosophy of mind and moral philosophy.
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79Reference and ReflexivityCenter for the Study of Language and Inf. 2001.Following his recently expanded _The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays,_ John Perry develops a reflexive-referential' account of indexicals, demonstratives and proper names. On these issues the philosophy of language in the twentieth century was shaped by two competing traditions, descriptivist and referentialist. Oddly, the classic referentialist texts of the 1970s by Kripke, Donnellan, Kaplan and others were seemingly refuted almost a century earlier by co-reference and no-re…Read more
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78PragmaticsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.These lines — also attributed to H. L. Mencken and Carl Jung — although perhaps politically incorrect, are surely correct in reminding us that more is involved in what one communicates than what one literally says; more is involved in what one means than the standard, conventional meaning of the words one uses. The words ‘yes,’ ‘perhaps,’ and ‘no’ each has a perfectly identifiable meaning, known by every speaker of English (including not very competent ones). However, as those lines illustrate, …Read more
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75Critical Pragmatics: An Inquiry Into Reference and CommunicationCambridge University Press. 2011.Critical Pragmatics develops three ideas: language is a way of doing things with words; meanings of phrases and contents of utterances derive ultimately from human intentions; and language combines with other factors to allow humans to achieve communicative goals. In this book, Kepa Korta and John Perry explain why critical pragmatics provides a coherent picture of how parts of language study fit together within the broader picture of human thought and action. They focus on issues about singular…Read more
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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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72Fodor and psychological explanationIn Barry M. Loewer (ed.), Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics, Blackwell. 1991.[In Meaning in Mind, edited by Barry Loewer and Georges Rey. Oxford: Basil Black- well, 1991, 165.
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71Varieties of minimalist semantics (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2). 2006.Cappelen and Lepore view themselves as embattled defenders of the Free Republic of Semantics from the attacks of its enemies, mostly in the form of pragmatic incursions. They withdraw to a limited territory, and defend it with reason, humor, and other less noble weapons. The enemies are everywhere. This way of posing the debates is often humorous and helps make the book easy to read. It also often leads the authors to caricaturize and to trivialize many of the problems, arguments and positions h…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |