Georges Rey

Fodor and LePore's attack on conceptual role semantics relies on Quine's attack on the traditional analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, which in turn consists of four arguments: an attack on truth by convention; an appeal to revisability; a claim of confirmation holism; and a charge of explanatory vacuity. Once the different merits of these arguments are sorted out, their proper target can be seen to be not the Traditional Distinctions, but an implicit assumption about their superficial availability that we have abundant reason to reject. Once we reject it, we can see how issues of the absorbtion of conventions, the revisability of belief, and confirmation holism are compatible with the Traditional Distinctions, and that Quine's discussion only serves to camouflage the question of whether some confirmation relations are constitutive of meaning and knowable a priori

According to the “Folieism” I have been recently defending, communication is a kind of folie à deux in which speakers and hearers enjoy a stable and innocuous illusion of producing and hearing standard linguistic entities (“SLE”s) that are seldom if ever actually produced. In the present paper, after summarizing the main points of the view, I defend it against efforts of Barber, Devitt and Miščević to rescue SLEs in terms of social, response-dependent proposals. I argue that their underlying error is a failure to appreciate the important shift of the explanatory locus in modern linguistics, from external objects to internal conceptions. I go on to show how (i) pace Devitt, this shift is entirely compatible with there being conventional aspects to language, and also serves to distinguish the ease of natural language from the waggle dance of the bees; and (ii) pace Barber and Smith, it is compatible with an appearance / reality distinction, and with reliance on testimony in epistemology. I conclude with further arguments about why, pace Collins and Matthews, intentionality is a crucial feature of linguistic explanation, even if it is ultimately spelt out largely in terms of computational role.

Shoemaker (1996) presented a priori arguments against the possibility of ‘self‐blindness’, or the inability of someone, otherwise intelligent and possessed of mental concepts, to introspect any of her concurrent attitude states. Ironically enough, this seems to be a position that Gopnik (1993) and Carruthers (2006, 2008, 2009a,b) have proposed as not only possible, but as the actual human condition generally! According to this ‘Objectivist’ view, supposed introspection of one's attitudes is not ‘direct’, but an ‘inference’ of precisely the sort we make about the attitudes of others, an inference that has the advantage in our own case of only our own sensory data and memories, our behavior, and of the context we are in; i.e. we are all substantially self‐ blind. After sorting out a number of methodological and verbal issues, I argue, first, that the a priori arguments against Objectivism don't succeed, and that Gopnik and Carruthers are right to regard the issue as an empirical one. On the other hand, I think they seriously underestimate the difficulty of establishing Objectivism. It is unlikely there is an inferential procedure from the data of pure sensation, behavior and context to the relevant self‐attributions that would be as spectacularly reliable as people manifestly seem to be. Moreover, there is a simpler model: the mind very likely consists of a panoply of sub‐routines some of whose outputs are ‘tagged’ for their having been so processed, rather in the way that software ‘documents’ are on standard computers. Introspection plausibly consists in a person's simply attending to distinctive constellations of these tags, even though they may lack phenomenal feels. This draws attention to an important independent fact: that much of phenomenology (or ‘what it's like’ to be in a certain state) may be constituted by facts that are not phenomenal.