Michael Pendlebury

The intentionality of virtually all thought that is distinctive of human beings is linguistically based and constitutively normative. As Robert Brandom claims in Making It Explicit, this normativity is best understood as having roots in social practice. But Brandom is wrong to insist that all intentionality is normative (thus denying intentionality to nonhuman, nonlinguistic animals). For even the simple social practices that ground the most primate norms presuppose robust nonnormative intentionality. Furthermore, Brandom’s appeal to perception to supplement his informal semantics with a view to avoiding complete indeterminacy of linguistic meaning is either ineffective or arbitrary and unjustified unless perceptual states are recognized as having nonnormative intentional contents that go way beyond the mere differential responsiveness which he allows them.

The main aim of this paper is to work toward an account of how sensibility and understanding combine in perceptual judgments, with the emphasis on the role of sensibility in both the justification of such judgments and the explanation of how it is possible for them to apply to an objective world. I argue that in themselves sensory intuitions function as (animal level) beliefs about the environment, and that these beliefs have the status of perceptual judgments to the extent to which they are embedded in and engaged with the high-level patterns of consciousness and reasoning characteristic of full-blown human judgment. In terms of this account, sensibility is seamlessly integrated with understanding in perceptual judgments. This does not, however, imply that its contribution to perceptual judgments cannot be separated analytically, for in my terms the basic justification and objective reference of perceptual judgments are directly inherited from the sensory intuitions (functioning as sensory beliefs) which constitute those judgments. I conclude by showing how this account can be used to undermine John McDowell’s claim that any attempt to assign a separable contribution to sensibility cannot avoid the Myth of the Given.

Competing metaethical theories are sometimes cast as alternative ways of responding to an inconsistency between two apparent features of moral judgments, viz., that they are truth-apt expressions of belief and that they have motivational force. I argue that this is an oversimplification that fails to address some important data that can be accommodated on the basis of a straightforward “good reasons” account of “ought” judgments that explains why certain of these judgments have motivational force will others do not. This solution applies equally to all “ought” judgments regardless of whether they are advanced from the moral point of view, so it is not threatened by the existence of amoralists or moral nihilists. And it does not in its own right involve a commitment to any particular metaethical theory. This shows that the problem of motivation does not provide a good framework for the major metaethical debates.

Focusing on the simple demonstrative ‘that’ and demonstrative expressions of the form ‘that F,’ this paper reviews four accounts of what determines the denotations of demonstratives—the description theory, according to which the work is done by a proper definite description associated with the demonstrative; the causal theory, according to which it is done by a non-deviant causal chain connecting the object and the demonstrative; the demonstration theory, according to which it is done by a demonstration accompanying the demonstrative; and the mental reference theory, according to which it is done by the mental act of reference that the demonstrative expresses—and it offers evidence of the superiority of the mental reference theory.

This paper presents an approach to the elementary temporal semantics of the English tense system, the atoms of which are the present tense, the past tense, the progressive auxiliary, the perfective auxiliary, and the modal will as used for the future. It offers accounts of the forms of temporal semantics of core verb phrases of different categories and of the atoms of the tense system, using machinery that that yields appropriate compositional accounts of the temporal semantics of compound, tensed verb phrases. This machinery also yields a novel account of the Kenny-Vendler classification of core verb phrases.

In order to establish that judgments about practical reasons can be objective, it is necessary to show that the applicable standards provide an adequate account of truth and error. This in turn requires that these standards yield an extensive set of substantive, publicly accessible judgments that are presumptively true. This output requirement is not satisfied by the standards of universalizability, consistency, coherence, and caution alone. But it is satisfied if we supplement them with the principle that desire is a source of minimal reasons. This principle is justified despite currently fashionable arguments against the claims of desire.