Mark Siebel

Some philosophers, most notably Hempel and Salmon, have tried to reduce explanation to probability by proposing analyses of explanation in probabilistic terms. Hempel claims, roughly, that a hypothesis H explains a datum D if and only if the conditional probability P is close to 1. It is well known that such an account fails in cases where H is irrelevant for D. Even though it is highly likely that Tom will not become pregnant, given that he regularly takes his wife’s birth control pills, the latter does not explain the former. Neither does an idea work which is in the proximity of Salmon’s, namely, that H explains D if and only if P > P. Suppose Susan swallows a pound of arsenic in order to commit suicide. Shortly after, however, she dies because she is run over by a bus. The probability of dying, given that one ingests a pound of arsenic, is usually higher than the prior probability of dying. Nonetheless, it is not the arsenic but the collision with the bus which explains Susan’s death. The aforementioned objections are directed against …

It is shown that the probabilistic theories of coherence proposed up to now produce a number of counter-intuitive results. The last section provides some reasons for believing that no probabilistic measure will ever be able to adequately capture coherence. First, there can be no function whose arguments are nothing but tuples of probabilities, and which assigns different values to pairs of propositions {A, B} and {A, C} if A implies both B and C, or their negations, and if P(B)=P(C). But such sets may indeed differ in their degree of coherence. Second, coherence is sensitive to explanatory relations between the propositions in question. Explanation, however, can hardly be captured solely in terms of probability.

The Raven and the Bayesian. As an essential benefit of their probabilistic account of confirmation, Bayesians state that it provides a twofold solution to the ravens paradox. It is supposed to show that (i) the paradox’s conclusion is tenable because a white shoe only negligibly confirms the hypothesis that all ravens are black, and (ii) the paradox’s first premise is false anyway because a black raven can speak against the hypothesis. I argue that both proposals are not only unable to solve the paradox, but also point to severe difficulties with Bayesianism. The former does not make the conclusion acceptable, and it entails the bizarre consequence that a great amount of non-black non-ravens substantially confirms the ravens hypothesis. The latter does not go far enough because there is a variant of the first premise which follows from Bayesianism and implies a weaker, but nevertheless untenable, variant of the conclusion.

Der zweite Band der Reihe Philosophische Forschung spannt zwei Kerngebiete der Analytischen Philosophie zusammen: die Semantik und die Ontologie. Was sind die Grundbausteine unserer Ontologie? Wie beziehen wir uns sprachlich bzw. geistig auf sie? Diese und weitere Fragen werden von international renommierten Philosophen aus historischer und systematischer Perspektive diskutiert. Die Beiträge sind in Deutsch und English verfasst. Sie stammen von Christian Beyer, Johannes Brandl, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Dorothea Frede, Rolf George, Gerd Graßhoff, Peter Hacker, Andreas Kemmerling, Edgar Morscher, Kevin Mulligan, Rolf Puster, Richard Schantz, Benjamin Schnieder, Oliver Scholz, Severin Schröder, Peter Simons, Thomas Spitzley, Markus Stepanians, Ralf Stoecker und Daniel von Wachter.

In the classic Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts,Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish advocated the idea that to perform an illocutionary actoften just means to express certain attitudes. The underlying definition of attitudeexpression, however, gives rise to serious problems because it requires intentions of a peculiarkind. Recently, Wayne Davis has proposed a different analysis of attitude expression whichis not subject to these difficulties and thus promises a more plausible account of illocutions.It will be shown, however, that this account is too weak since it does not exclude cases wherethe utterer merely pretends to perform an illocutionary act. Davis' analysis also callsinto question a weaker doctrine widely held among speech act theorists by suggesting that, inorder to perform an illocutionary act, it is not even necessary to express mental states.

In Bolzano's view, a proposition is necessarily true iff it is derivable from true propositions that include no intuition (Anschauung). This analysis is historically important because it displays close similarities to Quine's and Kripke's ideas. Its systematic significance, however, is reduced by the fact that derivability is defined with recourse to the method of variation, which we are allowed to apply even to propositions containing none of the respective variables. This liberality leads to the result that, according to Bolzano's analysis, every truth is necessarily true. Even by introducing his condition of relevance (shared variables), Bolzano cannot avoid that some propositions come out as necessarily true which are merely contingently true.

The standard argument against the compositionality of adjective-noun compounds containing "red" says that "red" does not make the same semantic contribution because a red car has to be red outside whereas a red watermelon has to be red inside. Fodor's reply to that argument is that the inside/outside feature is semantically irrelevant because "red F" just means F which is red for Fs. That account agrees with our intuitions concerning analyticity; but it seems to be in conflict with a central test for understanding: a person who knows nothing else about these expressions than what is offered by Fodor is far from applying them successfully

Hommel et al. (2001) try to explain the emergence of distal representations by an evolutionary account which includes their theory of event coding. A closer look at the way the terms “distal representations” and “representations of events” are defined reveals, however, that their hypothesis of a common code for perceived and to-be-produced events is in fact superfluous. Moreover, it shows that they mix up empirical facts with conceptual/definitional facts in the second assumption of their explanation.

Abstract:Kant’s famous definition of analyticity states that a judgement is analytic if its subject-concept contains its predicate-concept. Ayer objects that (i) Kant makes use of the vague term ‘concept’, (ii) Kant presupposes that every judgement and every sentence has subject-predicate form, and (iii) in addition to the given ‘psychological’ criterion, Kant employs a ‘logical’ criterion not equivalent to the former. It will be shown that, taken literally, these objections are quite superficial. The third one, however, entails a serious problem.

I criticize three claims concerning simulators: (1) That a simulator provides the best-fitting simulation of the perceptual impression one has of an object does not guarantee, pace Barsalou, that the object belongs to the simulator's category. (2) The people described by Barsalou do not acquire a concept of truth because they are not sensitive about the potential inadequacy of their sense impressions. (3) Simulator update prevents Barsalou's way of individuating concepts (i.e., identifying them with simulators) from solving the problem of intra-personal concept stability because to update a simulator is to change its content, and concepts with different contents are distinct.

In the second volume of his Wissenschaftslehre from 1837, the Bohemian philosopher, theologian, and mathematician Bernard Bolzano introduced his concept of consequence, named derivability, together with a variety of theorems and further considerations. Derivability is an implication relation between sentences in themselves, which are not meant to be linguistic symbols but the contents of declarative sentences as well as of certain mental episodes. When Schmidt utters the sentence ‘Schnee ist weiß’, and Jones judges that snow is white, the sentence in itself expressed by Schmidt is the same as the one to which Jones agrees in thought. This sentence in itself is an abstract entity: in some sense, it exists; but it is unreal insofar as it lacks a position in space and time, does not stand in causal relationships, and is independent of the existence of thinking beings and languages.

The standard argument against the compositionality of adjective-noun compounds containing "red" says that "red" does not make the same semantic contribution because a red car has to be red outside whereas a red watermelon has to be red inside. Fodor's reply to that argument is that the inside/outside feature is semantically irrelevant because "red F" just means F which is red for Fs. That account agrees with our intuitions concerning analyticity; but it seems to be in conflict with a central test for understanding: a person who knows nothing else about these expressions than what is offered by Fodor is far from applying them successfully.

To have a propositional attitude, a thinker must possess the concepts included in its content. Surprisingly, this rather trivial principle refl ects badly on many theories of concept possession because, in its light, they seem to require too much. To solve this problem, I point out an ambiguity in attributions of the form 'S possesses the concept of Fs'. There is an undemanding sense which is involved in the given principle, whereas the theoretical claims concern a stronger sense which can be brought out by formulations such as 'S has an adequate conception of Fs' or 'S knows what Fs are'