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154Red watermelons and large elephants: A case against compositionality?Theoria 15 (38): 263-280. 2000.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 tes…Read more
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72Equivalent testimonies as a touchstone of coherence measuresSynthese 161 (2): 167-182. 2008.Over the past years, a number of probabilistic measures of coherence have been proposed. As shown in the paper, however, many of them do not conform to the intuitition that equivalent testimonies are highly coherent, regardless of their prior probability.
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43Against Probabilistic Measures of CoherenceErkenntnis 63 (3): 335-360. 2005.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 se…Read more
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40William P. Alston: Illocutionary acts and sentence meaning, Cornell university press: Ithaca and London 2000Grazer Philosophische Studien 62 (1): 249-261. 2001.
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33Truth and intra-personal concept stabilityBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (4): 632-633. 1999.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 …Read more
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24La notion bolzanienne de déductibilitéPhilosophiques 30 (1): 171-189. 2003.L’article présente le concept de déductibilité que Bolzano introduit dans sa Wissenscahftslehre, indique quelques traits caractéristiques en vertu desquels ce concept diffère de plusieurs conceptions contemporaines de la conséquence et examine l’affirmation selon laquelle il présente une forte similarité avec la conception de Tarski et la logique de la pertinence.The article presents the concept of deducibility which Bolzano introduced in his Wissenschaftslehre, points out some of the characteri…Read more
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24Der Rabe und der BayesianistJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 35 (2): 313-329. 2004.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…Read more
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8Variation, Derivability and NecessityGrazer Philosophische Studien 53 (1): 117-137. 1997.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 t…Read more
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24Red Watermelons and Large ElephantsTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 15 (2): 263-280. 2000.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 tes…Read more
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15Free Content A Puzzle About Concept PossessionGrazer Philosophische Studien 68 (1): 1-22. 2005.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 br…Read more
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11Bolzanos Ableitbarkeit und Tarskis logische FolgerungIn Julian Nida-Rümelin & Georg Meggle (eds.), Analyomen 2, Volume I: Logic, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, De Gruyter. pp. 148-156. 1997.
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William P. ALSTON: Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 2000Grazer Philosophische Studien. forthcoming.
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107The ontology of meanings (review)Philosophical Studies 137 (3). 2008.In part 4 of Meaning, Expression, and Thought, Davis rejects what he calls Fregean ideational theories, according to which the meaning of an expression is an idea; and then presents his own account, which states that, e.g., the meaning of ‘Primzahl’ in German is the property of meaning prime number. Before casting doubt on the latter ontology of meanings, I come to Frege’s defence by pointing out that he was not an advocate of the position Davis named after him because Fregean senses are not lex…Read more
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41Does TEC explain the emergence of distal representations?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (4): 588-589. 2004.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 explan…Read more
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