Mitchell Green

The relation between two systems of attitude ascription that capture all the empirically significant aspects of an agents thought and speech may be analogous to that between two systems of magnitude ascription that are equivalent relative to a transformation of scale. If so, just as an objects weighing eight pounds doesnt relate that object to the number eight (for a different but equally good scale would use a different number), similarly an agents believing that P need not relate her to P (for a different but equally adequate interpretive scheme could use a different proposition). In either case the only reality picked out by any system of ascription is what is common to all equivalent rivals. By emphasizing some contrasts between decision theory and belief-desire psychology, it is argued that if attitude ascription is appropriately analogous to measurement then not only is being related to a proposition an artifact of the system of representation chosen, so are belief and desire.

Speech acts are a staple of everyday communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the Twentieth Century.[1] Since that time “speech act theory” has been influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory and many other scholarly disciplines.[2] Recognition of the importance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things than describe reality. In the process the boundaries among the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind and even ethics have become less sharp. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare an implicit normative structure within linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice concerned with describing reality. Much recent research aims at an accurate characterization of this normative structure underlying linguistic practice

I argue that it is possible literally to perceive the emotions of others. This account depends upon the possibility of perceiving a whole by perceiving one or more of its parts, and upon the view that emotions are complexes. After developing this account, I expound and reply to Rowland Stout's challenge to it. Stout is nevertheless sympathetic with the perceivability-of-emotions view. I thus scrutinize Stout's suggestion for a better defence of that view than I have provided, and offer a refinement of my own proposal that incorporates some of his insights

Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge takes the reader on tour of the nature, value, and limits of self-knowledge. Mitchell S. Green calls on classical sources like Plato and Descartes, 20th-century thinkers like Freud, recent developments in neuroscience and experimental psychology, and even Buddhist philosophy to explore topics at the heart of who we are. The result is an unvarnished look at both the achievements and drawbacks of the many attempts to better know one's own self. Key topics in this volume include: Knowledge - what it means to know, the link between wisdom and knowledge, and the value of living an "examined life" Personal identity - questions of dualism, bodily continuity, and personhood The unconscious - including the kind posited by psychoanalysis as well as the form proposed by recent research on the so-called adaptive unconscious Free will - if we have it, and the recent arguments from neuroscience challenging it Self-misleading - the ways we willfully deceive ourselves, and how this relates to empathy, peer disagreement, implicit bias, and intellectual humility Experimental psychology - considerations on the automaticity of emotion and other cognitive processes, and how they shape us This book is designed to be used in conjunction with the free 'Know Thyself' MOOC created through collaboration of the University of Connecticut's Project on Humility and Conviction in Public Life, and the University of Edinburgh's Eidyn research centre, and hosted on the Coursera platform. The book is also suitable as a text for interdisciplinary courses in the philosophy of mind or self-knowledge, and is highly recommended for anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating topic.

Angle Grinder Man removes wheel locks from cars in London. He is something of a folk hero, saving drivers from enormous parking and towing fines, and has succeeded thus far in eluding the authorities. In spite of his cape and lamé tights, he is no fiction; he's a real person. By contrast, Pegasus, Zeus and the like are fictions. None of them is real. In fact, not only is each of them different from the others, all differ from Angle Grinder Man. After all, Zeus throws thunderbolts but doesn't remove boots from cars; unlike Superman, Angle Grinder Man couldn't leap over a parked Mini, and all sightings suggest that he is a human being, not a horse.

According to many forms of Externalism now popular in the Philosophy of Mind, the contents of our thoughts depend in part upon our physical or social milieu.1 These forms of Externalism leave unchallenged the thesis that the ~non-factive! attitudes we bear towards these contents are independent of physical or social milieu. This paper challenges that thesis. It is argued here that publicly forwarding a content as a supposition for the sake of argument is, under conditions not themselves guaranteeing the existence of that state, sufficient for occupancy of the intentional state of supposing that content. Because a saying may literally create an intentional state, whether one is in such a state does not depend solely upon how things are within one’s skin. Rather, even leaving content fixed, the attitude borne toward that content depends in part upon what norms are in force in one’s milieu.

In Belief and the Will, van Fraassen employed a diachronic Dutch Book argument to support a counterintuitive principle called Reflection. There and subsequently van Fraassen has put forth Reflection as a linchpin for his views in epistemology and the philosophy of science, and for the voluntarism (first-person reports of subjective probability are undertakings of commitments) that he espouses as an alternative to descriptivism (first-person reports of subjective probability are merely self-descriptions). Christensen and others have attacked Reflection, taking it to have unpalatable consequences. We prescind from the question of the cogency of diachronic Dutch Book arguments, and focus on Reflection's proper interpretation. We argue that Reflection is not as counterintuitive as it appears — that once interpreted properly the status of the counterexamples given by Christensen and others is left open. We show also that descriptivism can make sense of Reflection, while voluntarism is not especially well suited to do so.

Frege was the grandfather of analytical philosophy, Husserl the founder of the phenomenological school, two radically different philosophical movements. In 1903, say, how would they have appeared to any German student of philosophy who knew the work of both? Not, certainly, as two deeply opposed thinkers: rather as remarkably close in orientation, despite some divergence of interests. They may be compared with the Rhine and the Danube, which rise quite close to one another and for a time pursue roughly parallel courses, only to diverge in utterly different directions and flow into different seas. Why, then, did this happen? What small ingredient into the thought of each was eventually magnified into so great an effect?

An approach is provided to the prediction and explanation of quantity implicata that, unlike the majority of approaches available, does not construe Quantity as requiring speakers to make the strongest claim that their evidence permits. Central to this treatment is an elaboration of the notion of what a conversation requires as appealed to in the Cooperative Principle and the Quantity maxim. What a conversation requires is construed as depending, at any given point, upon the aim of the conversation taking place, the conversational record, which includes such features as common ground and salience relations among objects, and any proffered illocution calling for a reply. In accounting for this third dimension a partial characterization is provided of the speech acts of assertion and interrogation in terms of their role in constraining the progress of the conversation in which they occur

Definitions of art tend to take the phenomenon at face value, with philosophers aspiring to accommodate their theories to the artistic facts no matter how bizarre. The result, as for instance in the work of Dickie, is a definition of art neutral on the questions whether any of it is any good, and why anyone would bother to produce it. Zangwill bucks this trend by insisting that the method of definition-and-counterexample that drives much of the field is out of date, and by contending that any good theory of art should explain why making and appreciating it is worth our while. The result is an account of art that foregrounds aesthetic value while striving to show why art production and appreciation are rational activities.Zangwill sees the tradition he wishes to rebut as guided by the method of ‘extensional adequacy’, that is, ‘ … a theory of art that classifies as art all or most of the things we intuitively call “art”, and that excludes all or most of the things that we intuitively do not call “art” ’. This is jarring, since that tradition aims for intensional adequacy, as shown by the fact that a critic of a given theory is allowed to proffer hypothetical rather than just actual cases in aid of that critique. Zangwill's error does not, however, undermine the gravamen of his challenge, which is this. Insofar as we are after a theory of art rather than a description of the …

Abstract: One oft-cited feature of speech acts is their expressive character: Assertion expresses belief, apology regret, promise intention. Yet expression, or at least sincere expression, is as I argue a form of showing: A sincere expression shows whatever is the state that is the sincerity condition of the expressive act. How, then, can a speech act show a speaker's state of thought or feeling? To answer this question I consider three varieties of showing, and argue that only one of them is suited to help us answer our question. I also argue that concepts from the evolutionary biology of communication provide one source of insight into how speech acts enable one to show, and thereby express, a psychological state.

In recent years the view that understanding a language requires knowing what its words and expressions mean has come under attack. One line of attack attempts to show that while knowledge can be undermined by Gettier-style counterexamples, language understanding cannot be. I consider this line of attack, particularly in the work of Pettit and Longworth, and show it to be unpersuasive. I stress, however, that maintaining a link between language understanding and knowledge does not itself vindicate a cognitivist view of the former.

Metaphorical utterances are construed as falling into two broad categories, in one of which are cases amenable to analysis in terms of semantic content, speaker meaning, and satisfaction conditions, and where image-construction is permissible but not mandatory. I call these image-permitting metaphors, and contrast them with image-demanding metaphors comprising a second category and whose understanding mandates the construction of a mental image. This construction, I suggest, is spontaneous, is not restricted to visual imagery, and its result is typically somatically marked sensu Damasio. IDM’s are characteristically used in service of self-expression, and thereby in the elicitation of empathy. Even so, IDM’s may reasonably provoke banter over the aptness of the imagery they evoke.

Frege was the grandfather of analytical philosophy, Husserl the founder of the phenomenological school, two radically different philosophical movements. In 1903, say, how would they have appeared to any German student of philosophy who knew the work of both? Not, certainly, as two deeply opposed thinkers: rather as remarkably close in orientation, despite some divergence of interests. They may be compared with the Rhine and the Danube, which rise quite close to one another and for a time pursue roughly parallel courses, only to diverge in utterly different directions and flow into different seas. Why, then, did this happen? What small ingredient into the thought of each was eventually magnified into so great an effect?

An approach is provided to the prediction and explanation of quantity implicata that, unlike the majority of approaches available, does not construe Quantity as requiring speakers to make the strongest claim that their evidence permits. Central to this treatment is an elaboration of the notion of what a conversation requires as appealed to in the Cooperative Principle and the Quantity maxim. What a conversation requires is construed as depending, at any given point, upon the aim of the conversation taking place, the conversational record, which includes such features as common ground and salience relations among objects, and any proffered illocution calling for a reply. In accounting for this third dimension a partial characterization is provided of the speech acts of assertion and interrogation in terms of their role in constraining the progress of the conversation in which they occur.

Stalnaker’s conception of context as common ground possesses unquestionable explanatory power, shedding light on presupposition, presupposition accommodation, the behavior of certain types of conditionals, epistemic modals, and related phenomena. The CG-context approach is also highly abstract, so merely pointing out that it fails to account for an aspect of communication is an inconclusive criticism. Instead our question should be whether it can be extended or modified to account for such a phenomenon while preserving its spirit. To that end, this essay assesses the prospects of the CG-context approach for making sense of the variety of ways in which interlocutors accept propositions as well as non-propositional contents, some different types of conversation and the norms distinctive of these different types, some pre-illocutionary pragmatic phenomena, conversational injustice, and fictional discourse.

From the point of view of ethics, truthtelling is not a matter of speaking the truth but is rather a matter of speaking what one believes to be the truth. So too liars do not necessarily say what is false; they say what they believe to be false. Further, one can mislead without lying. An executive answering in the affirmative the question whether some employees are in excessive danger on the job will mislead if he knows that in fact most employees are but does not say so. Yet he does not lie. Similarly there is no lie in an advertisement suggesting that those who use a certain product will win garner wealth and power. This article deals with the ethical and practical dimensions of truthtelling and lying only.

Grice's Quantity maxims have been widely misinterpreted as enjoining a speaker to make the strongest claim that she can, while respecting the other conversational maxims. Although many writers on the topic of conversational implicature interpret the Quantity maxims as enjoining such volubility, so construed the Quantity maxims are unreasonable norms for conversation. Appreciating this calls for attending more closely to the notion of what a conversation requires. When we do so, we see that eschewing an injunction to maximal informativeness need not deprive us of any ability to predict or explain genuine cases of implicature. Crucial to this explanation is an appreciation of how what a conversation, or a given stage of a conversation, requires, depends upon what kind of conversation is taking place. I close with an outline of this dependence relation that distinguishes among three importantly distinct types of conversation.