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6Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine (edited book)Reidel. 1969.It is gratifying to see that philosophers' continued interest in Words and Objections has been so strong as to motivate a paperback edition. This is gratifying because it vindicates the editors' belief in the permanent im portance of Quine's philosophy and in the value of the papers com menting on it which were collected in our volume. Apart from a couple of small corrections, only one change has been made. The list of Professor Quine's writings has been brought up to date. The editors cannot cl…Read more
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136Essays in honor of Carl G. Hempel (edited book)D. Reidel. 1970.Reminiscences of Peter, by P. Oppenheim.--Natural kinds, by W. V. Quine.--Inductive independence and the paradoxes of confirmation, by J. Hintikka.--Partial entailment as a basis for inductive logic, by W. C. Salmon.--Are there non-deductive logics?, by W. Sellars.--Statistical explanation vs. statistical inference, by R. C. Jeffre--Newcomb's problem and two principles of choice, by R. Nozick.--The meaning of time, by A. Grünbaum.--Lawfulness as mind-dependent, by N. Rescher.--Events and their d…Read more
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47Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. QuinePhilosophical Review 82 (1): 99-110. 1973.Articles: Smart, "Quine's Philosophy of science"; Harman, "An Introduction to 'Translation and Meaning', Chapter Two of Word and Object"; Stenius, "Beginning with Ordinary Things"; Chomsky, "Quine's Empirical Assumptions"; Hintikka, "Behavioral Criteria of Radical Translation"; Stroud, "Conventionalism and the Indeterminacy of Translation"; Strawson, "Singular Terms and Predication"; Grice, "Vacuous Names"; Geach, "Quine's Syntactical Insights"; Davidson, "On Saying That"; Follesdal, "Quine on M…Read more
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63V. Action and reactionInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 13 (1-4): 140-148. 1970.
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208The method of truth in metaphysicsMidwest Studies in Philosophy 2 (1): 244-254. 1977.Repr. as Essay 14 in Davidson, Donald, _Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation_, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK (Clarendon, 2001). 215-226
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422What metaphors meanIn Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel (eds.), Arguing about language, Routledge. pp. 31. 2010.The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it another way. But if I am right,…Read more
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107What is Quine's view of truth?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 37 (4). 1994.Two questions are raised about Quine's view of truth. He has recently said that ontology is relative to a translation manual: is this the same as relativizing it to a language? The same question may be asked about truth. Should we think there is one concept of truth which is relative to a language, or is there a separate concept for each language (or speaker)? The second question concerns Quine's repeated endorsements of the ?disquotational? account of truth. Does he think this account limits a …Read more
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136Who is FooledIn Problems of rationality, Oxford University Press. 2004.Applies and extends the conclusions of the preceding chapters by examining cases of self‐deception of a puzzling sort emerging from cases of fantasizing and imagining, found in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The author is particularly interested in what can be described as the ‘divided mind of self‐deception’, the mind that produces an imagination due to its realising the state of the world that motivates the fantasy construct and the possessor's even…Read more
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89What thought requiresIn Joao Branquinho (ed.), The Foundations of Cognitive Science, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 121. 2001.Examines further the criteria for attributing thought to an object or creature by illuminating the relation between thought, language, and world on the one hand, and the sort of structure that thought and language require on the other. Examines the implications the Unified Theory has with regards to this relation, and challenges the widespread belief that we will not really understand the intentional attitudes, conceptualization, or language until we can give a purely extensional, physicalist ac…Read more
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129What is present to the mind?In Abraham Zvie Bar-On (ed.), Grazer Philosophische Studien, Distributed in the U.s.a. By Humanities Press. pp. 197-213. 1986.
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14The Conditions of ThoughtGrazer Philosophische Studien 36 (1): 193-200. 1989.This summary paper explains why we are not constrained to start from a solipsistic, or first person point of view in considering the nature of thought. My aim here is to suggest the nature of an acceptable extemalism. According to this view, knowledge of other minds need not be a problem m addition to the problem of empirical knowledge. The essential step toward determining the content of someone else's thought is made by discovering what normally causes those thoughts. Hence I believe that ther…Read more
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113The conditions of thoughtIn Abraham Zvie Bar-On (ed.), Grazer Philosophische Studien, Distributed in the U.s.a. By Humanities Press. pp. 193-200. 1986.This summary paper explains why we are not constrained to start from a solipsistic, or first person point of view in considering the nature of thought. My aim here is to suggest the nature of an acceptable extemalism. According to this view, knowledge of other minds need not be a problem m addition to the problem of empirical knowledge. The essential step toward determining the content of someone else's thought is made by discovering what normally causes those thoughts. Hence I believe that ther…Read more
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103Truth and predication. 2005."Davidson begins by harking back to an early interest in the classics, and an even earlier engagement with the workings of grammar. In the pleasures of diagramming sentences in grade school, he locates his first glimpse into the mechanics of how we conduct the most important activities in our life - such as declaring love, asking directions, issuing orders, and telling stories. Davidson connects these essential questions with the most basic and yet hard to understand mysteries of language use - …Read more
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343Three varieties of knowledgeIn A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.), A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays, Cambridge University Press. pp. 153-166. 1992.I know, for the most part, what I think, want, and intend, and what my sensations are. In addition, I know a great deal about the world around me. I also sometimes know what goes on in other people's minds. Each of these three kinds of empirical knowledge has its distinctive characteristics. What I know about the contents of my own mind I generally know without investigation or appeal to evidence. There are exceptions, but the primacy of unmediated self-knowledge is attested by the fact that we …Read more
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10The Structure of TruthOxford University Press. 2020.Donald Davidson was one of the most famous and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. The Structure of Truth presents his 1970 Locke Lectures in print for the first time. They comprise an invaluable historical document which illuminates how Davidson was thinking about the theory of meaning, the role of a truth theory therein, the ontological commitments of a truth theory, the notion of logical form, and so on, at a pivotal moment in the development of his thought. Unlike Davidson's p…Read more
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35The Perils and Pleasures of InterpretationIn Ernest Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. 2006.There is a contrast between the difficulties that stand in the way of explaining in detail how we manage to find out what is in other people's minds and the relative ease with which we do it in practice. The first part of the article explores the obstacles that thwart theory, the second part describes features of our minds that work in our favor when it comes to practice. At the end it is suggested that the project of fully naturalizing our understanding of other minds — a project philosophers a…Read more
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129Responses to Barry Stroud, John McDowell, and Tyler BurgePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (3): 691-699. 2003.
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280The Emergence of ThoughtErkenntnis 51 (1): 511-521. 1999.A phenomenon “emerges” when a concept is instantiated for the first time: hence emergence is relative to a set of concepts. Propositional thought and language emerge together. It is proposed that the degree of complexity of an object language relative to a given metalanguage can be gauged by the number of ways it can be translated into that metalanguage: in analogy with other forms of measurement, the more ways the object language can be translated into the metalanguage, the less powerful the co…Read more
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |