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655What Are Group Speech Acts?Language & Communication 70 46-58. 2020.The paper provides a taxonomy of group speech acts whose main division is that between collective speech acts (singing Happy Birthday, agreeing to meet) and group proxy speech acts in which a group, such as a corporation, employs a proxy, such as a spokesperson, to convey its official position. The paper provides an analysis of group proxy speech acts using tools developed more generally for analyzing institutional agency, particularly the concepts of shared intention, proxy agent, status role, …Read more
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823Unconscious Inference Theories of Cognitive AcheivementIn Anders Nes & Timothy Hoo Wai Chan (eds.), Inference and Consciousness, Routledge. pp. 15-39. 2019.This chapter argues that the only tenable unconscious inferences theories of cognitive achievement are ones that employ a theory internal technical notion of representation, but that once we give cash-value definitions of the relevant notions of representation and inference, there is little left of the ordinary notion of representation. We suggest that the real value of talk of unconscious inferences lies in (a) their heuristic utility in helping us to make fruitful predictions, such as about il…Read more
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21Review: Existential Cognition: Computational Minds in the World (review)Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 59 (2): 537-541. 1999.Review of Ron McClamrock's Existential Cognition.
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1695The Epistemology of Thought Experiments: First Person versus Third Person ApproachesMidwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1): 128-159. 2007.Recent third person approaches to thought experiments and conceptual analysis through the method of surveys are motivated by and motivate skepticism about the traditional first person method. I argue that such surveys give no good ground for skepticism, that they have some utility, but that they do not represent a fundamentally new way of doing philosophy, that they are liable to considerable methodological difficulties, and that they cannot be substituted for the first person method, since the…Read more
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437Individual and Collective Action: Reply to BlombergJournal of Social Ontology 5 (1): 125-146. 2019.Olle Blomberg challenges three claims in my book From Individual to Plural Agency (Ludwig, Kirk (2016): From Individual to Plural Agency: Collective Action 1. Vols. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press.). The first is that there are no collective actions in the sense in which there are individual actions. The second is that singular action sentences entail that there is no more than one agent of the event expressed by the action verb in the way required by that verb (the sole agency requirement). …Read more
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480From Individual to Collective Responsibility: There and Back AgainIn Saba Bazargan-Forward & Deborah Tollefsen (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility, Routledge. pp. 78-93. 2020.This chapter argues that in cases in which a (non-institutional) group is collectively causally responsible and collectively morally responsible for some harm which is either (i) brought about intentionally or (ii) foreseen as the side effect of something brought about intentionally or (iii) unforeseen but a nonaggregative harm, each member of the group is equally and as fully responsible for the harm as if he or she had done it alone.
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281Plural Action Sentences and Logical Form: Reply to HimmelreichAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (4): 800-806. 2017.This paper replies to Himmelreich's ‘The Paraphrase Argument Against Collective Actions’ [2017], which presents three putative counterexamples to the multiple agents analysis of plural action sentences. The paper shows that the argument from the first example, the discursive dilemma, fails because it relies crucially on a simplification of the target analysis, and that the others don't bear on the question because they turn out on examination to be about individual rather than group action sente…Read more
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677Blueprint for a Science of Mind: A Critical Notice of Christopher Peacocke's A Study of ConceptsMind and Language 9 (4): 469-491. 1994.A review essay on Peacocke's book A Study of Concepts. Raises questions about the role of the concept of finding an inference primitively compelling and questions of detail about the basic framework, its application to the systematicity of thought, the response to potential objections in the chapters on the metaphysics of concepts and naturalism, and the treatment of the concept of belief.
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43François Recanati's Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta: An Essay on Metarepresentation (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (2): 481-488. 2003.The book is divided into twenty chapters, divided in turn into six parts. Parts I-III contain the main positive account of metarepresentations. The main semantic thesis of parts I-III is that metarepresentational sentences are not relational, but involve a metarepresentational operator applied to a sentence which functions in its usual way, but which is evaluated relative to a “shifted circumstance” in use. This is supposed to represent a novel account of the semantics of attitude sentences that…Read more
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1Skepticism and Externalist Theories of Thought ContentDissertation, University of California, Berkeley. 1990.This dissertation addresses the question whether externalist theories of thought content provide a satisfactory response to the traditional problem of skepticism about the external world. I address two questions. If externalist theories of thought content are true, do they provide a satisfactory response to skepticism about the external world? Are externalist theories of thought content true? My answer to the first question is yes, and to the second no. The argument of the dissertation is divide…Read more
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213Donald Davidson: meaning, truth, language, and realityOxford University Press. 2005.Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig present the definitive critical exposition of the philosophical system of Donald Davidson. Davidson 's ideas had a deep and broad influence in the central areas of philosophy; he presented them in brilliant essays over four decades, but never set out explicitly the overarching scheme in which they all have their place. Lepore's and Ludwig's book will therefore be the key work, besides Davidson 's own, for understanding one of the greatest philosophers of the twentie…Read more
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103Phenomenal consciousness and intentionality: Comments on The Significance of ConsciousnessPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 8. 2002.Commentary on Charles Siewert's The Significance of Consciousness (Princeton, 1998). I discuss three issues about the relation of phenomenal consciousness, in the sense Siewert isolates, to intentionality. The first is whether, contrary to Siewert, phenomenal consciousness requires higher-order representation. The second is whether intentional features of conscious states are identical with phenomenal features, as Siewert argues, or merely conceptually supervene on them, with special attention t…Read more
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3270Collective IntentionalityIn Lee C. McIntyre & Alexander Rosenberg (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science, Routledge. pp. 214-227. 2016.In this chapter, we focus on collective action and intention, and their relation to conventions, status functions, norms, institutions, and shared attitudes more generally. Collective action and shared intention play a foundational role in our understanding of the social. The three central questions in the study of collective intentionality are: (1) What is the ontology of collective intentionality? In particular, are groups per se intentional agents, as opposed to just their individual membe…Read more
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557Methodological Individualism, the We-mode, and Team ReasoningIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Social Ontology and Collective Intentionality: Critical Essays on the Philosophy of Raimo Tuomela with his Responses, Springer. pp. 3-18. 2016.Raimo Tuomela is one of the pioneers of social action theory and has done as much as anyone over the last thirty years to advance the study of social action and collective intentionality. Social Ontology: Collective Intentionality and Group Agents (2013) presents the latest version of his theory and applications to a range of important social phenomena. The book covers so much ground, and so many important topics in detailed discussions, that it would impossible in a short space to do it even …Read more
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562Thought Experiments in Experimental PhilosophyIn Michael T. Stuart, Yiftach Fehige & James Robert Brown (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments, Routledge. pp. 385-405. 2018.Much of the recent movement organized under the heading “Experimental Philosophy” has been concerned with the empirical study of responses to thought experiments drawn from the literature on philosophical analysis. I consider what bearing these studies have on the traditional projects in which thought experiments have been used in philosophy. This will help to answer the question what the relation is between Experimental Philosophy and philosophy, whether it is an “exciting new style of [philo…Read more
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474Fission, First Person Thought, and Subject-body DualismEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 13 (1): 5-25. 2017.In “The Argument for Subject Body Dualism from Transtemporal Identity Defended” (PPR 2013), Martine Nida-Rümelin (NR) responded to my (PPR 2013) criticism of her (2010) argument for subject-body dualism. The crucial premise of her (2010) argument was that there is a factual difference between the claims that in a fission case the original person is identical with one, or the other, of the successors. I argued that, on the three most plausible interpretations of ‘factual difference’, the argume…Read more
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366Truth-Theoretic Semantics and Its LimitsArgumenta (3): 21-38. 2017.Donald Davidson was one of the most influential philosophers of the last half of the 20th century, especially in the theory of meaning and in the philosophy of mind and action. In this paper, I concentrate on a field-shaping proposal of Davidson’s in the theory of meaning, arguably his most influential, namely, that insight into meaning may be best pursued by a bit of indirection, by showing how appropriate knowledge of a finitely axiomatized truth theory for a language can put one in a positio…Read more
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466Actions and Events in Plural DiscourseIn Kirk Ludwig & Marija Jankovic (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality, Routledge. pp. 476-488. 2018.This chapter is concerned with plural discourse in the grammatical sense. The goal of the chapter is to urge the value of the event analysis of the matrix of action sentences in thinking about logical form in plural discourse about action. Among the claims advanced are that: 1. The ambiguity between distributive and collective readings of plural action sentences is not lexical ambiguity, either in the noun phrase (NP) or in the verb phrase (VP), but an ambiguity tracing to the scope of the even…Read more
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448Proxy Agency in Collective ActionIn Kirk Ludwig & Marija Jankovic (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality, Routledge. pp. 58-67. 2018.This chapter explains the mechanism of proxy agency whereby a group (or individual) acts through another authorized to represent it.
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349Unity in the Variety of QuotationIn Ludwig Kirk & Ray Greg (eds.), The Semantics and Pragmatics of Quotation, Springer. pp. 99-134. 2018.This chapter argues that while quotation marks are polysemous, the thread that runs through all uses of quotation marks that involve reference to expressions is pure quotation, in which an expression formed by enclosing another expression in quotation marks refers to that enclosed expression. We defend a version of the so-called disquotational theory of pure quotation and show how this device is used in direct discourse and attitude attributions, in exposition in scholarly contexts, and in so-c…Read more
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31From Plural to Institutional Agency: Collective Action IIOxford University Press. 2017.Kirk Ludwig presents a philosophical account of institutional action, such as action by corporations and nation states. He argues that it can be fully understood in terms of the agency of individuals, and concepts derived from our understanding of individual action. He thus argues for a strong form of methodological individualism.
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252Dretske on explaining behaviorActa Analytica 11 111-124. 1996.Fred Dretske has recently argued, in a highly original book and a series of articles, that action explanations are a very special species of historical explanation, in opposition to the traditional view that action explanations cite causes of actions, which are identical with bodily movements. His account aims to explain how it is possible for there to be a genuine explanatory role for reasons in a world of causes, and, in particular, in a world in which we have available in principle an explan…Read more
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509The concept of truth and the semantics of the truth predicateInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (6): 622-638. 2007.We sketch an account according to which the semantic concepts themselves are not pathological and the pathologies that attend the semantic predicates arise because of the intention to impose on them a role they cannot fulfill, that of expressing semantic concepts for a language that includes them. We provide a simplified model of the account and argue in its light that (i) a consequence is that our meaning intentions are unsuccessful, and such semantic predicates fail to express any concept, and…Read more
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217Causing actions (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2). 2003.Critical Notice of Causing Actions by Paul Pietroski,
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631Semantics for opaque contextsPhilosophical Perspectives 12 141-66. 1998.In this paper, we outline an approach to giving extensional truth-theoretic semantics for what have traditionally been seen as opaque sentential contexts. We outline an approach to providing a compositional truth-theoretic semantics for opaque contexts which does not require quantifying over intensional entities of any kind, and meets standard objections to such accounts. The account we present aims to meet the following desiderata on a semantic theory T for opaque contexts: (D1) T can be formul…Read more
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617Donald DavidsonMidwest Studies in Philosophy 28 (1). 2004.This chapter reviews the major contributions of Donald Davidson to philosophy in the 20th century.
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432Propositions and higher-order attitude attributionsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (5): 741-765. 2013.An important objection to sententialist theories of attitude reports is that they cannot accommodate the principle that one cannot know that someone believes that p without knowing what it is that he believes. This paper argues that a parallel problem arises for propositionalist accounts that has gone largely unnoticed, and that, furthermore, the usual resources for the propositionalist do not afford an adequate solution. While non-standard solutions are available for the propositionalist, it tu…Read more
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388Truth in the Theory of MeaningIn Ernest LePore & Kirk Ludwig (eds.), A Companion to Donald Davidson (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy), Wiley-blackwell. pp. 175-190. 2013.This chapter reviews interpretations of Davidson's project in the theory of meaning and argues against a variety of views according to which Davidson intended to reduce meaning to some variety of truth conditions or replace the project of giving a theory of meaning with a theory of truth, and in support of interpreting him as offering an indirect way of achieving the goals of the traditional project by appeal to knowledge of facts about a semantic theory of truth for the language, including that…Read more
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812Intuitions and relativityPhilosophical Psychology 23 (4): 427-445. 2010.I address a criticism of the use of thought experiments in conceptual analysis advanced on the basis of the survey method of so-called experimental philosophy. The criticism holds that surveys show that intuitions are relative to cultures in a way that undermines the claim that intuition-based investigation yields any objective answer to philosophical questions. The crucial question is what intuitions are as philosophers have been interested in them. To answer this question we look at the role o…Read more
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583Foundations of Social Reality in Collective Intentional BehaviorIn Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.), Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts: Essays on John Searle’s Social Ontology, Springer. 2007.This paper clarifies Searle's account of we-intentions and then argues that it is subject to counterexamples, some of which are derived from examples Searle uses against other accounts. It then offers an alternative reductive account that is not subject to the counterexamples.
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