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360The normativity of meaning and contentStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2022.Normativism in the theory of meaning and content is the view that linguistic meaning and/or intentional content are essentially normative. As both normativity and its essentiality to meaning/content can be interpreted in a number of different ways, there is now a whole family of views laying claim to the slogan “meaning/content is normative”. In this essay, we discuss a number of central normativist theses, and we begin by identifying different versions of meaning normativism, presenting the arg…Read more
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28Rule-Following and Charity : Wittgenstein and Davidson on Meaning DeterminationIn Claudine Verheggen (ed.), Wittgenstein and Davidson on Language, Thought, and Action, Cambridge University Press. pp. 69-96. 2017.The project of this chapter is to explore some relations between the rule-following considerations and radical interpretation. I spell out the sense in which the rule-following considerations are about meaning determination, and investigate whether the principle of meaning determination used in the early Davidson's account of meaning determination - the principle of charity - provides an answer to what I shall call "Wittgenstein's paradox". More precisely, I am interested in one aspect of the pa…Read more
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481Against Content NormativityMind 118 (469): 31-70. 2009.As meaning's claim to normativity has grown increasingly suspect the normativity thesis has shifted to mental content. In this paper, we distinguish two versions of content normativism: 'CE normativism', according to which it is essential to content that certain 'oughts' can be derived from it, and 'CD normativism', according to which content is determined by norms in the first place. We argue that neither type of normativism withstands scrutiny. CE normativism appeals to the fact that there is …Read more
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66in What Detemines Content? The Internalism/Externalism Dispute, ed. T. Marvan, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press 2006.
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53Reasons for Belief and NormativityIn Daniel Star (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity, Oxford University Press. pp. 575-599. 2018.In this chapter, we critically examine the most important extant ways of understanding and motivating the idea that reasons for belief are normative. First, we examine the proposal that the distinction between explanatory and so-called normative reasons that is commonly drawn in moral philosophy can be rather straightforwardly applied to reasons for belief, and that reasons for belief are essentially normative precisely when they are normative reasons. In the course of this investigation, we exp…Read more
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TriangulationIn Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. 2005.As an analogy, triangulation was introduced into the philosophy of mind and language in Donald Davidson's 1982 paper ‘Rational animals’. The analogy is used to support the claim that linguistic communication not only suffices to show that a creature is a rational animal in the sense of having propositional thoughts, but that it is necessary as well: ‘rationality is a social trait. Only communicators have it’. The triangulation argument employs the premise that in order to have any propositional …Read more
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55Talking about LooksReview of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (4): 781-807. 2017.In natural language, looks-talk is used in a variety of ways. I investigate three uses of ‘looks’ that have traditionally been distinguished – epistemic, comparative, and phenomenal ‘looks’ – and endorse and develop considerations in support of the view that these amount to polysemy. Focusing on the phenomenal use of ‘looks’, I then investigate connections between its semantics, the content of visual experience, and the metaphysics of looks. I argue that phenomenal ‘looks’ is not a propositional…Read more
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106Defeating looksSynthese 195 (7): 2985-3012. 2016.In previous work, I have suggested a doxastic account of perceptual experience according to which experiences form a kind of belief: Beliefs with what I have called “phenomenal” or “looks-content”. I have argued that this account can not only accommodate the intuitive reason providing role of experience, but also its justificatory role. I have also argued that, in general, construing experience and perceptual beliefs, i.e. the beliefs most directly based on experience, as having different conten…Read more
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78Colors and the Content of Color ExperienceCroatian Journal of Philosophy 12 (3): 421-437. 2012.In previous work, I have defended a non-standard version of intentionalism about perceptual experience. According to the doxastic account, visual experience is a peculiar kind of belief: belief with “phenomenal” or looks-content. In this paper, I investigate what happens if this account of experience is combined with another idea I find very plausible: That the colors are to be understood in terms of color experience. I argue that the resulting phenomenal account of color experience captures eve…Read more
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135Intentionalism, defeasibility, and justificationPhilosophical Studies 173 (4): 1007-1030. 2016.According to intentionalism, perceptual experience is a mental state with representational content. When it comes to the epistemology of perception, it is only natural for the intentionalist to hold that the justificatory role of experience is at least in part a function of its content. In this paper, I argue that standard versions of intentionalism trying to hold on to this natural principle face what I call the “defeasibility problem”. This problem arises from the combination of standard inten…Read more
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12Schwerpunkt: Sprache und Regeln. 1st Bedeutung normativ?Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 48 (3): 393-394. 2000.
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16Bedeutung zwischen Norm und NaturgesetzDeutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 48 (3): 449-468. 2000.
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365In Defence of a Doxastic Account of ExperienceMind and Language 24 (3): 297-327. 2009.Today, many philosophers think that perceptual experiences are conscious mental states with representational content and phenomenal character. Subscribers to this view often go on to construe experience more precisely as a propositional attitude sui generis ascribing sensible properties to ordinary material objects. I argue that experience is better construed as a kind of belief ascribing 'phenomenal' properties to such objects. A belief theory of this kind deals as well with the traditional arg…Read more
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573Colors without circles?Erkenntnis 66 (1-2): 107--131. 2007.Realists about color, be they dispositionalists or physicalists, agree on the truth of the following claim: (R) x is red iff x is disposed to look red under standard conditions. The disagreement is only about whether to identify the colors with the relevant dispositions, or with their categorical bases. This is a question about the representational content of color experience: What kind of properties do color experiences ascribe to objects? It has been argued (for instance by Boghossian and Vell…Read more
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108Reply to ForbesAnalysis 72 (2): 298-303. 2012.In earlier work (Glüer, K. and P. Pagin. 2006. Proper names and relational modality. Linguistics & Philosophy 29: 507–35; Glüer, K. and P. Pagin. 2008. Relational modality. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 17: 307–22), we developed a semantics for (metaphysical) modal operators that accommodates Kripkean intuitions about proper names in modal contexts even if names are not rigid designators. Graeme Forbes (2011. The problem of factives for sense theories. Analysis 71: 654–62.) criticiz…Read more
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134Martin on the Semantics of 'Looks'Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (4): 292-300. 2012.A natural way of understanding (non-epistemic) looks talk in natural language is phenomenalist: to ascribe looks to objects is to say something about the way they strike us when we look at them. This explains why the truth values of looks-sentences intuitively vary with the circumstances with respect to which they are evaluated. But Mike Martin (2010) argues that there is no semantic reason to prefer a phenomenalist understanding of looks to “Parsimony”, the position according to which looks are…Read more
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19Sprache und Regeln: zur Normativität von BedeutungWalter de Gruyter. 1999.Die Arbeit wendet sich einem zentralen Problem der Modernen Sprachphilosophie zu. Mit Kripkes 'Wittgenstein' hat die Sprachphilosophie einen neuen Slogan erhalten: Beudeutung ist normativ. Dass die Sprache nicht naturlich, sondern konventionell sei, gehort dabei seit der griechischen Sophistik zu den Binsenweisheiten dieses Zweigs der Philosophie. Sehen wir jedoch mit Wittgenstein sprachliche Bedeutung als durch den Gebrauch sprachlicher Ausdrucke bestimmt an, wird daraus schnell die These, es s…Read more
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Stockholm UniversityRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |