Tadeusz Ciecierski

The paper attempts to pose a problem for theories claiming that intentional attributions are essentially normative. Firstly, I argue that the claim is ambiguous. Secondly, that three possible interpretations of the claim can be distinguished: one that appeals to normative impositions put on agents of intentional states, another that exploits the fact that one can normatively assess the states in question and a further one that locates normativity in the domain of special intentional explanations. Thirdly, it is argued that each interpretation faces serious difficulties: they either fail to provide a justification for the claim they intend to make or they contradict certain justified observations about intentional attributions.

The aim of this paper is to pose a problem for theories that claim that belief reports are context dependent. Firstly, I argue that the claim is committed to verbalism, a theory that derives the context sensitivity of belief reports from the context sensitivity of the psychological verbs used in such reports. Secondly, I argue that verbalism is not an attractive theoretical option because it is in conflict with the non-proto-rigidity of verbs like ‘believe’. Finally, I describe various consequences that the argument has for invariantism and moderate contextualism.

The paper is a reply to Leopold Hess' article "Proper Names - the Facts and the Myths". It is shown that the author misunderstood the issue of proper names and misconceived main ideas of the new theory of reference. The most important mistakes made by the author are: (i) considering the category of proper names in detachment from linguistic usage ;(ii) wrong reconstruction of the so-called modal argument and the notion of rigid designator; (iii) equivocating between two meanings of "a priori". All those mistakes are carefully analysed.

The aim of this paper is to discuss theories that attempt to single out the class of intentional states by appealing to factors that are supposedly criterial for intentional sentences. The papers starts with distinguishing two issues that arise when one thinks about intentional expressions: the Taxonomy Problem and the Fundamental Demarcation Problem. The former concerns the relation between the classes of distinct intentional verbs and distinct intentional states. The latter concerns the question about how to distinguish intentional states and acts from the non-intentional ones. Next, the general desiderata for theories providing criteria for singling out the class of intentional sentences are introduced. Finally, distinct proposals for providing such criteria are analyzed. Author argues that neither is satisfactory.