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62Truth and MeaningIn Ernest Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. 2006.This article says something about previous work related to truth and meaning, goes on to discuss Davidson and related papers of his, and then discusses some issues arising. It begins with the work of Gottlob Frege. Much work in the twentieth century developed Frege's ideas. A great deal of that work continued with the assumption that semantics is fundamentally concerned with the assignments of entities to expressions. So, for example, those who tried to develop a formal account of sense did so b…Read more
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88Alcoholism, Disease, and InsanityPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 20 (4): 297-315. 2013.It is argued that alcoholism, and substance addiction generally, is a disease. It is not of its nature chronic or progressive, although it is in serious cases. It is better viewed as a psychological disease than a neurological one. It is argued that each time an alcoholic takes a drink, this is the result of choice; however, in cases of serious affliction, such choices are compulsive and may be called 'involuntary' in that they are made against the subject's will, motivated by an overwhelmingly …Read more
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28Four arguments for the indeterminacy of translationIn A. Orenstein & Petr Kotatko (eds.), Knowledge, Language and Logic: Questions for Quine, Kluwer Academic Print On Demand. pp. 131--139. 2000.
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140Cognitive content and propositional attitude attributionsIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Jonathan D. Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2006.Tyler Burge (Burge (1979)) has developed a very influential line of anti-individualistic thought. He argued that the cognitive content of a person
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20A Slim Book on Narrow ContentMIT Press. 1999.A good understanding of the nature of a property requires knowing whether that property is relational or intrinsic. Gabriel Segal's concern is whether certain psychological properties—specifically, those that make up what might be called the "cognitive content" of psychological states—are relational or intrinsic. He claims that content supervenes on microstructure, that is, if two beings are identical with respect to their microstructural properties, then they must be identical with respect to t…Read more
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14Representing representationsIn P. Carruthers & J. Boucher (eds.), Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes, Cambridge University Press. pp. 146--161. 1998.
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20Ignorance of meaningIn Alex Barber (ed.), Epistemology of language, Oxford University Press. 2003.Article
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15Truth and senseIn Petr Kotatko & John Biro (eds.), Frege: Sense and Reference One Hundred Years Later, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 15--24. 1995.
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105A preference for sense and referenceJournal of Philosophy 86 (2): 73-89. 1989.The topic of this paper is the semantic structure of belief reports of the form 'a believes that p'. it is argued that no existing theory of these sentences satisfactorily accounts for anaphoric relations linking expressions within the embedded complement sentence to expressions outside. a new account of belief reports is proposed which assigns to embedded expressions their normal semantic values but which also exploits frege's idea of using senses to explain the apparent failures of extensional…Read more
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68This paper is principally devoted to comparing and contrasting poverty of stimulus arguments for innate cognitive apparatus in relation to language and in relation to folk psychology. These days one is no longer allowed to use the term ‘innate’ without saying what one means by it. So I will begin by saying what I mean by ‘innate’. Sections 2 and 3 will discuss language and theory of mind, respectively. Along the way, I will also briefly discuss other arguments for innate cognitive apparatus in t…Read more
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113Two theories of namesMind and Language 16 (5). 2001.Two semantic theories of proper names are explained and assessed. The theories are Burge’s treatment of proper names as complex demonstratives and Larson and Segal’s quasi-descriptivist account of names. The two theories are evaluated for empirical plausibility. Data from deficits, processing models, developmental studies and syntax are all discussed. It is concluded that neither theory is fully confirmed or refuted by the data, but that Larson and Segal’s theory has more empirical plausibility
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664On a unitary semantical analysis for definite and indefinite descriptionsIn Marga Reimer & Anne Bezuidenhout (eds.), Descriptions and beyond, Oxford University Press. pp. 420-437. 2004.
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192Keep making senseSynthese 170 (2): 275-287. 2009.In a number works Jerry Fodor has defended a reductive, causal and referential theory of cognitive content. I argue against this, defending a quasi-Fregean notion of cognitive content, and arguing also that the cognitive content of non-singular concepts is narrow, rather than wide.
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The philosophy of psychologyIn Philosophy 2: Further Through the Subject, Oxford University Press. 1998.
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45Content and Computation: Chasing the Arrows A Critical Notice of Jerry Fodor's The Elm and the ExpertMind and Language 12 (3-4): 490-501. 1997.
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Please allow me to recapitulate some territory that will be familiar to most readers. Here is how the problem of mental causation has typically been set up since shortly after the onset of non-reductive physicalism. It is now widely assumed that the realm of the physical is causally closed. This means that the probability of any event’s occurring is fully determined by physical causes, and physical causes alone. There is no space in the physical causal nexus for any non-physical event to exert a…Read more