Denis McManus

Christina Lafont has argued that the early Heidegger's reflections on truth and understanding are incompatible with ‘the supposition of a single objective world’. This paper presents her argument, reviews some responses that the existing Heidegger literature suggests, and offers what I argue is a superior response. Building on a deeper exploration of just what the above ‘supposition’ demands, I argue that a crucial assumption that Lafont and Haugeland both accept must be rejected, namely, that different ‘understandings of Being’ can be viewed as offering ‘rival perspectives’ on a common subject-matter. I develop this case by drawing on an alternative account of what a Heideggerian ‘understanding of Being’ might be like

This paper explores the place of realist and idealist themes in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It takes as its starting point Adrian Moore’s denial that transcendental idealism is present in that text only as an “enemy”—to be “diagnosed and dispelled,” as Peter Sullivan puts it. I question whether reflection on TI can perform the positive task which Moore’s reading assigns to it—in particular, whether coming to recognize its ultimate incoherence leads us to a recognition of “the forces that give this nonsense the appearance of sense in the first place.” On the basis of an understanding of those forces that is present in Moore’s own work, I argue that reflection on the quasi-realist themes manifest in Wittgenstein’s remarks on picturing perform that task more successfully. In this way, I question the special status that Moore assigns to TI in the Tractatus, his claiming—“with... myriad qualifications”—that “Wittgenstein is a transcendental idealist.”

Paul Boghossian has pointed out a ’circularity problem’ for dispositionalist theories of meaning: as a result of the holistic character of belief fixation, one cannot identify someone’s meaning such and such with facts of the form S is disposed to utter P under conditions C, without C involving the semantic and intentional notions that such a theory was to explain. Alex Miller has recently suggested an ’ultra‐sophisticated dispositionalism’ (modelled on David Lewis’s well known version of functionlism) and has argued that this version of dispositionalism escapes Boghossian’s ’circularity problem’. Miller argues, nonetheless, that another of Boghossian’s criticisms of dispositionalism, ’the infinity problem’ still applies to this ’ultra‐sophisticated dispositionalism’: C will still draw upon a potential infinity of mediating background clusters of belief. The present paper argues that the feature that ’the infinity problem’ presents as problematic is a feature of a host of familiar explanations. Our fundamental difficulty in this area is not our inability to understand how a more general model can be applied to a particular domain (the intentional understood as dispositional) but our failure to understand that general model itself (dispositional explanation).

The paper presents an interpretation of the thinking behind the early Wittgenstein's "general form of the proposition." It argues that a central role is played by the assumption that all domains of discourse are governed by the same laws of logic. The interpretation is presented partly through a comparison with ideas presented recently by Michael Potter and Peter Sullivan; the paper argues that the above assumption explains more of the key characteristics of the "general form of the proposition" than Potter and Sullivan suppose, including, in particular, its claim that the bases from which all other propositions are derived must be elementary propositions.