Filip Buekens

Social constructivist approaches to science have often been dismissed as inaccurate accounts of scientific knowledge. In this article, we take the claims of robust social constructivism (SC) seriously and attempt to find a theory which does instantiate the epistemic predicament as described by SC. We argue that Freudian psychoanalysis, in virtue of some of its well-known epistemic complications and conceptual confusions, provides a perfect illustration of what SC claims is actually going on in science. In other words, the features SC mistakenly ascribes to science in general correctly characterize the epistemic status of Freudian psychoanalysis. This sheds some light on the internal disputes in the field of psychoanalysis, on the sociology of psychoanalytic movement, and on the “war” that has been waged over Freud's legacy with his critics. In addition, our analysis offers an indirect and independent argument against SC as an account of bona fide science, by illustrating what science would look like if it were to function as SC claims it does

Most attempts at defining or elucidating ’weak’ or ’strong’ supervenience introduce various forms of _physical indiscernibility_. After glancing at some definitions, I argue that they must fail if mental events are supposed to be genuinely causally efficacious and non-epiphenomenal. Then I elucidate Davidson’s account of supervenience (’D-supervenience’), first as an abstract relation between a predicate and a set of predicates (to be illustrated by uncontroversial examples), and then as applied to the mental/physical relation. I argue that Davidson must defend that if two events are physically indiscernible in the light of a complete physical theory of the world then they must be identical in the Leibnizian sense (‘L-identity’): physical indiscernibility collapses into L-identity. It follows that mental differences between two numerically different events logically entail physical differences between them. I conclude by demonstrating how the Davidsonian account of the concept can explain some counterexamples to Moore’s approach to supervenience of moral on natural properties. The central tenet in this paper is that supervenience principles based on duplication create, rather than solve, problems in this problem area

Contextualists and assessment relativists neglect the expressive dimension of assertoric discourse that seems to give rise to faultless disagreement. Discourse that generates the intuition makes public an attitudinal conflict, and the affective -expressive dimension of the contributing utterances accounts for it. The FD-phenomenon is an effect of a public dispute generated by a sequence of expressing opposite attitudes towards a salient object or state of affairs, where the protagonists are making an attempt to persuade the other side into joining the other’s camp

After contrasting obscurantism with bullshit, we explore some ways in which obscurantism is typically justified by investigating a notorious test-case: defences of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Obscurantism abuses the reader's natural sense of curiosity and interpretive charity with the promise of deep and profound insights about a designated subject matter that is often vague or elusive. When the attempt to understand what the speaker means requires excessive hermeneutic efforts, interpreters are reluctant to halt their quest for meaning. We diagnose this as a case of psychological loss aversion, in particular, the aversion to acknowledging that there was no hidden meaning after all, or that whatever meaning found was projected onto the text by the reader herself

In this essay, I show how semantic theories in contemporary philosophy of language shed light on questions about the meaning of life. Current semantic theories tend to defend various forms of holism in semantics: the meaning of a word or sentence is explained by its place in a pattern of sentences, a framework, or a language . A second feature of these theories is that semantic holism rejects the idea that we understand words and sentences on the basis of a pre-established theory which can be applied to cases. Meaning and understanding always involve interpretation and languages are dynamic idiolects rather than fixed systems of communication. This connects semantics with various forms of particularism in ethics. I show how semantic particularism can be applied to questions were ‘meaning’ is used in its ’existential’ sense . The semantic and existential meaning of ’meaning’ have analogous functions

We present an inference to the best explanation of the immense cultural success of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic method. We argue that an account of psychoanalytic facts as products of unintended declarative speech acts explains this phenomenon. Our argument connects diverse, seemingly independent characteristics of psychoanalysis that have been independently confirmed, and applies key features of John Searle’s and Eerik Lagerspetz’s theory of institutional facts to the psychoanalytic edifice. We conclude with a brief defence of the institutional approach against more contentious social constructivist approaches to science and psychoanalysis

In ‘Meaning Revisited’, a reconsideration of his famous views on meaning, H.P. Grice has put forward the thesis that natural meaning (n-meaning) might be a precursor or predecessor of non-natural meaning. In this paper, I will take up Grice’s challenge and sketch a picture of how natural meaning could give rise to nn-meaning. The relevance of Grice’s challenge is obvious for current attempts at naturalizing nn-meaning: a plausible theory of the genesis of meaning must show why nn-meaning is not an unexplicable cosmic event but a product of various ways creatures more or less like us optimize communicative behaviour and learn to reason about mental states that causally explain that behaviour.