Johannes Brandl

In this paper, I discuss the different views of the founders of descriptive psychology in the 19th century about the meaning and purpose of this discipline and sketch a new plan for connecting descriptive psychology with the language-critical tradition of analytic philosophy. I will show that the goals Hermann Lotze, Franz Brentano, and Wilhelm Dilthey set for descriptive psychology were too lofty for different reasons. The common problem they faced was how to reconcile the ideal of autonomous philosophical knowledge with the empirical relevance that descriptive psychology should have. Faced with this dilemma, I outline a new plan to conceive of descriptive psychology as a critical project aimed at overcoming the obstacles that language places in the way of our knowledge of mental phenomena.

We develop a new theory of the cognitive changes around 4 years of age by trying to explain why understanding of false belief and of alternative naming emerge at this age. We make use of the notion of discourse referents as it is used in File Change Semantics, one of the early forms of the more widely known Discourse Representation Theory. The assumed cognitive change exists in how children can link DRs in their mind to external referents. The younger children check whether the conditions for a DR match the conditions of an external entity. The older children, in addition, have an explicit understanding of reference in virtue of making explicit identity assertions. This involves the metarepresentational ability of representing that different DRs represent the same external referent, which — we argue — is required for alternative naming and for the false belief task.

It is argued that Davidson's basic objection to the Building Block Method in semantics is neither that it gives the wrong explanation of how a first language is learned nor that it assigns a meaning to Single words prior to interpreting a whole language. The arguments against Fregean concepts and truth-values as the references of predicates and sentences are found to be equally superficial as the arguments against a primitive notion reference defmed in causal terms.Davidson's basic objection turns out to be that thoughts do not have a deep-structure which can be revealed by a correct analysis. His constraints on a theory of meaning do not allow for a distinction, as suggested by Dummett, between analysis and decomposition of thoughts. This forces us to a very general decision about how to do philosophy. As a non-reductivist I think it makes sense to assume a basic thought-structure. From this perspective the use of buildingblocks in semantics is vindicated.

Die beste Erklärung für den Gegenstandsbezug unserer Gedanken erhalten wir, so die These meines Aufsatzes, indem wir die Semantik jener Ausdrücke studieren, mit denen wir uns auf Individuen beziehen. Für diese methodologische Entscheidung sprechen dreierlei Gründe: Erstens die Uneinheitlichkeit der Kategorie singulärer Terme; zweitens die Notwendigkeit, zwischen einem starken und einem schwachen Begriff des de re Glaubens zu unterscheiden; sowie drittens die Unmöglichkeit, psychische Phänomene zu einem Verbindungsglied zwischen Worten und Gegenständen zu machen. Im ersten Punkt stütze ich mich auf eine Lesart der attributiv/referentiell Unterscheidung, die Donnellan zu einem Partner und nicht zu einem Gegner von Russell macht. Schon die Kennzeichnungstheorie stellt jeden Versuch in Frage, zwei so grundverschiedene Arten des Bezeichnens gleichermaßen durch ein 'intentionales Gerichtetsein' der Sprecher zu erklären. An dieser Schwierigkeit scheitert auch, so mein zweites Argument, Chisholms Versuch, zwei unterschiedlich starke Begriffe des de re Glaubens auf intentionale Weise zu definieren. Schließlich verteidige ich Wittgensteins streng antireduktionistische Haltung gegenüber Deutungen, die ihn zum Advokaten eines Primats des Intentionalen machen würden.

It is argued that Davidson's basic objection to the Building Block Method in semantics is neither that it gives the wrong explanation of how a first language is learned nor that it assigns a meaning to Single words prior to interpreting a whole language. The arguments against Fregean concepts and truth-values as the references of predicates and sentences are found to be equally superficial as the arguments against a primitive notion reference defmed in causal terms.Davidson's basic objection turns out to be that thoughts do not have a deep-structure which can be revealed by a correct analysis. His constraints on a theory of meaning do not allow for a distinction, as suggested by Dummett, between analysis and decomposition of thoughts. This forces us to a very general decision about how to do philosophy. As a non-reductivist I think it makes sense to assume a basic thought-structure. From this perspective the use of buildingblocks in semantics is vindicated.

In this paper we address the question how children come to understand normativity through simple forms of social interaction. A recent line of research suggests that even very young children can understand social norms quite independently of any moral context. We focus on a methodological procedure developed by Rakoczy et al., Developmental Psychology, 44, 875–881, that measures children’s protest behaviour when a pre-established constitutive rule has been violated. Children seem to protest when they realize that rule violations are not allowed or should not have happened. We point out that there is more than one possible explanation for children’s reactions in these studies. They could be due to disobeying an authority, an inability to follow a rule, or the violation of an empirical expectation due to the mismatch between statement and action. We thus question whether it would still count as an indicator for normative understanding if children responded to aspects of the game other than the violation of a constitutive rule and conclude that the protesting behavior, when taken in isolation, does not suffice as evidence for normative understanding

Wittgenstein meint, nur ein endliches Verifikationsverfahren könne einem Satz Sinn verleihen. Darin unterscheidet er sich sowohl vom alten Verifikationismus des Wiener Kreises als auch von neueren Bedeutungstheorien, die den Satzsinn durch die Bedingungen des berechtigten Behauptens erklären wollen. Es wird gezeigt, daß beide Positionen in einen Regreß münden, sobald sie Wittgensteins Forderung nach vollständiger Verifizierbarkeit ernst nehmen. Weder der epistemische Begriff des "endgültigen" Verifizierens noch der semantische Begriff der "ausgezeichneten" Verifikation kommen ohne einen externen Bezugspunkt wie Wahrheit oder Rationalität aus. Da Wittgenstein jedes Verbindungsglied ablehnt, das noch zwischen den Satz und seine Verifikation treten kann, bleibt für ihn als Ideal der Vollständigkeit nur der Punkt, an dem sich die Erklärungskraft einer zur Demonstration vorgeführten Verifikation erschöpft. Zur Erläuterung dieser Position wird auf die Tractatus-These der internen Relationen und auf das Argument des Regelfolgens zurückgegriffen.

Critically reflecting some theses of Fodor & LePore's Holism, it is argued that semantic holism in spite of all their criticism is not defeated. As a consequence of the rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction, a first result is that they do not take Traditional Holism, as it originates from Frege and Wittgenstein, serious at all. Whereas a Weak Anatomism, inspired with views of Traditional Holism, might be an interesting alternative to atomism and holism even for Quine and Neo-Fregeans like Dummett. Concerning the Principle of Compositionality an ambiguity between recurrence and functional compositionality is localized that relativizes their critique on Davidson. And finally versions of content- and belief-holism in combination with adequate charity-principles are discussed as a basis for squaring Intentional Realism with Brentano's Thesis.

It is often assumed that deflationist accounts of truth are a product of philosophy of logic and language in the twentieth century. In this paper I show why this assumption is historically short-sighted. An early version of deflationism about truth can already be found in Brentano’s 1889 lecture “On the Concept of Truth.” That Brentano is a precursor of deflationism has gone largely unnoticed because of a different reception of his lecture: according to most scholars, Brentano proposes in it a revision of the correspondence theory of truth that he later rejected in favour of an epistemic theory. Contrary to this received interpretation, I argue that Brentano actually tried to show how one can minimize an account of truth without thereby sacrificing a robust realist intuition about the objectivity of truth. Brentano held on to this deflationist view in his later years, when he assigned self-evident judgments a primary role in our understanding of truth.

Thoughts may have a subject — they may concern a certain topic —without having an object in the sense of being directed upon a referent. It is argued that, once this distinction is acknowledged, a third position between Meinong and Russell can be established. There will then be objectless thoughts which need not be false in view of the non-existence of their purported referents. But there will also be object-dependent thoughts which have their referents necessarily. Neither logically proper names nor non-existing objects need to be introduced if we allow for cases when we are mistaken about what kind of thoughts we are considering. This result is achieved via an analysis of fictional names and a free logic which includes a nonpredicating use of general terms in sentences imitating the logical form of predications.