Herman Cappelen

In Insensitive Semantics (INS) and earlier work (see for example C&L (1997), (1998), (2004), (2005)) we defend a combination of two views: speech act pluralism and semantic minimalism. We're not alone advocating speech act pluralism; a modified version of it can be found in Mark Richard (1998), and we're delighted to have found a recent ally in Scott Soames (see chapter 3 of Soames (2001)1). There's less explicit support for minimalism, though we think it’s one way to interpret parts of Donald Davidson's work. John MacFarlane's reply to INS made clear to us that there might be more minimalists than we thought and that MacFarlane is one of them. MacFarlane's Non-Indexical Contextualism (NIC) incorporates a version of semantic minimalism; this made us realize that others who sympathize with MacFarlane's view (for example Mark Richard (2003) and Egan, Hawthorne and Weatherson (2005)) are, in effect, semantic minimalists.

One of the three central issues in Lloyd Humberstone's ‘Sufficiency and Excess’ is what he calls ‘the Complete Thought Issue’ (CTI, for short). This is the question of whether some declarative sentences have proposition radicals, rather than full-blown propositions, as their semantic values. My focus in this reply is exclusively on Humberstone's comments about CTI and on CTI more generally. The goal of Humberstone's discussion of CTI is to defend ‘[Kent] Bach's claim against Cappelen and Lepore's attacks’ (Humberstone, 2006, p. 316). These ‘attacks’ on Bach are found in Cappelen and Lepore (2004). In section one I present CTI, in section two I evaluate Humberstone's defence of Bach, and in section three I discuss two solutions to CTI.

According to Kent Bach (forthcoming), our book, Insensitive Semantics (IS), suffers from its 'implicit endorsement' of (1): (1) Every complete sentence expresses a proposition (this is Propositionalism, a fancy version of the old grammar school dictum that every complete sentence expresses a complete thought) (Bach (ms.)) In response (C&L, forthcoming), we claim to be unaware of endorsing (1). No argument in IS depends on (1), we say. We don't claim to have shown that that there couldn't be grammatical sentences the semantic contents of which are not propositional.

But the sort of context sensitivity exhibited in such sentences does not compromise the claim that meaning determines truth conditions, since recourse to context here is directed and restricted by conventional meaning alone. Anyone who understands sentence (2) knows that its utterances are true just in case whatever object is demonstrated in the context of utterance is nice; and he also knows that any utterance of (2) says of, or expresses about, whichever object is demonstrated that it’s nice. (Similarly, anyone who understands (3) knows that any utterance of it is true just in case whoever utters it has eaten. And every utterance says of, or expresses about, the speaker that he or she has eaten.) In sum, according to the thesis that meaning determines truth conditions, (indicative) sentences divide into two classes – those with truth conditions tout..

What does it mean to possess knowledge about something? What kinds of things exist and can be known? How should we live? What matters and what has value? In this book, we seek to answer these questions by examining contributions from the history of philosophy, science and ethics. The book has 20 chapters divided into three parts. Part 1, Knowing, asks questions about knowledge. Part 2, Being, starts by asking about what is real. Part 3, Doing, is devoted to ethics. Every chapter has an introduction and one or in some cases two original texts written either by contemporary thinkers or by important figures from the history of philosophy and science. Each chapter is accompanied by study questions and learning goals. The aim of this book is twofold: to teach you to become a critical reader, who can identify positions, arguments, and structures in a scientific text; and to introduce you to some important positions and ideas in order to enable you to discuss the big questions raised in the book. [Note: This book has been specifically developed as a textbook for the so-called 'Examen Philosophicum" course; it exists also in Norwegian as 'Vite, være, gjøre']

Hva vil det si å ha kunnskap om noe? Hva slags ting finnes i verden, og hva går det an å vite noe om? Hvordan bør vi leve? Hva er verdifullt? I denne boka søkes svar på disse spørsmålene gjennom eksempler fra filosofi- og vitenskapshistorien og fra etikk. Boka har 20 kapitler fordelt på tre deler. Del 1 – vite – stiller spørsmål om kunnskap. Del 2 – være – tar utgangspunkt i hva som er virkelig. Del 3 – gjøre – er viet etikk. Hvert kapittel har en introduksjon samt én til to originaltekster som er skrevet av tenkere fra vår samtid og fra filosofi- og vitenskapshistorien. Hvert kapittel har også studiespørsmål og en opplisting av det du bør ha lært, etter å ha lest kapittelet. [Dette er den eneste godkjent boken som dekker pensum til examen philosophicum ved Universitetet i Oslo]

It is a fundamental feature of language that words refer to things. Much attention has been devoted to the nature of reference, both in philosophy and in linguistics. Puzzles of Reference is the first book to give a comprehensive accessible survey of the fascinating work on this topic from the 1970s to the present day. Written by two eminent philosophers of language, Puzzles of Reference offers an up-to-date introduction to reference in philosophy and linguistics, summarizing ideas such as Kripke's revolutionary theory and presenting the various challenges in a clear and accessible manner. As the text does not assume prior training in philosophy or linguistics, it is ideal for use as part of a philosophy of language course for philosophy students or for linguistics students. Puzzles of Reference belongs to the series Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy of Language, in which each book provides an introduction to an important area of the philosophy of language, suitable for students at any level.

In Insensitive Semantics (INS) and several earlier articles (see C&L 1997, 1998, 2003, 2004) we appeal to a range of procedures for testing whether an expression is semantically context sensitive. We argue that claims to the effect that an expression, e, is semantically context sensitivity should be made only after checking whether e passes these tests. We use these tests to criticize those we classify as Radical and Moderate Contextualist (Taylor is one of our targets in the latter category.).

One of Szabo's central objections is his ‘reservations about the alleged slide from moderate to radical contextualism’. First, some background: the argument Szabo expresses doubt about is essential both to the critical part of our book and to its positive part. Our argument against what we call moderate contextualism depends on the assumption that it collapses into radical contextualism. Our positive view depends on the assumption that for any utterance, we can trigger the intuition that many different propositions are said (this is at the core of our speech act pluralism). So Szabo is attacking one of the key assumptions in IS – if his 'reservations' are well justified, most of what we have to say collapses

This paper examines two attempts to justify the way in which intuitions about specific cases are used as evidence for and against philosophical theories. According to the concept model, intuitions about cases are trustworthy applications of one’s typically tacit grasp of certain concepts. We argue that regardless of whether externalist or internalist accounts of conceptual content are correct, the concept model flounders. The second justification rests on the less familiar belief model, which has it that intuitions in philosophy derive from one’s (often tacit) beliefs. Although more promising than the concept model, the belief model fails to justify traditional philosophical use of intuitions because it is not clear a priori that the beliefs at issue are true. The latter model may, however, legitimize a less a prioristic approach to intuitions.

Much work in the philosophy of language assumes that a semantic theory T, for a language L should assign p as the semantic content of an utterance u, by A, of a sentence S in L, if and only if “A said that p” is true. This assumption is mistaken. More generally, the aim of semantics cannot be to capture the extension of English expressions such as “meaning” or “what was said”. This provides support for Davidson’s paratactic theory of indirect speech and for the view that a semantic theory should take the form of a truth-theory.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. If we don't know what the words 'democracy' and 'democratic' mean, then we don't know what democracy is. This book defends a radical view: these words mean nothing and should be abandoned. The argument for Abolitionism is simple: those terms are defective and we can easily do better, so let's get rid of them. According to the abolitionist, the switch to alternative devices would be a significant communicative, cognitive, and political advance. The first part of the book presents a general theory of abandonment: the conditions under which language should be abandoned. The rest of the book applies this general theory to the case of 'democracy' and 'democratic'. Cappelen shows that 'democracy' and 'democratic' are semantically, pragmatically, and communicatively defective. Abolitionism is not all gloom and doom. It also contains a message of good cheer: we have easy access to conceptual devices that are more effective than 'democracy'. We can do better. These alternative linguistic devices will enable us to ask better questions, provide genuinely fruitful answers, and have more rational discussions. Moreover, those questions and answers better articulate the communicative and cognitive aims of those who use empty terms like 'democracy' and 'democratic'.

I argue that philosophy department should be reorganised: they should be built up around strong research groups in restricted fields. Another way to think of this: departments should model themselves on research centres. Members of such research centres / departments would teach outside their area of competency. At the BA level teaching can remain as it is, but those teaching classes will often be teaching outside the area of expertise. That is not a problem. PhD supervision would be within the restricted fields that the department specialises in. In other words: I reject the zoo-model of academic departments where you get ‘one of each’, so that all classes can be taught by someone working on the topic of that class.

Context and Communication offers an introduction to a central theme in the study of language: the various ways in which what we say depends on the context of speech and thought. The period since 1970 has produced a vast literature on this topic, both by philosophers and by linguists. This book explores key data, questions, concepts, and theories of context sensitivity. It is written to be accessible to someone with no prior knowledge of the material or, indeed, any prior knowledge of philosophy, and is ideal for use as part of a philosophy of language course by students of philosophy or linguistics.

Language Turned on Itself examines what happens when language becomes self-reflexive; when language is used to talk about language. Those who think, talk, and write about language are habitual users of various metalinguistic devices, but reliance on these devices begins early: kids are told, 'That's called a "rabbit"'. It's not implausible that a primitive capacity for the meta-linguistic kicks in at the beginning stages of language acquisition. But no matter when or how frequently these devices are invoked, one thing is clear: they present theorists of language with a complex data pattern. Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore show that the study of these devices and patterns not only represents an interesting and neglected project in the philosophy of language, but also carries important consequences for other parts of philosophy. Part I is devoted to presenting data about various aspects of our metalinguistic practices. In Part II, the authors examine and reject the four leading metalinguistic theories, and offer a new account of our use of quotation in a variety of different contexts. But the primary goal of this book is not to promote one theory over another. Rather, it is to present a deeply puzzling set of problems and explain their significance.

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories (e.g., the reflective-equilibrium method), for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science.

This volume brings together two series of papers: one began with Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore's 1997 paper 'On an Alleged Connection Between the Theory of Meaning and Indirect Speech'. The other series started with their 1997 paper 'Varieties of Quotation'. The central theme throughout is that only when communicative content is liberated from semantic content will we make progress in understanding language, communication, contexts, and their interconnection. These are the papers in which Cappelen and Lepore introduced speech act pluralism and semantic minimalism, and they provide the foundation for one of the most powerful attacks on contextualism in contemporary philosophy.

This paper examines two attempts to justify the way in which intuitions about specific cases are used as evidence for and against philosophical theories. According to the concept model, intuitions about cases are trustworthy applications of one’s typically tacit grasp of certain concepts. We argue that regardless of whether externalist or internalist accounts of conceptual content are correct, the concept model flounders. The second justification rests on the less familiar belief model, which has it that intuitions in philosophy derive from one’s beliefs. Although more promising than the concept model, the belief model fails to justify traditional philosophical use of intuitions because it is not clear a priori that the beliefs at issue are true. The latter model may, however, legitimize a less a prioristic approach to intuitions.