Peter Alward

I have been dissatisfied with Walton’s make-believe model of appreciator engagement with fiction ever since my first encounter with it as a graduate student.1 What I have always objected to is not the suggestion that such engagement is broadly speaking imaginative; rather, it is the suggestion that it specifically involves de se imaginative activity on the part of appreciators. That is, while I concede that appreciators imagine (de re) of the fictional works they experience that they are thus and so, I deny that they imagine (de se) experiencing an object that is thus and so.2 The main source of my dissatisfaction with the make-believe model is that it is phenomenologically unfamiliar; I have never been aware of de se imaginings of the requisite sort while appreciatively engaged with fiction.3 Of course, one could argue that it nevertheless occurs, albeit sub-consciously. But in order for this manoeuvre to be plausible, it would have to be established that there are appreciative phenomena that can only (or best) be explained by the supposition that appreciators engage in de se imagining, and which cannot be adequately explained by the supposition that they merely engage in de re imagining. Currie, for example, has argued that we need to make the former supposition in order to find a solution to the “problem of personality,” the problem of explaining why our emotional reactions to the plights of fictional characters often differ from our reactions to the similar plights of actual people.4 What I want to argue in this paper is that Currie’s defense of de se imaginative engagement is..

In this article, I develop an argument against all Fregean approaches to the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions. This is a bit pathological on my part given that my own view is itself Fregean in the relevant sense. Perhaps a more sensible strategy would be to sweep the whole thing under the carpet and hope no one notices. Originally, the intended targets of this argument were Fregean accounts of belief ascriptions that were, in my view, insufficiently sensitive to how particular believers conceived of the objects of their beliefs. But the argument proved to be too strong. It shows that, for any Fregean view, including my own, the meanings of ascription complements must vary with believers. Something about babies and bath water seems apt.

In this commentary, I am going to focus on the earlier sections of Lapointe’s paper in which she defends an interpretation of Frege’s account of the individuation of lexical types. According to Lapointe, Frege rejects the view that two signs – concrete particulars – belong to the same lexical type just in case they are tokens of the same orthographic or phonographic type. Instead Frege’s position is that two signs belong to the same lexical type “only if they are recognized as belonging to the same lexical type.” [p. 1] And recognizing that a (currently perceived) sign is of the same lexical type as previous perceived sign requires recognizing (i) that the current sign was produced and deployed with communicative intentions and (ii) that the speaker/ inscriber of the current sign and the speaker/ inscriber of the previous sign have “the same mental state or mental states that are similar in some essential manner.” [p.

ABSTRACT: The cluster theory of names is generally thought to have been to have been utterly discredited by the objections raised against it by Kripke in Naming and Necessity. In this paper, I develop a new version of the cluster theory in which the role played by clusters of associated descriptions is occupied by teams of cognitive relations. And I argue that these teams of relations find a home in an account of the meanings of expressions in epistemic sentence frames, and in a more general theory of the reference of proper names. RÉSUMÉ: La théorie des faisceaux de noms est généralement considérée sans fondement depuis les objections soulevées par Kripke dans Naming and Necessity. Nous proposons une nouvelle version de la théorie des faisceaux dans laquelle le rôle joué par les faisceaux de descriptions associées est pris en charge par des équipes de relations cognitives. Ces équipes de relations trouvent leur place au sein de l’explication de la signification des expressions dans le cadre de phrases épistémologiques et, plus généralement, dans celui d’une théorie de la référence des noms propres.