Peter Alward

In this paper, a theory of the contents of fictional names — names of fictional people, places, etc. — will be developed.1 The fundamental datum that must be addressed by such a theory is that fictional names are, in an important sense, empty: the entities to which they putatively refer do not exist.2 Nevertheless, they make substantial contributions to the truth conditions of sentences in which they occur. Not only do such sentences have truth conditions, sentences differing only in the fictional names they contain differ in their truth conditions. It is, after all, commonplace to note such things as, for example, thatBilbo Baggins is a hobbitis true, andSherlock Holmes is a hobbitis false, while acknowledging at ..

According to Tiedke, in order for an act to be free it must satisfy two requirements: (PR) The agent must have been the source of the action. (PAP) It must have been possible for the agent to have done otherwise. Different accounts of freedom cash these conditions out in different ways. The Standard Compatibilist offers the following versions of these principles: (PRSC) The agent's choice was a link in the chain of events that caused her to perform the action (PAPSC) If the agent had chosen differently, she would have acted differently. What is important to note is that there is no requirement that the agent in fact have the ability to choose other than she does. Peacocke's version of compatibilist freedom differs from the standard account in exactly this regard. According to (Tiedke's reconstruction of) Peacocke, an act is free just in case the following conditions are satisfied: (PRPC) The agent must be able to conceptualize/reflect upon the factors influencing her decision to..

performances. But comparatively little work has been by way of elucidating such speech acts,[1] and without an adequate account of them, such comparisons will ultimately prove to be empty. In this paper, I will defend an illocutionary pretense view, according to which actors pretend to perform various kinds of illocutionary acts rather than genuinely performing them. This is, of course, a fairly intuitive position to take. What I want to argue, however, is that this is the route one must take: there are simply no tenable alternatives

Functionalism cannot accommodate the possibility of mad pain—pain whose causes and effects diverge from those of the pain causal role. This is because what it is to be in pain according to functionalism is simply to be in a state that occupies the pain role. And the identity theory cannot accommodate the possibility of Martian pain—pain whose physical realization is foot-cavity inflation rather than C-fibre activation (or whatever physiological state occupies the pain-role in normal humans). After all, what it is to be in pain according to the identity theory is to be in whatever state that occupies the pain role for us.

Egan argues against Lewis’s view that properties are sets of actual and possible individuals and in favour of the view that they are functions from worlds to extensions (sets of individuals). Egan argues that Lewis’s view implies that 2nd order properties are never possessed contingently by their (1st order) bearers, an implication to which there are numerous counter-examples. And Egan argues that his account of properties is more commensurable with the role they play as the semantic values of predicates than is Lewis’s.

In this chapter, a positive account of reader engagement with fiction will developed. According to this picture, the basic reader attitude towards fictional works is imaginative. But, in my view, engagement with fiction does not require any de se imagining on the part of readers; it requires only de dicto and de re imagining. The account of reader engagement is modelled on the attitudes of story-listeners to the stories to which they listen and the performers who tell them. In engaged reading, however, the activity of story-listening is, in an important sense, truncated: reader engagement with the text occurs without the mediation of a storyteller. As a result, readers have to imaginatively supply a substitute – a fictionalized version of the author.

A common approach to drawing boundary between fiction and non-fiction is by appeal to the kinds of speech acts performed by authors of works of the respective categories. Searle, for example, takes fiction to be the product of illocutionary pretense of various kinds on the part of authors and non-fiction to be the product of genuine illocutionary action.1 Currie, in contrast, takes fiction to be the product of sui generis fictional illocutionary action on the part of authors and non-fiction to be the product of assertion and other familiar kinds of illocutionary action.2 The central thesis of this paper is that the speech act approach to fictionality is simply a non-starter. Now it is, of course, commonplace to note that approaches of this kind run into difficulty accommodating nonliterary fictions3 and uncomposed or authorless fictions. What will be argued here, however, is that speech acts analyses are inadequate even understood narrowly as accounts of composed literary fiction. And the reason is that they fail to adequately attend to the distinction between composition and storytelling.

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.

In the paper, I develop what I call the “Neo-Hintikkan theory” of belief sentences. What is characteristic of this approach is that the meaning of an ascription is analyzed in terms of the believer’s “epistemic alternatives”: the set of worlds compatible with how the believer takes the world to be. The Neo-Hintikkan approach proceeds by assuming that (1) individuals in believers’ alternatives can share spatio-temporal parts with actual individuals, and (2) ascribers can refer to individuals in believer’s alternatives in virtue of their perceptual or causal interaction with the spatio-temporal parts these “believed individuals” share with actual individuals. The guiding idea underlying this view is that the source of substitutivity failure in certain central cases is that believers have put the spatio-temporal parts of the objects they have encountered together in the wrong way.

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

My original reaction to Yosh’s paper was to grumble. It seemed to me to contain a number of terminological infelicities, unpersuasive arguments, and counterintuitive implications. And while I think that some of my superficial complaints are worth pointing out (and I can’t help myself), a commentary consisting only of grumbling would be neither interesting nor helpful. Paul Viminitz would describe such a commentary as “unseemly”. And so I revisited Yosh’s paper with a more sympathetic eye. My second reaction was to suppose that what Yosh had actually done was to provide a Russellian analysis of sentences containing descriptions but in a 2nd order logical system – a system in which quantification over properties is permitted and in which 1st order quantifiers are reinterpreted as 2nd order properties. This would be an interesting albeit modest contribution to the description literature. But as I reread Yosh’s paper in preparation for writing this commentary, I realized that given the account of individual kinds that was being developed this wasn’t right. Individual kinds are not properties at all, they are a new sort of individual – teams of one. Yosh’s proposal is hardly modest at all. So, in these comments, I am going to focus on the notion of an individual kind and whether or not we ought to endorse such entities in our semantic theorizing. But first, some preliminary grumbling – I really can’t help myself.

ABSTRACT: A popular strategylor resolving Kim 's exclusion problem is to suggest that mental and physical property tropes are identical despite the non-identity of the mental and physical properties themselves. I argue that mental and physical tropes can be identified without losing the dispositional character of mentality only if a dual-character hypothesis regarding the intrinsic characters of tropes is endorsed. But even with this assumption, the causaI efficacy of the wrong dispositions is secured.RÉSUMÉ: On résout habituellement le problème de l'exclusion de Kim en suggérant que les tropes de propriété mentale et physique sont identiques en dépit de la non-identité des propriétés mentales et physiques elles-mêmes. Je soutiens que les tropes mentaux et physiques peuvent être ramenés l'un à l'autre sans perdre le caractère dispositionnel de la pensée, à la condition d'approuver une hypothèse sur la nature double des caractères intrinsèques des tropes. Même en suivant cette proposition, l'efficacité causale des dispositions fausses est maintenue.

A standard strategy for defending a claim of non-identity is one which invokes Leibniz’s Law. (1) Fa (2) ~Fb (3) (∀x)(∀y)(x=y ⊃ (∀P)(Px ⊃ Py)) (4) a=b ⊃ (Fa ⊃ Fb) (5) a≠b In Kalderon’s view, this basic strategy underlies both Moore’s Open Question Argument (OQA) as well as (a variant formulation of) Frege’s puzzle (FP). In the former case, the argument runs from the fact that some natural property—call it “F-ness”—has, but goodness lacks, the (2nd order) property of its being an open question whether everything that instantiates it is good to the conclusion that goodness and F-ness are distinct. And in the latter case, the argument runs from the fact that that Hesperus has, but Phosphorus lacks, the property of being believed by the ancient astronomers to be visible in the evening sky to the conclusion that Hesperus and Phosphorus are distinct. Kalderon argues that both the OQA and FP fail because in neither case is there good reason to believe that both (1) and (2) are true. The reason we are tempted to believe that they are true is because we mistake de dicto claims for de re claims. In order for FP to go through, the truth of the following de re claims needs to be established: FP1) Hesperus was believed by the ancient astronomers to be visible in the evening sky.