Mark Eli Kalderon

The Frege Geach problem was rst raised by ? (1939: 33•34) and independently by ? (1958, 1960, 1965) and Searle (1962, 1969) and was originally directed at expressivist proposals such as Ayer's (1946: 108) emotivism: It is worth mentioning that ethical terms do not serve only to express feeling. They are calculated also to arouse feeling, and so to stimulate action. . . . In fact we may de ne the meaning of the various ethical words in terms both of the di erent feelings they are ordinarily taken to express, and also the di erent responses which they are calculated to provoke. Ayer's talk of `de ning' the meanings of ethical words suggests that he identi ed the meaning of an ethical word with the attitudes it expresses and provokes. Ayer's emotivism is subject to the Frege Geach problem because it is a form of atomistic reduction. It is atomistic in that it assumes a one•one correlation between the meanings of ethical words and the linguistic actions they perform (such as the expression and provoca• tion of the relevant attitudes). It is a reduction in that it identi es the meaning of an ethical word with attitudes it expresses and provokes. Atomistic reductions face the following dilemma: Suppose that freestanding and embedded occurrences of `wrong' mean the same. The problem is that words can occur in embedded contexts and fail to express the attitudes they do in freestanding contexts. This di culty would be avoided if the atomistic reduction applied only to the meaning of freestanding occurrences. However, if the account applies only to freestanding occurrences, then it is incomplete, for the expressivist would lack an account of the meaning of ethical words in embedded contexts. Furthermore, some guaran• tee must be given that freestanding and embedded occurrences mean the same despite their meanings being di erently determined. For, if freestanding and embedded occurrences dif• fer in meaning, then the expressivist is apparently committed to the invalidity of recognized forms of valid argument (due to the fallacy of equivocation)..

Now with extra footnotes, by editorial demand! Final version accepted by Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. This essay consists in a trick and a potential insight. The trick consists in a minimalist interpretation of color mixture. The account of color mixture is minimalist in the sense that, given certain background assumptions, there is no more to Timaeus’ account of color mixture than the list of the chromatic pathēmata and the list of how these combine to elicit perceptions of all the colors. The only potential controversial elements of the minimalist interpretation are the relevant background assumptions and the interpretation of the chromatic pathēmata. The potential insight concerns a motive that Plato, in the guise of Timaeus, may have for presenting an account of color mixture. Specifically, I shall argue that on the minimalist interpretation, Plato may be read as reconciling the Democritrean four color scheme with an older tradi- tion where white and black are the fundamental chromatic opposition. As we shall see, this bears on the interpretation of the chromatic pathēmata.

I defend and develop a traditional view in the metaphysics of sound, The Wave Theory of Sound. According The Wave Theory, as developed herein, sounds are not patterned disturbances so much as their propagation. And the propagation of a patterned disturbance is not a form of travel, but a dynamic in-formation, the wave-form successively inhering in diferently located parts of the dense and elastic medium. This conception, along with the assumption that we hear not only sounds but their sources, has the resources to address many of the most recent criticisms of this traditional view.

We hear sounds, and their sources, and their audible qualities. Sounds and their sources are essentially dynamic entities, not wholly present at any given moment, but unfolding through their temporal interval. Sounds and their sources, essentially dynamic entities, are the bearers or susbtrata of audible qualities. Audible qualities are qualities essentially sustained by activity. The only bearers of audible qualities present in auditory experience are essentially dynamic entities. Bodies are not, in this sense, essentially dynamic entities and so are not present in our auditory experience. Though absent in auditory experience, we may, nonetheless, attend to bodies in audition, when an audible sound-generating event in which they participate presents a dynamic aural image of them.

Mark Eli Kalderon argues that morality is a fiction by means of which our emotional attitudes are conveyed. This is an improvement on the standard noncognitivist view, which denies that moral judgement is belief but claims instead that it is the expression of an emotional attitude. Noncognitivists tend to deny that moral sentences even purport to represent moral reality, and so they have developed non-standard semantics for moral discourse. Kalderon's fictionalism shows that noncognitivism can manage without such controversial semantics. His book will be essential reading for anyone working in moral philosophy, and for many others working on meaning and knowledge.

Fictionalism is the view that a serious intellectual inquiry need not aim at truth. It came to prominence in philosophy in 1980, when Hartry Field argued that mathematics does not have to be true to be good, and Bas van Fraassen argued that the aim of science is not truth but empirical adequacy. Both suggested that the acceptance of a mathematical or scientific theory need not involve belief in its content. Thus the distinctive commitment of fictionalism is that acceptance in a given domain of inquiry need not be truth-normed, and that the acceptance of a sentence from the associated region of discourse need not involve belief in its content. In metaphysics fictionalism is now widely regarded as an option worthy of serious consideration. This volume represents a major benchmark in the debate: it brings together an impressive international team of contributors, whose essays represent the state of the art in various areas of metaphysical controversy, relating to language, mathematics, modality, truth, belief, ontology, and morality.

This essay explores the commitments of modal structuralism. The precise nature of the modal-structuralist analysis obscures an unclarity of its import. As usually presented, modal structuralism is a form of anti-platonism. I defend an interpretation of modal structuralism that, far from being a form of anti-platonism, is itself a platonist analysis: The metaphysically significant distinction between (i) primitive modality and (ii) the natural numbers (objectually understood) is genuine, but the arithmetic facts just are facts about possible progressions. If correct, modal structuralism is best understood not as an alternative to, but as a species of, platonism.

Transparency is the following (alleged) property of truth: if one possesses the concept of truth, then to assert, believe, inquire whether it is true that S just is to assert, believe, inquire whether S (and conversely). It might appear (as it did to Frege in 'Thoughts') that if truth ascriptions were transparent, then the truth predicate must be redundant; but the fact that some truth ascriptions are not transparent-for instance, those that quantify over, name, or describe the proposition(s) to which truth is ascribed-shows that the truth predicate could not be redundant. It is argued that the apparent paradox is resolved by treating content as more basic than truth (and arguing, accordingly, that content cannot be explained, even in part, in terms of truth conditions). This strategy is illustrated by three candidate analyses, each of which treats the truth predicate as non-redundant but can, nevertheless, account for transparency.

Philosophy of mathematics is in an alienated state. While regarded by the profession as a serious and legitimate subdiscipline, a passing knowledge of its subject matter is considered something of a luxury—or at least not required of a conscientious philosopher the way a passing knowledge of logic is. Philosophy of mathematics is thus regarded with a benign neglect: best left to the experts, whose opinions should be deferred to, but mostly irrelevant to the central concerns of the working philosopher. Its practitioners, however, often display a strikingly different attitude. Much of the enthusiasm for the subject matter derives from the recognition that undertaking and evaluating a position in the philosophy of mathematics involves undertaking and evaluating substantive commitments of general philosophical interest. Indeed many practitioners, though by no means blind to the intrinsic interest of their discipline, regard philosophy of mathematics also as a means of addressing more general issues in philosophy. Unfortunately the significance of philosophy of mathematics to the work of the nonspecialist has for the most part been under appreciated.

What is the relation between colors and our experience of them? A na?ve thought is this?the phenomenal character of color experience is determined by the qualitative character of the perceived color. When Norm perceives a red tomato, the qualitative character of his color experience is determined by the qualitative character of the color manifest in his experience of the tomato. If however, colors are mind- independent qualities of material objects, as they seem, pre-philosophically to be, then this can seem to con?ict with the possibility, if it is one, of veridical perceptual variation. Indeed, it is largely on this basis that Shoemaker ?????? criticizes the version of representationalism defended by Hilbert and Kalderon ??????