Filip Buekens

In ‘Meaning Revisited’, a reconsideration of his famous views on meaning, H.P. Grice has put forward the thesis that natural meaning (n-meaning) might be a precursor or predecessor of non-natural meaning. In this paper, I will take up Grice’s challenge and sketch a picture of how natural meaning could give rise to nn-meaning. The relevance of Grice’s challenge is obvious for current attempts at naturalizing nn-meaning: a plausible theory of the genesis of meaning must show why nn-meaning is not an unexplicable cosmic event but a product of various ways creatures more or less like us optimize communicative behaviour and learn to reason about mental states that causally explain that behaviour.

SummaryExternalism in philosophy of mind is usually taken to be faced with the following difficulty: from the fact that meanings are externally individuated, it follows that the subjective character of mental states and events becomes problematic. On the basis of a well‐founded approach to similar problems in the philosophy of action, I propose a solution based on two connected issues: we should think of mental states not as beliefs, but as states of knowledge, and thought experiments, designed to strip off the contribution of the world from the subject's contribution to the contents of his mental states, are doomed to fail. The allegedly subjective character of propositional contentful states is that they are agent‐specific states. Agent‐specificity is not in contradiction with mental states or intentional actions having a circumstantial nature.

Recent work on evaluative discourse and judgements of personal taste in particular has focused on active interpersonal disagreements. I explore the communicative import of judgements of taste: why we issue them, why we sometimes get involved in disputes about taste, and what acceptance or rejection of such judgements consists of. The view developed here – that the core use of such judgements lies in seeking to align our attitudes in view of a shared project – makes it plausible that the use of a sentence of the form ‘a is F’ (where F is a predicate of taste) semantically expresses the simple, semantically articulated proposition that a is F, is subject to an unrelativized truth predicate and not enriched by personal standards or perspectives. Our model shows that personal standards or perspectives are, contrary to a widely shared assumption in the debate, not the entities or objects that require coordination. What is shared among interlocutors are projects that require the coordination of the participant’s strategic choices. The semantically articulated proposition functions as a focal point, proposed by the speaker, for coordinating their choices.

Most attempts at defining or elucidating ’weak’ or ’strong’ supervenience introduce various forms of _physical indiscernibility_. After glancing at some definitions, I argue that they must fail if mental events are supposed to be genuinely causally efficacious and non-epiphenomenal. Then I elucidate Davidson’s account of supervenience (’D-supervenience’), first as an abstract relation between a predicate and a set of predicates (to be illustrated by uncontroversial examples), and then as applied to the mental/physical relation. I argue that Davidson must defend that if two events are physically indiscernible in the light of a complete physical theory of the world then they must be identical in the Leibnizian sense (‘L-identity’): physical indiscernibility collapses into L-identity. It follows that mental differences between two numerically different events logically entail physical differences between them. I conclude by demonstrating how the Davidsonian account of the concept can explain some counterexamples to Moore’s approach to supervenience of moral on natural properties. The central tenet in this paper is that supervenience principles based on duplication create, rather than solve, problems in this problem area

In zijn jongste boek, Kritiek van de interpreterende rede, bekijkt Filip Buekens de centrale thema's in de taalfilosofie van Davidson. Vertrekkend vanuit de stelling dat spreken en verstaan een vorm van rationeel handelen is, wordt onderzocht hoe een theorie voor een taal (in de vorm van een Tarskiaanse waarheidstheorie) wordt geconstrueerd vanuit het standpunt van een 'radicale interpretator' die inzicht wil krijgen in het talig handelen van personen. In een uitgebreide vergelijking met de filosofie van Michael Dummett en W.V. Quine worden de specifieke uitgangspunten van Davidson verhelderd. Daarbij gaat vooral aandacht naar de constitutieve principes die het verstaan van anderen en het begrijpelijk zijn voor anderen mogelijk maken. Davidson verbindt aan dit project belangrijke metafysische conclusies. Deze worden uitgebreid toegelicht. Zo bespreekt de auteur de anti-sceptische argumenten van Davidson, het probleem van de onbepaaldheid van de referentie-relatie en Davidson's afwijzing van het relativisme. In een laatste hoofdstuk wordt de filosofie van Davidson getoetst aan belangrijke taalfilosofische discussies die de jongste jaren gevoerd werden: essentialisme, het volgen van regels, het probleem van de lingu.

When we evaluate the outcomes of investigative actions as justified or unjustified, good or bad, rational or irrational, we make, in a broad sense of the term, evaluative judgments about them. We look at operational accuracy as a desirable and evaluable quality of the outcomes and explore how the concepts of accuracy and precision, on the basis of insights borrowed from pragmatics and measurement theory, can be seen to do useful work in epistemology. Operational accuracy focuses on how a statement fits an explicit or implicit standard set by participants involved in a shared project. While truth can remain a thin semantic property of propositions, operational accuracy, as a quality of an outcome of inquiry and typically attached to a statement, a model, a diagram or a representation is an evaluation based on the non-epistemic goals set by the goal of inquiry, and a substantial evaluative notion. The goals, often made explicit by relevant questions in a context of inquiry, act as a filter, with truths a reliable epistemic method has access to functioning as input, and accurate representations as its output. Responsible inquiry seeks pragmatic equilibrium between what reliable knowledge on the one hand and degrees of accuracy required by the goal of inquiry.

In this essay, I show how semantic theories in contemporary philosophy of language shed light on questions about the meaning of life. Current semantic theories tend to defend various forms of holism in semantics: the meaning of a word or sentence is explained by its place in a pattern of sentences, a framework, or a language . A second feature of these theories is that semantic holism rejects the idea that we understand words and sentences on the basis of a pre-established theory which can be applied to cases. Meaning and understanding always involve interpretation and languages are dynamic idiolects rather than fixed systems of communication. This connects semantics with various forms of particularism in ethics. I show how semantic particularism can be applied to questions were ‘meaning’ is used in its ’existential’ sense . The semantic and existential meaning of ’meaning’ have analogous functions