Henry Jackman

While holism and atomism are often treated as mutually exclusive approaches to semantic theory, the apparent tension between the two usually results from running together distinct levels of semantic explanation. In particular, there is no reason why one can’t combine an atomistic conception of what the semantic values of our words are (one’s “descriptive semantics”), with a holistic explanation of why they have those values (one’s “foundational semantics”). Most objections to holism can be shown to apply only to holistic version of descriptive semantics, and do not tell against any sorts of holistic foundational semantics. As Davidson’s work will be used to illustrate, by clearly distinguishing foundational and descriptive semantics, one can capture the most appealing features of both holism and atomism.

This paper argues that, according to James, we are committed to their being a kind of stable consensus, and we are committed to its being one that we can recognize ourselves in, but by underwriting such regulative ideals through a ‘will to believe’ rather than a transcendental argument, we make our commitment to their being an end of inquiry a practical rather than theoretical one. Objectivity is something we are committed to making, not something that we are committed to their already being out there to find. There is thus no limit we are approaching that is independent of our approach. Pragmatism is thus a position between Realism and Subjectivism because it takes it as unsettled which story will ultimately hold for us. Subjectivism may reign even after we do our best, but we might be able to do better, and if we can, it is incumbent upon us to do so.

A belief ascription such as “Oedipus believes that his mother is the queen of Thebes” can be understood in two ways, one in which it seems true, and another in which it seems false. It can seem true because the woman who was, in fact, Oedipus’ mother was believed by him to be the queen of Thebes. It can seem false because Oedipus himself would have sincerely denied that Jocasta could be correctly characterized as “Oedipus’s mother.” Belief ascriptions thus seem to admit of two interpretations, and this has suggested to many that belief predicates such as “________ believes that his mother is the queen of Thebes” are ambiguous between a de dicto and a de re reading.1 However, the impression of ambiguity is a function of the narrow ranges of examples that philosophers focus on. When we consider our ascriptional practices as a whole, the suggestion that belief predicates are ambiguous is neither plausible nor needed to explain the de dicto/de re distinction. The following will argue that understanding paradigmatic de dicto and de re ascriptions in terms of disavowals from a more basic sort of ascription is preferable to positing a simple ambiguity in which each of the two sorts of ascription are conceptually primitive.

Unadorned process reliabilism (hereafter UPR) takes any true belief produced by a reliable process (undefeated by any other reliable process) to count as knowledge. Consequently, according to UPR, to know p, you need not know that you know it. In particular, you need not know that the process by which you formed your belief was reliable; its simply being reliable is enough to make the true belief knowledge. Defenders of UPR are often presented with purported counterexamples describing subjects who have true beliefs resulting from reliable (and undefeated) processes, but whom we do not intuitively take to know the propositions that they believe (call this “the internalist objection”). Mark McEvoy has recently challenged such arguments claiming (1) that the internalist objection against UPR simply begs the question against it, and (2) our intuitions about cases structurally similar to the standard examples characteristic of the internalist objection are actually often in line with UPR. In what follows I’ll argue that the plausibility of (1) depends on McEvoy’s success in establishing (2), but with the level of description provided, (2) seems undermotivated.

Semantic holists view what one's terms mean as function of all of one's usage. Holists will thus be coherentists about semantic justification: showing that one's usage of a term is semantically justified involves showing how it coheres with the rest of one's usage. Semantic atomists, by contrast, understand semantic justification in a foundationalist fashion. Saul Kripke has, on Wittgenstein's behalf, famously argued for a type of skepticism about meaning and semantic justification. However, Kripke's argument has bite only if one understands semantic justification in foundationalist terms. Consequently, Kripke's arguments lead not to a type of skepticism about meaning, but rather to the conclusion that one should be a coherentist about semantic justification, and thus a holist about semantic facts

While philosophers of language have traditionally relied upon their intuitions about cases when developing theories of reference, this methodology has recently been attacked on the grounds that intuitions about reference, far from being universal, show significant cultural variation, thus undermining their relevance for semantic theory. I’ll attempt to demonstrate that (1) such criticisms do not, in fact, undermine the traditional philosophical methodology, and (2) our underlying intuitions about the nature of reference may be more universal than the authors suppose.

Many philosophers have suggested that belief predicates are ambiguous between a de dicto and a de re reading. However, the impression of ambiguity is a function of the narrow ranges of examples that philosophers focus on. When we consider our ascriptional practices as a whole, the suggestion that belief predicates are ambiguous is neither plausible nor needed to explain the de dicto/de re distinction. This paper will argue that understanding paradigmatic de dicto and de re ascriptions in terms of disavowals from a more basic sort of ascription is preferable to positing an ambiguity in which each of the two sorts of ascription are conceptually primitive.

While most pragmatists view themselves as pluralists of one sort or another, Talisse and Aikin argue thatthe two views are, in fact, "not compatible". However, while their charge may be true of the types of pluralism that they consider, these pluralisms all presuppose a type of realism about value that the pragmatic pluralist need not accept. In what follows, I'll argue that the 'non-realist' account of value that one finds in James underwrites a type of pluralism that is both substantial and compatible with pragmatism

This paper will appeal a recent argument for the indeterminacy of translation to show not that meaning is indeterminate, but rather that assertion cannot be explained in terms of an independent grasp of the concept of truth. In particular, it will argue that if we try to explain assertion in terms of truth rather than vice versa, we ultimately will not be able to make sense of the difference between assertion and denial. This problem with such 'semantic' accounts of assertion then illustrates why we need not worry about the purported argument for indeterminacy.