Jesper Kallestrup

Many philosophers of language and mind have recognized the existence of two distinct kinds of content assigned to our linguistic and mental representations. Thus following Kaplan , the character is the linguistic meaning of an expression-type, while the content is the propositional content expressed by a token of that expression in a context. Perry applied Kaplan's distinction in the analysis of belief: the proposition p is what a subject S believes, and the belief state is that in virtue of which S believes p; where belief states are individuated by the characters of the sentences that S is disposed to assert. And Barwise and Etchemendy distinguished between the infon and the Austinian proposition, where the former is the content to be evaluated with respect to a situation, and the latter is the complete content, including both the infon and the situation.The possibility of operating with two kinds of content arises when a distinction is drawn between two kinds of context-dependence. Since Kaplan, we are familiar with the idea that context determines both the content of a sentence containing an indexical and the circumstance with respect to which that content is evaluated. So, truth values depend on the context of utterance and on the circumstance of evaluation. Whether an utterance of ‘I feel elated’ is true or false depends on both which proposition is expressed, i.e. who the speaker is, and on whether that proposition is evaluated with respect to the time and world of the context. Variation in either factor makes for a potential change in truth value. Also well-known is Kaplan's idea that contents have relative truth conditions: they are true with respect to world-time-place triples. The temporal operator ‘now’ in ‘I feel elated now’ specifies the time with respect to which the proposition …

According to Sosa, knowledge is apt belief, where a belief is apt when accurate because adroit. Sosa :465–475, 2010; Judgment and agency, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015) adds to his triple-A analysis of knowledge, a triple-S analysis of competence, where a complete competence combines its seat, shape and situation. Much of Sosa’s influential work assumes that epistemic agents are individuals who acquire knowledge when they hit the truth through exercising their own individual skills in appropriate shapes and situations. This paper explores an extension of Sosa’s framework to a social setting in which groups constitute epistemic agents over and above their individual members. The claim is that groups can be ascribed knowledge in virtue of hitting the truth through exercising their competences in appropriate shapes and situations. While knowledge at the collective level may diverge from knowledge at the individual level, the competences of groups are nothing over and above the combined competences of their members. The ensuing view thus has implications for the debate over reduction and supervenience in collective epistemology.

Lei Zhong (2012. Counterfactuals, regularity and the autonomy approach. Analysis 72: 75–85) argues that non-reductive physicalists cannot establish the autonomy of mental causation by adopting a counterfactual theory of causation since such a theory supports a so-called downward causation argument which rules out mental-to-mental causation. We respond that non-reductive physicalists can consistently resist Zhong's downward causation argument as it equivocates between two familiar notions of a physical realizer.

Kripke's argument against the identity theory in the philosophy of mind runs as follows. Suppose some psychophysical identity statement S is true. Then S would seem to be contingent at least in the sense that S seems possibly false. And given that seeming contingency entails genuine contingency when it comes to such statements S is contingent. But S is necessary if true. So S is false. This entry considers responses to each of the three premises. It turns out that each response does not fully withstand scrutiny, and so Kripke's conclusion is hard to resist. Section 1 lays out Kripke's argument, and Sections 2 to 4 then discuss responses to each of the three premises respectively.

Machery et al. claim that analytic philosophers of language are committed to a method of cases according to which theories of reference are assessed by consulting semantic intuitions about actual and possible cases. Since empirical evidence suggests that such intuitions vary both within and across cultures, these experimental semanticists conclude that the traditional attempt at pursuing such theories is misguided. Against the backdrop of Kripke’s anti-descriptivist arguments, this paper offers a novel response to the challenge posed by Machery et al., arguing that they either misplace or exaggerate the role played by. The lesson is that while semantic intuitions carry evidential weight in evaluating certain subjunctive conditionals reflecting counterfactual possibilities, they neither play an epistemic role in determining the actual reference of proper names, nor in evaluating certain indicative conditionals reflecting so-called counteractual possibilities. Moreover, once an asymmetry is acknowledged in Machery et al’s vignette between the narrator and the subject’s suppositions about the actual world, a corresponding ambiguity can account for the alleged culturally determined variation in semantic intuitions

The philosophical case for extended cognition is often made with reference to ‘extended-memory cases’ (e.g. Clark & Chalmers 1998); though, unfortunately, proponents of the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) as well as their adversaries have failed to appreciate the kinds of epistemological problems extended-memory cases pose for mainstream thinking in the epistemology of memory. It is time to give these problems a closer look. Our plan is as follows: in §1, we argue that an epistemological theory remains compatible with HEC only if its epistemic assessments do not violate what we call ‘the epistemic parity principle’. In §2, we show how the constraint of respecting the epistemic parity principle stands in what appears to be a prima facie intractable tension with mainstream thinking about cases of propositional memory. We then outline and evaluate in §3 several lines of response.