Jeff Speaks

In Narrow Content, Hawthorne & Yli-Vakkuri provide an admirably clear and precise framework for understanding the debate between internalist and externalist theories of mental content. They also present a series of arguments against internalism. They identify two views — which they call 'thought-relativism' and 'quasi-internalism' — which seem to avoid their main line of argument. I discuss Hawthorne & Yli-Vakkuri's arguments against these two views, and explore a few different ways in which they might be developed.

The nature of predication, and its relation to truth, is the central topic of Davidson’s posthumously published Truth and Predication . The main task which an account of predication should accomplish is a solution to the problem of predication; and that, Davidson tells us, is the problem of explaining what makes some collections of words, but not others, true or false (86). It is so-called because, Davidson thinks, the principal challenge faced by any answer to this problem is the problem of explaining the distinctive contribution made by predicates to the truth or falsity of sentences

The most widely accepted and well worked out approaches to the foundations of meaning take facts about the meanings of linguistic expressions at a time to be derivative from the propositional attitudes of speakers of the language at that time. This mentalist strategy takes two principal forms, one which traces meaning to belief, and one which analyzes it in terms of communicative intentions. I argue that either form of mentalism fails, and conclude by suggesting that we can do better by focusing on connections between linguistic meaning and the contents of perceptions (rather than beliefs or intentions), and by (following Kripke's approach to reference) replacing questions about the nature of meaning with questions about the nature of term introduction and meaning transmission.

Perfect being theology is the attempt to decide questions about the nature of God by employing the Anselmian formula that God is the greatest possible being. One form of perfect being theology—recently defended by Brian Leftow in God and Necessity—holds that we can decide between incompatible claims that God is F and that God is not F by asking which claim would confer more greatness on God, and then using the formula that God is the greatest possible being to rule out the one which confers less greatness on God. This paper argues that this form of argument, while intuitively quite plausible, does not work

Increasingly, beginning in the 1970’s and 1980’s, many philosophers of language found themselves in a difficult situation. On the one hand, many came to believe that, in order to do semantics properly, as well as to give an adequate treatment of the attitudes, one needed to posit certain entities — propositions — which could be the meanings of sentences (relative to contexts), the contents of mental states, and the primary bearers of truth and falsity. However, many — largely due to the arguments of Scott Soames1 — also came to distrust the standard theoretical account of the nature of propositions, which treated them as sets of worlds, and came to think of them instead as structured entities of some sort

In response to arguments against the existence of God, and in response to perceived conflicts between divine attributes, theists often face pressure to give up some pretheoretically attractive thesis about the divine attributes. One wonders: when does this unacceptably water down our concept of God, and when is it, as van Inwagen says, ‘permissible tinkering’ with the concept of God? A natural and widely deployed answer is that it is permissible tinkering iff it is does not violate the claim that God is the greatest possible being. Call this the ’perfect being defense.’ In this paper I lay out some influential uses of the perfect being defense, and then argue that this strategy for defending theism fails.

Theories of propositions as complex acts, of the sort recently defended by Peter Hanks and Scott Soames, make room for the existence of distinct propositions which nonetheless represent the same objects as having the same properties and standing in the same relations. This theoretical virtue is due to the claim that the complex acts with which propositions are identified can include particular ways of cognizing, or referring to, objects and properties. I raise two questions about this sort of view—one about what it means to stand in a propositional attitude relation to a complex act of this sort, and one about which ways of cognizing can be parts of propositions. Both questions turn out to be difficult for the complex act theorist to answer in a satisfactory way.

There are two main ways in which things with minds, like us, differ from things without minds, like tables and chairs. First, we are conscious--there is something that it is like to be us. We instantiate phenomenal properties. Second, we represent, in various ways, our world as being certain ways. We instantiate representational properties. Jeff Speaks attempts to make progress on three questions: What are phenomenal properties? What are representational properties? How are the phenomenal and the representational related?

One of Kripke's fundamental objections to descriptivism was that the theory misclassifies certain a posteriori propositions expressed by sentences involving names as a priori. Though nowadays very few philosophers would endorse a descriptivism of the sort that Kripke criticized, many find two-dimensional semantics attractive as a kind of successor theory. Because two-dimensionalism needn't be a form of descriptivism, it is not open to the epistemic argument as formulated by Kripke; but the most promising versions of two-dimensionalism are open to a close relative of that argument.

What can we know about God by reason alone? Philosophical theology is the attempt to obtain such knowledge. An ancient tradition, which is perhaps more influential now than ever, tries to derive the attributes of God from the principle that God is the greatest possible being. Jeff Speaks argues that that constructive project is a failure. He also argues that the related view that the concept of God is the concept of a greatest possible being is a mistake. In the last chapter, he sketches an alternative path forward.