Steffen Borge

Tyler Burge has argued that one has an a priori prima facie entitlement to believe in the truth of what one takes to have been presented as true by an interlocutor. This thesis, however, is problematic, since the alleged a priori prima facie entitlement to believe in the truth of our seeming understanding of things presented as true to us, rests on the possibility of determining assertoric force on a purely intellectual basis. This thesis is not plausible and Burge's analogy from memory does not support it. Two routes for defending Burge's thesis of the a priori prima facie entitlement to believe in the truth of what has been asserted can be identified: the Transcendental Route and the Intrinsic Rationality Route. David Lewis' account of linguistic convention would serve as a transcendental argument for the a priori prima facie entitlement to believe in the truth of what has been asserted, but flaws in Lewis' theory leave us deprived of any good transcendental argument for such an entitlement. The Intrinsic Rationality Route is in better standing, but we have yet to see an argument for why we should resort to that measure.

John Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities of objects has meet resistance. In this paper I bypass the traditional critiques of the distinction and instead concentrate on two specific counterexamples to the distinction: Killer yellow and the puzzle of multiple dispositions. One can accommodate these puzzles, I argue, by adopting Thomas Reid’s version of the primary/secondary quality distinction, where the distinction is founded upon conceptual grounds. The primary/secondary quality distinction is epistemic rather than metaphysical. A consequence of Reid’s primary/ secondary quality distinction is that one must deny the original version of Molyneux’s question, while one must affirm an amended version of it. I show that these two answers to Molyneux’s question are not at odds with current empirical research.

The Chomskian holds that the grammars that linguists produce are about human psycholinguistic structures, i.e. our mastery of a grammar, our linguistic competence. But if we encountered Martians whose psycholinguistic processes differed from ours, but who nevertheless produced sentences that are extensionally equivalent to the set of sentences in our English and shared our judgements on the grammaticality of various English sentences, then we would count them as being competent in English. A grammar of English is about what the Martians and we share. In this note, I argue that a recent attack on the Martian Argument by Laurence fail to mitigate its force.

John Searle has argued that the aim of strong AI of creating a thinking computer is misguided. Searle’s Chinese Room Argument purports to show that syntax does not suffice for semantics and that computer programs as such must fail to have intrinsic intentionality. But we are not mainly interested in the program itself but rather the implementation of the program in some material. It does not follow by necessity from the fact that computer programs are defined syntactically that the implementation of them cannot suffice for semantics. Perhaps our world is a world in which any implementation of the right computer program will create a system with intrinsic intentionality, in which case Searle’s Chinese Room Scenario is empirically (nomically) impossible. But, indeed, perhaps our world is a world in which Searle’s Chinese Room Scenario is empirically (nomically) possible and that the silicon basis of modern day computers are one kind of material unsuited to give you intrinsic intentionality. The metaphysical question turns out to be a question of what kind of world we are in and I argue that in this respect we do not know our modal address. The Modal Address Argument does not ensure that strong AI will succeed, but it shows that Searle’s challenge on the research program of strong AI fails in its objectives.

This paper deals with two distinct topics; unwarranted questions and admittures. The traditional speech act analysis of questions needs revision, since among the felicity conditions of asking a question is believing that the question is warranted. Some questions are unwarranted according to my analysis. A question is unwarranted if the questioner is not standing in the right relation to the addressee, such that he can demand or expect a sincere answer. I use the idea of unwarranted questions to show how conversational admittures can be generated. A conversational admitture is a non-intended admittance by the speaker of some state of affairs being believed by the speaker to be true. Under the assumption that the speaker is rational, the non-intended admittance is something that it is reasonable to credit the speaker with believing as an explanation of the speaker's unwillingness to be cooperative in a given conversation. In the last section I introduce what I call the Principle of Privacy, which tells us that we have a prima facie right to guard some of our thoughts, feelings, personal history, etc. I argue that the Principle of Privacy together with the ideas that there are unwarranted questions and conversational admittures, and the way unwarranted questions can be exploited to generate the latter, endows us with the right to lie in certain contexts. ;

Paul Horwich’s Use Theory of Meaning (UTM) depends on his rejection of Paul Grice’s distinction between natural and non-natural meaning and his Univocality of Meaning Thesis, as he wishes to deflate the meaning-relation to usage. Horwich’s programme of deflating the meaning-relation (i.e. how words, sentences, etc., acquire meaning) to some basic regularity of usage cannot be carried through if the meaning-relation depends on the minds of users. Here, I first give a somewhat detailed account of the distinction between natural and non-natural meaning in order to set the stage for Horwich’s critique of it. I then present Horwich’s critique of the distinction and show how that rejection accords with his overall view of meaning as use. Horwich’s rejection of the distinction between natural and non-natural meaning, I argue in the last section, is ill founded, and because UTM depends on this rejection, UTM is stillborn.

John Searle has argued that the aim of strong AI to create a thinking computer is misguided. Searle's "Chinese Room Argument" purports to show that syntax does not suffice for semantics and that computer programs as such must fail to have intrinsic intentionality But we are not mainly interested in the program itself, but rather the implementation of the program in some material. It does not follow by necessity from the fact that computer programs are defined syntactically that the implementation of them cannot suffice for semantics. Perhaps our world is a world in which any implementation of the right computer program will create a system with intrinsic intentionality, in which case Searle's "Chinese Room Scenario" is empirically (nomically) impossible. But perhaps our world is a world in which Searle's "Chinese Room Scenario" is empirically (nomically) possible, and the silicon basis of modern-day computers is one kind of material unsuited to give you intrinsic intentionality. The metaphysical question turns out to be a question of what kind of world we are in, and I argue that in this respect we do not know our model address. The "Model Address Argument" does not ensure that strong AI will succeed, but it shows that Searle's challenge to the research program of strong AI fails in its objectives.