Ali Hossein Khani

This paper argues that interpretivism, at least in certain influential forms, fails to meet the conditions required to sustain its central metaphysical claim: that facts about what a subject intends are constitutively dependent on the judgements of another subject, or interpreter. I focus on what I have called ‘Third-Person-Based’ or ‘Third-Personal Judgement-Dependent’ accounts of mental content, which hold that, as an a priori matter, facts about a subject’s intentional states are determined by the judgements of a second person. I argue that such accounts violate key constraints that any adequate judgement-dependent theory must satisfy.

Saul Kripke’s groundbreaking reading of Wittgenstein, set out in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), has sparked intense discussion for over forty years. This book provides a clear and comprehensive account of Kripke’s interpretation, guiding readers through the central ‘Sceptical Argument’, the ‘Sceptical Solution’, the ‘Problem of Other Minds’ and the major philosophical responses that have followed. It illuminates both the subtleties and the lasting significance of Kripke’s approach to meaning and rule-following. The work is organised in two parts: Part I focuses on Kripke’s Wittgenstein, while Part II examines the criticisms and responses that his reading has provoked. • Part I explains the sceptical argument Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein, which challenges the classical realist view that there are facts about what speakers mean by words. It then explores the sceptical solution, showing how ordinary linguistic practices allow us to ascribe meaning and rule-following to one another. Attention is also given to the problem of other minds, highlighting the additional complexities that arise when we attempt to extend sensation concepts from ourselves to others. • Part II surveys the principal responses from leading philosophers since the 1980s, including John McDowell, Simon Blackburn, Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker, Colin McGinn, Crispin Wright, Paul Boghossian, Philip Pettit, Barry Stroud, Hannah Ginsborg, Alexander Miller, George Wilson, Scott Soames, Noam Chomsky, Paul Horwich, as well as Norman Malcolm, Donald Davidson, David Lewis, Christopher Peacocke, Jerry Fodor, David Stern, Alex Byrne, Ruth Millikan, Hilary Putnam and John Searle. By systematically analysing these reactions, the book offers an accessible yet thorough reassessment of Kripke’s reading and its profound impact on debates about language, meaning and the philosophy of mind.

It has long been a philosophical problem to explain the commonly accepted distinction between two kinds of qualities: primary and secondary. While the roots of this debate can be traced back to Plato’s Euthyphro, it was John Locke who, more clearly than others, articulated the distinction and introduced the terms “primary quality” and “secondary quality.” Similar distinctions, under labels such as “primary affections,” “primary attributes,” or “original qualities,” also appear in the writings of earlier thinkers, including Galileo Galilei, Robert Boyle, and René Descartes. This article’s focus is not on the historical development of the distinction, but rather on Crispin Wright’s contemporary and well-known “Judgment-Dependent” account of this distinction, which aims to provide a criterion for determining whether a quality should be regarded as secondary. Metaphysically, a primary quality is often understood as a quality whose instantiation or existence is constituted, or metaphysically determined, by something independent of human responses formed under certain conditions, such as seeing, smelling, or touching. Typical examples include shape, extension, motion, solidity, and number. These qualities are said to be objective because, for instance, if an object’s surface is square-shaped, it has this shape regardless of whether one perceives it as such. In other words, such qualities are mind-independent. Epistemologically, knowledge that an object’s surface is square-shaped is not infallible precisely because the fact that the object possesses this quality is independent of how one perceives it or what one believes about it. Therefore, even if one’s beliefs about these qualities are formed under optimal conditions, they can still be false. By contrast, a secondary quality is one whose instantiation or existence depends on how one perceives, judges, or responds to it. Typical examples include color, taste, smell, and sound. Consequently, these qualities are often considered subjective. For example, whether an object is red appears to depend on how it looks or how one sees it under certain conditions. Thus, the quality of being red is said to be mind-dependent. Epistemologically, knowledge that an object is red can be infallible because the object’s having that quality depends on one’s perception: if one’s beliefs about these qualities are formed under optimal conditions, they will be guaranteed to be correct. Wright’s judgment-dependent account offers a criterion for determining whether a given quality is treatable as secondary or “judgment-dependent,” as Wright prefers to call it. By employing this account, he aims to answer two fundamental questions: one metaphysical and one epistemological. If the account successfully shows that a quality is judgment-dependent, Wright can claim that facts about whether an object has that quality are metaphysically determined by the judgments of a suitable subject. The epistemological question, that is, how the subject knows such facts, is answered by appealing to the subject’s direct knowledge of her own judgments. In what follows, this account is introduced step by step and then applied to several crucial cases.

ABSTRACT A Third-Person-Based or Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account of mental content implies that, as an a priori matter, facts about a subject’s mental content are precisely captured by the judgments of a second-person or an interpreter. Alex Byrne, Bill Child, and others have discussed attributing such a view to Donald Davidson. This account significantly departs from a First-Person-Based or First-Personal Judgment-Dependent account, such as Crispin Wright’s, according to which, as an a priori matter, facts about intentional content are constituted by the judgments of the subject herself, formed under certain optimal or cognitively ideal conditions. I will argue for two claims: (1) Attributing a Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account to Davidson is unjustified; Davidson’s view is much closer to a non-reductionist First-Personal Judgment-Dependent account. (2) Third-Personal accounts rest on a misconstrual of the role of an interpreter in the First-Personal accounts; the notion of an interpreter still plays an essential role in the latter ones.

Blackburn and Searle have argued that Quine‘s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation results in a denial of the sort of first-person authority that we commonly concede we have over our mental and semantical content. For, the indeterminacy thesis implies that there is no determinate meaning to know at all. And, according to Quine, the indeterminacy holds at home too. For Blackburn, Quine must constrain the domain of indeterminacy to the case of translation only. Searle believes that Quine has no other choice but to give up on his behaviorism. Hylton, however, has attempted to defend Quine against these objections, by arguing that Quine‘s naturalistic claim that speaking a language is nothing but possessing certain dispositions to act in specific ways would enable him to accommodate first-person authority. I will argue that the objections from Blackburn and Searle, as well as Hylton‘s solution, are all problematic when seen from within Quine‘s philosophy. I will introduce a sort of Strawsonian-Wittgensteinian conception of first-person authority and offer that it would be more than compatible with Quine‘s naturalistic philosophy.

In this paper, I will argue against certain criticisms of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument and sceptical solution, made especially by Baker and Hacker, McGinn, and McDowell. I will show that their interpretation of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s view is misplaced. According to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument, there is no fact as to what someone means by her words. For Kripke, this conclusion, combined with Classical Realist view of meaning, leads to the Wittgensteinian paradox, according to which there is no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Wittgenstein presents this paradox in paragraph 201 of the Philosophical Investigations. As Kripke reads Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein is in agreement with his sceptic on the sceptical conclusion of the sceptical argument, that is, that there is no fact about meaning, and builds his sceptical solution on an endorsement of that. McDowell, McGinn, and others have objected that Kripke has failed to properly understand Wittgenstein’s main remarks in 201, that is, that the paradox is the result of a misunderstanding of the ordinary notion of meaning. Wittgenstein does not accept such a sceptical conclusion. I will use the distinction George Wilson draws between two different conclusions of the sceptical argument and show that Kripke has respected all of the remarks that Wittgenstein has put in section 201.

Kripke in his famous book on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy argues, on behalf of Wittgenstein, that there can be no fact of the matter as to what a speaker means by her words, that is, no fact that can meet the Constitution Demand and the Normativity Demand. He particularly argues against the dispositional view, according to which meaning facts are constituted by facts about the speaker's dispositions to respond in a certain way on certain occasions. He argues that facts about dispositions are finite and are incapable of constituting facts about what speakers mean by their words; they are also essentially descriptive, not prescriptive and thus, cannot meet the Normativity Demand. Hannah Ginsborg, one of the most important contemporary philosophers of language, has recently attempted to resist Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s arguments against by defending a new sort of reductive dispositionalism which can meet both demands at the same time. In this paper, I will argue that she would not be successful in her project.

This volume features new essays on the application and role of naturalism in philosophical inquiry. It serves as an important update on current controversies about naturalism. The contributors include leading figures who have written on naturalism and its relevance to a wide range of issues across philosophical subdisciplines. The chapter discuss how naturalism can be properly employed in different philosophical areas such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, philosophy of time, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of memory, cognitive science, ethics, meta-ethics, and normativity. Naturalism and Its Challenges will be of interest to scholars and advance students working in a wide range of philosophical disciplines.

Wright’s judgement-dependent account of intention is an attempt to show that truths about a subject’s intentions can be viewed as constituted by the subject’s own best judgements about those intentions. The judgements are considered to be best if they are formed under certain cognitively optimal conditions, which mainly include the subject’s conceptual competence, attentiveness to the questions about what the intentions are, and lack of any material self-deception. Offering a substantive, non-trivial specification of the no-self-deception condition is one of the main problems for Wright. His solution is to view it as a positive presumption, which is violated only if there is strong evidence to the effect that the subject is self-deceived. In this paper, I will argue that the concern about self-deception in Wright’s account is misplaced and generally unmotivated.

Saul Kripke, in his celebrated book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), offers a novel reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s main remarks in his later works, especially in Philosophical Investigations (1953) and, to some extent, in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956). Kripke presents Wittgenstein as proposing a skeptical argument against a certain conception of meaning and linguistic understanding, as well as a skeptical solution to such a problem. Many philosophers have called this interpretation of Wittgenstein Kripke’s Wittgenstein or Kripkenstein because, as Kripke himself emphasizes, it is “Wittgenstein’s argument as it struck Kripke, as it presented a problem for him” (Kripke 1982, 5) and “probably many of my formulations and re-castings of the argument are done in a way Wittgenstein would not himself approve” (Kripke 1982, 5). Such an interpretation has been the subject of tremendous discussions since its publication, and this has formed a huge literature on the topic of meaning skepticism in general and Wittgenstein’s later view in particular. According to the skeptical argument that Kripke extracts from Wittgenstein’s later remarks on meaning and rule-following, there is no fact about a speaker’s behavioral, mental or social life that can metaphysically determine, or constitute, what she means by her words and also fix a determinate connection between those meanings and the correctness of her use of these words. Such a skeptical conclusion has a disastrous consequence for the classical realist view of meaning: if we insist on the idea that meaning is essentially a factual matter, we face the bizarre conclusion that there is thereby “no such thing as meaning anything by any word” (Kripke 1982, 55). According to the skeptical solution that Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein, such a radical conclusion is intolerable because we certainly do very often mean certain things by our words. The skeptical solution begins by rejecting the view that results in such a paradoxical conclusion, that is, the classical realist conception of meaning. The skeptical solution offers then a new picture of the practice of meaning-attribution, according to which we can legitimately assert that a speaker means something specific by her words if we, as members of a speech-community, can observe, in enough cases, that her use agrees with ours. We can judge, for instance, that she means by “green” what we mean by this word, namely, green, if we observe that her use of “green” agrees with our way of using it. Attributing meanings to others’ words, therefore, brings in the notion of a speech-community, whose members are uniform in their responses. As a result, there can be no private language. This article begins by introducing Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s skeptical problem presented in Chapter 2 of Kripke’s book. It then explicates Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s skeptical solution to the skeptical problem, which is offered in Chapter 3 of the book. The article ends by reviewing some of the most important responses to the skeptical problem and the skeptical solution.

RésuméJe soutiendrai que la façon dont Davidson rend compte de l'intention pure peut être comprise comme une analyse de l'intention comme étant relative à un jugement dans une perspective en première personne. Selon Davidson, avoir la pure intention de faire A, c'est formuler un jugement tout bien considéré qu'il est désirable de faire A. Dans cette analyse anti-réductionniste, l'intention est traitée comme un état irréductible du sujet. J’établirai une comparaison entre cette analyse et celle de Wright et je montrerai comment la position de Davidson peut être considérée comme une analyse non-réductionniste rapportant l'intention au jugement, selon les directions suggérées par Wright. J'expliquerai ensuite comment cette analyse peut aider à éclaircir diverses difficultés qui se présentent dans la conception que Davidson se fait ultérieurement de la signification et du contenu mental.

Simon Blackburn has written extensively across a broad range of philosophical areas, including meta-ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. Deeply influenced by David Hume, he developed and defended his well-known ‘quasi-realism’ in meta-ethics, a view that has substantially shaped his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Blackburn refers to his own version of Wittgenstein as ‘Blackburn’s Wittgenstein’, in explicit contrast to ‘Kripke’s Wittgenstein’. Wittgenstein figures prominently in many of Blackburn’s discussions of quasi-realism, pragmatism, relativism, and minimalism about truth. In what follows, I shall refer to this figure as the ‘quasi-realist Wittgenstein’ and demonstrate the central features of his moral and semantic outlook.

Davidson has famously argued that conceptual relativism, which, for him, is based on the content-scheme dualism, or the “third dogma” of empiricism, is either unintelligible or philosophically uninteresting and has accused Quine of holding onto such a dogma. For Davidson, there can be found no intelligible ground for the claim that there may exist untranslatable languages: all languages, if they are languages, are in principle inter-translatable and uttered sentences, if identifiable as utterances, are interpretable. Davidson has also endorsed the Quinean indeterminacy-underdetermination distinction. The early Quine, as well as the later Quine, believe that the indeterminacy of translation casts serious doubt on the existence of facts of the matter about correct translation between languages. In this paper, I will argue that Quine cannot be the target of Davidson’s argument against conceptual relativism, and that Davidson’s argument is in conflict, among others, with his endorsement of the Quinean indeterminacy-underdetermination distinction. I will show how this conflict results in a radical departure from Quine with respect to the matter of factualism about fine-grained meanings.

Ludwig Wittgenstein left an indelible footprint on contemporary philosophy and his influence is incredibly rich and wide-ranging. However, the interpretation or understanding of Wittgenstein’s views - both his early views and his late views - is exceedingly fraught and contentious. How has Wittgenstein's thought been received by contemporary philosophers? How has it shaped the thinking of some of the leading philosophers of the post-war period? The Routledge Handbook of Wittgenstein and Other Philosophers: Part 2 examines the impact and influence of Wittgenstein's thought on some of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as major thinkers from related disciplines such as economics and politics. Comprising forty-eight chapters by a stellar line up contributors, Part 2 considers Wittgenstein's impact on philosophers including Susan Stebbing, Alan Turing, G.E. Moore, Carl Hempel, Iris Murdoch, B.F. Skinner, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Khun, Philippa Foot, Richard Wollheim and Jurgen Habermas.

Ludwig Wittgenstein left an indelible footprint on contemporary philosophy and his influence is incredibly rich and wide-ranging. However, the interpretation or understanding of Wittgenstein’s views - both his early views and his late views - is exceedingly fraught and contentious. How was Wittgenstein's thought received by his contemporaries, such as Frank Ramsey, Bertrand Russell, Gilbert Ryle and Elizabeth Anscombe? How did it shape the philosophical outlook of later philosophers, such as Michael Dummett, Willard Quine, Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty? The Routledge Handbook of Wittgenstein and Other Philosophers: Part 1 examines the impact and influence of Wittgenstein's thought on some of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Comprising forty chapters by a stellar line up of contributors, Part 1 considers Wittgenstein's impact on the forementioned figures as well as many more, with chapters on Wilfrid Sellars, Noam Chomsky, Thomas Nagel, Cora Diamond, Saul Kripke, Robert Brandom and John McDowell.