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1083Linguistic practice and false-belief tasksMind and Language 25 (3): 298-328. 2010.Jill de Villiers has argued that children's mastery of sentential complements plays a crucial role in enabling them to succeed at false-belief tasks. Josef Perner has disputed that and has argued that mastery of false-belief tasks requires an understanding of the multiplicity of perspectives. This paper attempts to resolve the debate by explicating attributions of desires and beliefs as extensions of the linguistic practices of making commands and assertions, respectively. In terms of these ling…Read more
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Do perceptions justify beliefs? : the argument from "looks" talkIn Johan Gersel, Rasmus Thybo Jensen, Morten S. Thaning & Søren Overgaard (eds.), In the light of experience: new essays on perception and reasons, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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29Belief, Introspection, and Constituted Kinds. Selected Papers from the Fifth Philosophy of Language and Mind ConferenceReview of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (1): 1-5. 2022.
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30Paradoxes of truth-in-context-XPhilosophical Studies 180 (5-6): 1467-1489. 2021.We may suppose that the truth predicate that we utilize in our semantic metalanguage is a two-place predicate relating sentences to contexts, the truth-in-context-X predicate. Seeming paradoxes pertaining to the truth-in-context-X predicate can be blocked by placing restrictions on the structure of contexts. While contexts must specify a domain of contexts, and what a context constant denotes relative to a context must be a context in the context domain of that context, no context may belong to …Read more
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72Imagination constrained, imagination constructedInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (1): 485-512. 2024.A number of authors have asked what it takes for a course of mental imagery to be epistemically or practically useful. This paper addresses a prior question, namely, the difference between courses of imagination that are realistic and those that are fantastic. One approach, suggested by recent literature concerning the utility of imagery, holds that a course of imagination represents realistically if and only if the course of events represented conforms to certain accepted constraints. Against t…Read more
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Scientific Realism as an Issue in SemanticsIn Patrick Greenough & Michael P. Lynch (eds.), Truth and Realism, Clarendon Press. 2006.
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44A strictly stronger relative mustThought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (2): 82-89. 2021.It is widely accepted that when ‘might’ expresses certain kinds of relative modality, the sentence ‘p and it might not be the case that p’ is in some sense inconsistent. It has proven difficult to define a formal semantics that explicates this inconsistency while meeting certain other desiderata, in particular, that p does not imply ‘Must p’. This paper presents such a semantics. The key idea is that background contexts have to have multiple levels, including an inner set consisting of worlds…Read more
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147Inner Speech as the Internalization of Outer SpeechIn Peter Langland-Hassan & Agustín Vicente (eds.), Inner Speech: New Voices, Oxford University Press. pp. 53-77. 2018.This paper aims to clear a path for the thesis that inner speech, in the very languages we speak, is the sole medium of all conceptual thought. First, it is argued that inner speech should not be identified with the auditory imagery of speech. Since they are distinct, there may be many more episodes of inner speech than those that are accompanied by auditory imagery. Second, it is argued that it is not necessary to conceive of linguistic communication as a matter of the speaker’s revealing th…Read more
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70Belief Attribution as Indirect CommunicationIn Ladislav Koreň, Hans Bernhard Schmid, Preston Stovall & Leo Townsend (eds.), Groups, Norms and Practices: Essays on Inferentialism and Collective Intentionality, Springer. pp. 173-187. 2021.This paper disputes the widespread assumption that beliefs and desires may be attributed as theoretical entities in the service of the explanation and predic- tion of human behavior. The literature contains no clear account of how beliefs and desires might generate actions, and there is good reason to deny that principles of rationality generate a choice on the basis of an agent’s beliefs and desires. An alter- native conception of beliefs and desires is here introduced, according to which an at…Read more
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45Indicative Conditionals in Objective ContextsTheoria 86 (5): 651-687. 2020.A conversation can be conceived as aiming to circumscribe a set of possibilities that are relevant to the goals of the conversation. This set of possibilities may be conceived as determined by the goals and objective circumstances of the interlocutors and not by their propositional attitudes. An indicative conditional can be conceived as circumscribing a set of possibilities that have a certain property: If the set of relevant possibilities is subsequently restricted to one in which the antecede…Read more
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80On the Difference Between Realistic and Fantastic ImaginingErkenntnis 87 (4): 1563-1582. 2020.When we imaginatively picture what might happen, we may take what we imagine to be either realistic or fantastic. A wine glass falling to the floor and shattering is realistic. A wine glass falling and morphing into a bird and flying away is fantastic. What does the distinction consist in? Two important necessary conditions are here defined. The first is a condition on the realistic representation of spatial configuration, grounded in an account of the imagistic representation of spatial configu…Read more
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558Metacognitive deficits in categorization tasks in a population with impaired inner speechActa Psychologica 181 62-74. 2017.This study examines the relation of language use to a person’s ability to perform categorization tasks and to assess their own abilities in those categorization tasks. A silent rhyming task was used to confirm that a group of people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA) had corresponding covert language production (or “inner speech”) impairments. The performance of the PWA was then compared to that of age- and education-matched healthy controls on three kinds of categorization tasks and on metacognit…Read more
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108Against the speaker-intention theory of demonstrativesLinguistics and Philosophy 42 (2): 109-129. 2019.It is commonly supposed that an utterance of a demonstrative, such as “that”, refers to a given object only if the speaker intends to refer to that object. This paper poses three challenges to this theory. First, the theory threatens to beg the question by defining the content of the speaker’s intention in terms of reference. Second, the theory makes psychologically implausible demands on the speaker. Third, the theory entails that there can be no demonstratives in thought.
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The Mind-Independence of Contexts for Knowledge-AttributionsIn Jonathan Ichikawa (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism, Routledge. pp. 455-464. 2017.If we say that the truth of a statement of the form “S knows that p” depends on the pertinent context, that raises the question, what determines the pertinent context? One answer would be: the speaker. Another would be: the speaker and the hearer jointly somehow. Yet a third answer would be: no one gets to decide; it is a matter of what the conversation is supposed to achieve and how the world really is, and it can happen that all of the interlocutors are mistaken about the pertinent context. In…Read more
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Etienne Bonnot de CondillacIn Margaret Cameron, Benjamin Hill & Robert J. Stainton (eds.), Sourcebook in the History of Philosophy of Language, Springer. pp. 773-774. 2016.This is a brief summary of Condillac's philosophy of language in his Origins of Human Knowledge.
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37The Problem of Context-relativity in SemanticsGrazer Philosophische Studien 93 (3): 329-333. 2016.This is an introduction to a special issue of Grazer Philosophische Studien on context-relativity in semantics.
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1Visual Imagery in the Thought of Monkeys and ApesIn Kristin Andrews & Jacob Beck (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds, Routledge. pp. 25-33. 2017.Explanations of animal problem-solving often represent our choices as limited to two: first, we can explain the observed behavior as a product of trained responses to sensory stimuli, or second, we can explain it as due to the animal’s possession of general rules utilizing general concepts. My objective in this essay is to bring to life a third alternative, namely, an explanation in terms of imagistic cognition.The theory of imagistic cognition posits representations that locate objects in a mul…Read more
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1Grounding Assertion and Acceptance in Mental ImageryIn Ondřej Beran, Vojtěch Kolman & Ladislav Koreň (eds.), From rules to meanings. New essays on inferentialism, Routledge. pp. 49-62. 2018.How can thinking be effective in enabling us to meet our goals? If we answer this in terms of representation relations between thoughts and the world, then we are challenged to explain what representation is, which no one has been able to do. If we drop the appeal to representation, then it is hard to explain why certain inferences are good and others are not. This paper outlines a strategy for a nonrepresentationalist account of the way in which the structure of reality may drive cognition. …Read more
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70Open Texture and Schematicity as Arguments for Non-referential SemanticsIn Klaus Petrus Sarah-Jane Conrad (ed.), Meaning, Context, and Methodology, Mouton De Gruyter. pp. 13-30. 2017.Many of the terms of our language, such as “jar”, are open-textured in the sense that their applicability to novel objects is not entirely determined by their past usage. Many others, such as the verbs “use” and “have”, are schematic in the sense that they have only a very general meaning although on any particular occasion of use they denote some more particular relation. The phenomena of open texture and schematicity constitute a sharp challenge to referential semantics, which assumes that e…Read more
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13On the Evidence for Prelinguistic ConceptsTheoria 20 (3): 287-297. 2010.Language acquisition is often said to be a process of mapping words into pre-existing concepts. If that is right, then we ought to be able to obtain experimental evidence for the existence of concepts in prelinguistic children, as intended in the work of Paul Quinn. This paper argues that Quinn's results have an alternative explanation.
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75Three Kinds of Nonconceptual Seeing-asReview of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (4): 763-779. 2017.It is commonly supposed that perceptual representations in some way embed concepts and that this embedding accounts for the phenomenon of seeing-as. But there are good reasons, which will be reviewed here, to doubt that perceptions embed concepts. The alternative is to suppose that perceptions are marks in a perceptual similarity space that map into locations in an objective quality space. From this point of view, there are at least three sorts of seeing-as. First, in cases of ambiguity resoluti…Read more
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The Refutation of Internalism: An Essay on IntentionalityDissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1984."Internalism" is the thesis that a subject's internal physical structure determines which beliefs and desires are properly attributable to him. Internalist theories of intentionality purport to solve several philosophical problems, most notably, how explanation in terms of belief and desire is compatible with subsumption of the subject under physical law. This dissertation argues that internalism is false. First it is argued that an internalistic construal of belief would make it impossible to u…Read more
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107Do Perceptions Justify Beliefs? The Argument from "Looks" TalkIn Gersel Johan, Thybo Jensen Rasmus, Thaning M. & Overgaard S. (eds.), In Light of Experience: Essays on Reason and Perception, Oxford University Press. pp. 141-160. 2018.Why should we believe that perceptions justify beliefs? One argument starts with the premise that sentences of the form “a looks F” may be used to justify conclusions of the form “a is F”. I will argue that this argument for the claim that perceptions justify beliefs founders on the following dilemma: Either “a looks F” does not report the content of a perception or, if it does, then it does not justify the conclusion “a is F”.
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82Presuppositions as Anaphoric Duality EnablersTopoi 35 (1): 133-144. 2016.The key to an adequate account of presupposition projection is to accommodate the fact that the presuppositions of a sentence cannot always be read off the sentence but can often be identified only on the basis of prior utterances in the conversation in which the sentence is uttered. In addition, an account of presupposition requires a three-valued semantics of assertibility and deniability in a context. Presuppositions can be explicated as sentences that belong to the conversation and the asser…Read more
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69An extraterrestrial perspective on conceptual developmentMind and Language 8 (1): 105-30. 1993.The network theory of conceptual development is the theory that conceptual developmentmay be represented as a process of constructing a network of linked nodes. The nodes of such a network represent concepts and the links between nodes represent relations between concepts. The structure of such a network is not determined by experience alone but must evolve in accordance with abstraction heuristics, which constrain the varieties of network between which experience must decide. This paper critici…Read more
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49Mind and ChanceCanadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (3): 533-552. 1987.Much discussed but still unresolved is whether a subject's internal physical structure is a sufficient condition for his beliefs and desires. The question has sometimes been expressed as a question about microstructurally identical Doppelgänger. Imagine two subjects who are identical right down to the ions traversing the synapses. Their senses are stimulated in all the same ways, their bodies execute the same motions, and identical physical events mediate between the sensory inputs and the behav…Read more
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382What is a context of utterance?Philosophical Studies 91 (2): 149-172. 1998.For many purposes in pragmatics one needs to appeal to a context of utterance conceived as a set of sentences or propositions. The context of utterance in this sense is often defined as the set of assumptions that the speaker supposes he or she shares with the hearer. I argue by stages that this is a mistake. First, if contexts must be defined in terms of shared assumptions, then it would be preferable to define the context as the set of assumptionsthat the interlocutors really do share. Second,…Read more
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252This document presents a Gentzen-style deductive calculus and proves that it is complete with respect to a 3-valued semantics for a language with quantifiers. The semantics resembles the strong Kleene semantics with respect to conjunction, disjunction and negation. The completeness proof for the sentential fragment fills in the details of a proof sketched in Arnon Avron (2003). The extension to quantifiers is original but uses standard techniques.
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37If children thought like adults: A critical review of Markman'sCategorization and Naming in Childrenand Keil'sConcepts, Kinds and Cognitive Development (review)Philosophical Psychology 4 (1): 139-146. 1991.
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166Thinking Out Loud: An Essay on the Relation Between Thought and LanguagePrinceton University Press. 1995.An Essay on the Relation Between Thought and Language Christopher Gauker. things possible? How, having once perceived the herds by the lake, does the agent remember this for later use? My answer is that one way he may do it is ...