David B. Martens

Robert Shope states at the outset of The Nature of Meaningfulness that his goal is "to present a unified view of meaningfulness". As the book unfolds, the unity in his view turns out to be subtle and complex, and to take in many distinct topics. His discussion is dense with arguments and counterexamples, and engages with many other contemporary analytic philosophers' writings on each topic. Readers are justified, I think, in treating the book as a collection of quite independent essays on various metaphysical topics that can profitably be engaged selectively on the basis of a reader's interests and on the reader's methodological terms.

In this dissertation I investigate the nature of first-person thoughts, i.e., thoughts typically expressed in English with sentences containing 'I'. ;Led by McTaggart and Castaneda, many philosophers have advanced various arguments and putative counter-examples designed to show that no theory of first-person thoughts can be correct which holds that the reference of a first-person thought to its subject is mediated by descriptive content of that thought. I thoroughly review classical and contemporary theories of first-person thoughts, from Russell through the present, carefully noting the data, arguments, and putative counter-examples that an adequate theory must accommodate. ;Taking a position contrary to that of McTaggart, Castaneda, et al., I describe a class of descriptional theories of first-person thoughts able to meet all of the principal anti-descriptionalist arguments and putative counter-examples, and to explain many of the peculiar properties of first-person thoughts. Those theories impute to a first-person thought a complex descriptive content derived from its subject's introspection of his or her own nonfirst-person mental states; certain causal relationships with its subject's actions; and a structure that includes an aspect under which the content is thought, obscuring part of that content from the introspective awareness of its subject

In two early papers, Max Cresswell constructed two formal logics of propositional identity, pcr and fcr, which he observed to be respectively deductively equivalent to modal logics s4 and s5. Cresswell argued informally that these equivalences respectively “give . . . evidence” for the correctness of s4 and s5 as logics of broadly logical necessity. In this paper, I describe weaker propositional identity logics than pcr that accommodate core intuitions about identity and I argue that Cresswell’s informal arguments do not firmly and without epistemic circularity justify accepting s4 or s5. I also describe how to formulate standard modal logics (k, s2, and their extensions) with strict equivalence as the only modal primitive

This paper proposes a response to the duplication objection to the descriptive theory of singular mental reference. This objection involves hypothetical cases in each of which there are a pair of qualitatively indistinguishable objects and a thought that apparently refers to only one of the pair, despite the descriptive indistinguishability of the two objects. I identify a concept of reference-likeness or closeness to reference, which is related to the concept of genuine singular reference as the concept of truthlikeness or closeness to truth is related to the concept of truth. My response to the duplication objection is to say that the hypothetical cases it involves establish only that a thought can come close enough to singular reference to a thing despite not genuinely referring to that thing, a consequence that is compatible with the descriptive theory of singular mental reference.

This sophisticated, difficult, and puzzling book consolidates and continues the exploration of our finitude pursued in Adrian Moore’s earlier book The Infinite and in a number of previous and intervening articles by him. One of Moore’s purposes in Points of View is to defend an affirmative answer to the question “Are absolute representations possible?” Moore takes this question to be an expression of an essential connection between current concerns about language and mind, and what he regards as deeper perennial concerns about our finitude. Another of his purposes is to recommend acquisition of a certain taste for nonsense as an apt response to those connected concerns, as “a philosophical tactic of very general utility.”