Gary Kemp

This chapter presents a section-by-section discussion of chapter 7 of W. V. Quine’s _Word and Object_, ‘Ontic Decision’. After outlining Quine’s earlier thinking about ontology, it considers his handling of the subject in the chapter––his most careful treatment of ontology in his ‘classical’ period––and comments on how he downplayed the importance of the issue in later works. Among the topics examined are his qualms about nominalism, his plumping for physical objects and sets, his insistence on the difference between concrete general terms and abstract singular terms, his argument that ‘attribute’ and ‘proposition’ are no more referential than ‘sake’ and ‘mile’, his handling of ideal objects such as infinitesimals and geometrical objects, his analysis of ‘ordered pair’, ‘natural number’, and other notions that require paraphrasing rather than elimination, his view of semantic ascent and how he views the philosophical project. Throughout the chapter attends to Quine’s emphasis on science, not common sense.

Attempts to persuade us - to believe something, to do something, to buy something - are everywhere. What is less clear is how to think critically about such attempts and how to distinguish those that are sound arguments. _Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide_ is a much needed guide to argument analysis and a clear introduction to thinking clearly and rationally for oneself. Accessibly written, this book equips students with the essential skills required to tell a good argument from a bad one. Key features of the book include: * clear, jargon-free discussion of key concepts in argumentation * how to avoid common confusions surrounding words such as 'truth', 'knowledge' and 'opinion' * how to identify and evaluate the most common types of argument * how to spot fallacies and tell good reasoning from bad * chapter summaries, exercises, examples and a glossary. The second edition has been updated to include topical new examples from politics, sport, medicine and music, as well as new exercises throughout.

I shall first consider two puzzles that illustrate the contrast between everyday experience or ordinary language, on the one hand, and scientific description on the other. What is common to them is simply that the ordinary description and the scientific description seem to conflict, and the philosopher is called upon to resolve the apparent contradiction. I contend—with some caveats—that there is no such conflict, nothing to adjust. That is one philosophical point (which has been made before). The other is to articulate the lesson for a third puzzle, for the concept of intelligence, particularly with respect to AI or artificial intelligence (especially as purportedly instantiated by LLMs, ‘Large Language Models’).

As is reasonably well-appreciated, Quine struggled with his definition of the all-important notion of an observation sentence; especially in order to make them bear out his commitment to language’s being a ‘social art’. In an earlier article (_Mind_ 131(523):805–825, 2022), I proposed a certain repair, which here I will explain, justify and articulate further. But it also infects the definition of observation categoricals, and furthermore makes it a secondary matter, a seeming afterthought, that evidence, science and knowledge generally are shared—are joint, social and collaborative products. Without forsaking Quine’s strict naturalism, I try to make the necessary adjustments to Quine’s scheme.

In the seventh chapter of his extraordinary book The Objective Eye, John Hyman offers various criticisms of Richard Wollheim’s theory of pictorial depiction.1 My immediate purpose in this short piece is to make the case that these criticisms fail. By no means do I claim that there are not other criticisms to be made against Wollheim’s theory or that Hymans’s book as a whole fails—not in its overarching attempt to rescue the objectivity of art from subjectivist views or, more narrowly, that Hyman’s theory of depiction fails. My claim is merely that Wollheim’s theory emerges relatively unscathed by the criticisms in Hyman’s Chapter 7, even if it is vulnerable on other grounds or incompatible with Hyman’s...

I attempt to explain Frege's handling of the Julius Caesar issue in terms of his more general philosophical commitments. These only became fully explicit in his middle-period writings, but his earlier moves are best explained, I suggest, if we suppose them to be implicit in his earlier thinking. These commitments conditionally justify Frege in rejecting Hume's Principle as either a definition or axiom but in accepting Axiom V. However, the general epistemological picture they constitute has serious problems in accounting for how knowledge is possible at all of such propositions as that Julius Caesar is not a number.

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.

Does the relation of seeing something as another really differ from seeing the one as resembling the other? Does seeing a cloud as a camel really differ from seeing a resemblance between the cloud and a camel? It is easy to think not, but I claim that the logic of the relation B sees x as resembling y differs markedly from that of B sees x as y and thus that we have two relations, not one. Aspect-perception is nontransitive, nonsymmetric, irreflexive and categorical. Perceived or subjective resemblance is weakly or faintly transitive, symmetric, reflexive and graded.

Museums and their practices - especially those involving collection, curation and exhibition - generate a host of philosophical questions. Such questions are not limited to the domains of ethics and aesthetics, but go further into the domains of metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of religion. Despite the prominence of museums as public institutions, they have until recently received surprisingly little scrutiny from philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. By bringing together contributions from philosophers with backgrounds in a range of traditional areas of philosophy, this volume demonstrates how their work can enhance our understanding of museums and shed light on the philosophical questions raised by museum practices. Many of the chapters in this volume make the case that the philosophy of museums is of vital concern, not only to those philosophers at work in the emerging field but also to practitioners within the museum world and to anyone who enjoys visiting museums.

Philosophy of language explores some of the most abstract yet most fundamental questions in philosophy. The ideas of some of the subject's great founding figures, such as Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, as well as of more recent figures such as Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, are central to a great many philosophical debates to this day and are widely studied. In this clear and carefully structured introduction to the subject, Gary Kemp explains the following key topics: the basic nature of philosophy of language, its concepts, and its historical development Frege's theory of sense and reference; Russell's theory of definite descriptions Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Ayer, and the Logical Positivists Recent perspectives including Kripke, Kaplan and Putnam; arguments concerning necessity, indexicals, rigid designation and natural kinds the pragmatics of language, including speech-acts, presupposition and conversational implicature Davidson's theory of language, the 'principle of charity', and the indeterminacy of interpretation puzzles surrounding the propositional attitudes (sentences which ascribe beliefs to people) the challenges presented by the later Wittgenstein contemporary directions, including contextualism, fictional objects and the phenomenon of slurs. The third edition has been thoroughly revised throughout and includes a new chapter on Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar. In addition, the concluding chapter on modern directions in philosophy of language has been expanded to two chapters and now cover crucial emergent areas of study such as slurs, conceptual engineering, epistemic injustice and experimental philosophy. Chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary make What is this thing called Philosophy of Language? an indispensable introduction to those teaching philosophy of language and will be particularly useful for students coming to the subject for the first time.

Gottlob Frege is the single most important figure in the development of modern mathematical logic, and is recognized as a founder of analytical philosophy. The primary aim of this work is to articulate the philosophical basis of Frege's logic and logical theory. I argue that the most general forces which animate Frege's work are neither Kantian, as is sometimes maintained, nor congenial to the semantical outlook on logic which has since Frege's time become standard. These forces are most conspicuous in Frege's conception of the nature of objectivity; historically, it agrees in essential respects with pre-Kantian enlightenment Rationalism. A great deal of space is devoted to showing the influence of this philosophy on the particulars of Frege's logical theory, and to a general criticism which culminates in a comparison with Wittgenstein's Tractatus; the work concludes with an extended discussion of the nature and significance of logicism as Frege conceived it, and a diagnosis of its failure in that light. Frege is a founder of analytical philosophy, but, as I argue, his most basic commitments have rarely been properly acknowledged, and some are actually deeply inimical to analytical philosophy as currently practiced. An ulterior aim of the work is to awaken a desire for a more explicit reckoning and evaluation of the most basic presuppositions of contemporary analytical philosophy