Gurpreet Rattan

Is relativism a coherent thesis? Donald Davidson’s classic ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, gives a negative answer. Davidson sought to undermine the coherence of the thesis of relativism, which he takes to be the thesis that different or alternative conceptual schemes are possible. I argue against Davidson and for the view that relativism is a coherent thesis, as follows. [1] Davidson’s master argument against relativism is invalid but can be patched to be valid. [2] Formulating the thesis of relativism requires care on issues about alternative conceptual schemes and their attribution. Conceptual relativism should not be understood as the thesis that alternative conceptual schemes are possible, but instead should be understood as a thesis about how certain attributions are possible, attributions according to which thinkers interpret other thinkers as saying and thinking things that make use of alternative conceptual schemes. [3] The patched argument is criticized based on a consideration of different kinds of semantics for attributing nonsensical saying and thinking. [4] The overall result is that relativism could be a coherent thesis even if the “very idea” of an alternative conceptual scheme is not.

On Sher’s view, three modes of thought make up the cognitive modality of truth: an immanent mode; a transcendent mode; and a normative mode. I locate the issue of the cognitive modality of truth in Sher’s value theory of truth. I discuss how to read the issue of cognitive modality into the deflationary view. My focus will be on the contrast between Sher’s inflationary theory and a minimal, but still inflationary, alternative. The net result is a friendly amendment to Sher’s view that eschews rather than accepts a connection between the cognitive modality of truth and correspondence theories of truth.

Is understanding epistemic in nature? Does a correct account of what constitutes understanding of a concept mention epistemological notions such as knowledge, justification or epistemic rationality? We defend the view that understanding is epistemic in nature – we defend epistemological conceptions of understanding. We focus our discussion with a critical evaluation of Tim Williamson's challenges to epistemological conceptions of understanding in The Philosophy of Philosophy. Against Williamson, we distinguish three kinds of epistemological conceptions and argue that Williamson's arguments succeed against only the most heavily committed kind, and leave the less heavily committed kinds untouched. Further, we argue that Williamson's elaboration of lessons from his arguments point in a direction opposite of his own conclusions and give vivid articulation and support to epistemological conceptions. We suggest also that skepticism about Williamson's larger metaphilosophical conclusions – according to which understanding plays no special role in the epistemology of philosophy – may be in order.

Does self-consciousness entail objectivity, that the subject of self-consciousness is related to a mind-independent world? Anil Gomes, in his elegant and thought-provoking book, The Practical Self, gives a new and absorbing account - a contemporary “deduction” - of how objectivity follows from self-consciousness. According to Gomes, the self-conscious subject must assent to the claim that she, herself, is the agent of her thinking. Further this assent by the self-conscious subject is sustained by a relation to a community of subjects, also agents, holding one another responsible for their thinking. Gomes's idea is that this relation to others is a relation to a mind-independent world. I do not argue against Gomes, but instead, pushing further in the same direction, argue that the self-conscious subject must also dissent from the claim that she herself is an object. I also ask about how Gomes's deduction amounts to a deduction of objectivity. Here I offer Gomes another way to think about objectivity and how his deduction of a relation between the self-conscious subject and a community of subjects constitutes a deduction of objectivity.

As usually understood, ‘conceptual engineering’ is a form of conceptual inquiry aimed at diagnosing problems with extant concepts and finding better concepts to replace them. This can seem like an appropriate response to a skeptical concern that our concepts are cognitively deficient: unsuitable for use in serious inquiry. We argue, however, that conceptual engineering, so understood, cannot reasonably be motivated in this way. The basic problem is that on the first hand, since conceptual engineering is itself a form of inquiry, it cannot succeed by using the problematic concept itself in inquiry (since it is unsuitable for use in inquiry); but, on the other hand, methods for carrying out inquiry directed at concepts without using those concepts are constrained in such a way as to make conceptual engineering very unlikely to succeed. The upshot is that conceptual engineering has no reasonable chance of addressing the skeptical concern about cognitive deficiency. This is an important and previously unarticulated result, about what conceptual engineering can and cannot reasonably be expected to do.

Is relativism a coherent thesis? The paper argues for a new view of relativism that opposes both classic and contemporary views. On this view, the thesis of relativism is coherent even if the key notions in the standard apparatus of relativism—of alternative conceptual schemes, relative truth, perspectival content—are all incoherent. The view defended here highlights issues about attitude attribution and explanation in formulating the thesis of relativism and it proposes a surprising connection between relativism and nonsense. The paper argues further that the thesis of relativism, so understood, is coherent, by considering different accounts of the semantics of attitude attributions in their application to the attribution of nonsensical thinking.

Mates’s Puzzle has flown below many philosophers’ radar, despite its relations to both Frege’s Puzzle and the Paradox of Analysis. We explain the relations amongst these puzzles on the way to arguing that Mates’s Puzzle suggests a generalization of Frege’s Puzzle, and of the sense-reference distinction itself, in the form of hierarchy of senses. We explain how Mates’s Puzzle and the hierarchy, to different degrees, illuminate each other, and how their connection is missed in the literature. However, we argue that the potential of Mates’s Puzzle to illuminate the hierarchy is yet to be fully actualised. We suggest that in order to do better, we need to formulate Mates’s Puzzle as a puzzle in the philosophy of thought and not as puzzle in the philosophy of language. What is needed, to which the present paper is a precursor, is an account of the cognitive significance of higher-order senses.

These are exciting times for philosophical theorizing about propositions, with the last 15 years seeing the development of new approaches and the emergence of new theorists. Propositions have been invoked to explain thought and cognition, the nature and attribution of mental states, language and communication, and in philosophical treatments of truth, necessity and possibility. According to Frege and Russell, and their followers, propositions are structured mind- and language-independent abstract objects which have essential and intrinsic truth-conditions. Some recent theorizing doubts whether propositions really exist and, if they do, asks how we can grasp, entertain and know them? But most of the doubt concerns whether the abstract approach to propositions can really explain them. Are propositions really structured, and if so where does their structure come from? How does this structure form a unity, and does it need to? Are the representational and structural properties of propositions really independent of those of thinking and language? What does it mean to say that an object occurs in or is a constituent of a proposition? The volume takes up these and other questions, both as they apply to the abstract object approach and also to the more recently developed approaches. While the volume as a whole does not definitively and unequivocally reject the abstract objection approach, for the most part, the papers explore new critical and constructive directions. This book was originally published as a special issue of the _Canadian Journal of Philosophy. _.

Kit Fine (2007) outlines an account of semantic coordination, an account motivated by the role of semantic coordination in cognition. Actually, Fine outlines two accounts of semantic coordination, one in terms of co-reference and another in terms of synonymy. I argue, first, that Fine's two accounts are not equivalent, with one being logically stronger than the other, but second and more importantly, that neither account is correct. I outline an alternative account of semantic coordination – the epistemic conception of semantic coordination – that links semantic and epistemic aspects of cognition more directly. The most surprising result of my alternative account of semantic coordination is that semantic coordination is a relation that can hold between elements of thought and language of different semantic types. I close the paper by briefly outlining some applications of the idea that semantic coordination is a relation that can hold across semantic types.

Does the epistemology of disagreement have significant consequences for theories of conceptual understanding? I argue that it does. I argue that the epistemology of disagreement manifests the existence of a special kind of concept, perspectival modes of metarepresentation, a kind of concept instances of which figure in the thinking about thoughts that occurs in deep disagreement. These perspectival modes of metarepresentation are de re modes of presentation of thoughts themselves – hence de re modes of metarepresentation – in which one and the same thought is presented to higher‐order thinking about thoughts in different ways. These modes or ways are de re and perspectival because they are individuated by facts about whether the thought being thought about is the grasped or understood propositional object of one's own or another's thinking. I outline a broadly Fregean framework for theorizing conceptual understanding and draw out three significant consequences of the existence of perspectival modes of metarepresentation for theories of conceptual understanding: they (1) constitute a new philosophical motivation for a restricted fragment of what Terence Parsons calls a “libertine” hierarchy of Fregean sense; (2) provide, against David Chalmers, examples of a priori equivalences that are nevertheless cognitively significant; and (3) constitute a novel and pervasive example of Kripkean ‘Paderewski’‐type designators.

Significant issues remain for understanding and evaluating the Quinean critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction. These issues are highlighted in a puzzling mismatch between the common philosophical attitude toward the critique and its broader intellectual legacy. A discussion of this mismatch sets the larger context for criticism of a recent tradition of interpretation of the critique. I argue that this tradition confuses the roles and relative importance of indeterminacy, a priority, and analyticity in the Quinean critique.

The dissertation considers four philosophical aspects of the theory of linguistic competence. Chapter 1 is concerned with issues in the philosophy of language. I argue that the Chomskyan perspective on linguistic competence, in which speakers have tacit knowledge of syntactic theories, ought to be widened to include the idea that speakers have tacit knowledge of truth conditional semantic theories. In Chapter 2, I consider some relevant issues in the philosophy of mind. I argue that tacit knowledge differs fundamentally from what I call the full propositional attitudes, in failing to satisfy three constraints constitutive of the full propositional attitudes. That implies, I argue, that attributions of tacit knowledge figure in a kind of explanation that is not a rationalizing explanation. Chapter 3 is concerned with the philosophy of psychology. I make explicit the explanatory role of tacit knowledge in linguistic explanation and consider objections to the idea that it can play such a role. I derive, as well, some of the general properties of tacit knowledge from its explanatory role. In Chapter 4, I consider the metaphysics and the epistemology of language. I argue that tacit knowledge plays a fundamental role in explaining how speakers can come to know linguistic facts under the conditions under which they actually do come to know them

According to the Relational View of Propositional Attitude Reports (‘Relational View of Reports’, for short), attitude reports report thinkers as standing in cognitive relations to propositions. One difficult question for the view is: What is the nature of the cognitive relation(s) thinkers stand in to propositions in having propositional attitudes? One promise of The Measure Theory of Mind (sometimes, ‘The Measure Theory’ or ‘Measure Theory’ for short) is that it can avoid having to answer this question by allowing attitude reports to be relational in form without taking the atti- tudes themselves to be relational, and a fortiori without taking propositional attitudes to involve any cognitive relation to propositions. This paper argues that if the propositional attitudes are conceived of in a robust way that emphasizes their normative and perspectival aspects, then this promise of The Measure Theory cannot be realized. If there is a viable Measure Theory for mind conceived of in these robust terms, it must incorporate, rather than dismiss, the notion of a cognitive relation to a proposition.

The connection between theories of truth and meaning is explored. Theories of truth and meaning are connected in a way such that differences in the conception of what it is for a sentence to be true are engendered by differences in the conception of how meanings depend on each other, and on a base of underlying facts. It is argued that this view is common ground between Davidson and Dummett, and that their dispute over realism is really a dispute in the theory of meaning over holism and molecularism. The view offered is contrasted with influential pragmatist and modest views

This paper analyzes the concept of truth in terms of an account of Fregean sense as cognitive value. The account highlights the importance of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference for the individuation of senses. Explicit truth attributions, like ‘that I smell the scent of violets is true’ involve an inter-level version of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference in the that-clause concepts of thoughts that they employ: one cannot understand the that-clause concept of the thought in the truth attribution without understanding the thought the that-clause concept is a concept of. This is not a redundancy that eliminates or deflates cognitive value, but an exploitation, by the concept of truth, of the inter-level version of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference in critical reflective thinking. The cognitive value of the concept of truth is to combine semantically with explicit ways of thinking of thoughts to make critical reflective thinking possible. This account of the cognitive value of the concept of truth assigns cognitive value not by construing the concept of truth as a way of thinking about some thing, but by articulating its broader cognitive role.

What is the cognitive value of the concept of truth? What epistemic difference does the concept of truth make to those who grasp it? This paper employs a new perspective for thinking about the concept of truth and recent debates concerning it, organized around the question of the cognitive value of the concept of truth. The paper aims to defend a substantively correct and dialectically optimal account of the cognitive value of the concept of truth. This perspective is employed in understanding the critical discussion around what Hartry Field has called “the incorporation model” for extending a deflationary view of truth to foreign sentences. Field's original intentions in discussing the incorporation model were to defend the deflationary view from some counterintuitive consequences concerning the understanding of truth attributions to foreign sentences. However, more recently, philosophers unencumbered by deflationary commitments have taken over the incorporation model for their own inflationary purposes. In particular, and in my terms, these philosophers can be understood as making what I argue is the ultimately too radical suggestion that the cognitive value of the concept of truth is to allow the incorporation not only of the linguistically foreign, but also of the conceptually alien. I clarify this dialectic en route to explaining and arguing for the cognitive inflationary view, according to which the cognitive value of the concept of truth is is to make possible the proprietary kind and quality of knowledge allowed by reflective clarity over the concepts and thoughts that one already has.

Recently, philosophers have put forth views in the epistemology of disagreement that emphasize the epistemic relevance of the first-person perspective in disa- greement. In the first part of the paper, I attempt a rational reconstruction of these views. I construe these views as invoking the first-person perspective to explain why it is rational for parties to a disagreement to privilege their own opinions in the absence of independent explanations for doing so—to privilege without independent explanations. I reconstruct three ways privilege might be thought to arise: by demotion, through self-trust, and through the epistemic immediacy in the first-person perspective. I argue that none of these ways, and none of the views that make use of them, clarify a compelling account of the epistemic relevance of the first-person perspective. In the second part of the paper, I try to discern some lessons and outline an alternative approach. According to this approach, the epistemic relevance of the first-person perspective is not to explain privilege without independent explanations but to explain the epistemic limits of intersubjective understanding. These limits are manifest in reflective disagreement and explain how other minds matter for one’s own mind in the pursuit of knowledge. The resulting view about the epistemology of disagreement is neither skeptical nor dogmatic, but dialectical, involving an active mental state that conceptualizes not only the subject matter but also one’s own and others’ minds in thinking and rational interaction at the epistemic limits of intersubjective understanding.

A structural similarity between deflationism and a certain semantically excessive interpretation of the results of cognitive science is developed. Both views incorporate "two-worlds" accounts of the nature of representation. But two-worlds accounts are committed to what I call quasi-technically “the worst possible theory of truth”. This renders the semantically excessive interpretation committed to the worst possible theory of truth; but it renders deflationism internally inconsistent or incoherent.

The thought that truth is valuable for its own sake is obvious, yet difficult to explicate in a precise and vindicating way. The paper tries to explicate and vindicate this thought with an argument for the conclusion that truth is an epistemic value. Truth is an epistemic value in the sense that a commitment to the value of truth plays a role in the justification and explanation of a fundamental aspect of our epistemic practice, namely, critical reflection. The paper also argues that this feature of truth is inconsistent with deflationary accounts of truth. The ideas are set against the backdrop of criticism of some recent work by Paul Horwich.

Is knowledge of language a kind of knowledge-that or knowledge-how? Michael Devitt’s Ignorance of Language argues that knowledge of language is a kind of knowledge-how. Devitt’s account of knowledge of language is embedded in a more general account of the nature of language as grounded in thought. The paper argues that Devitt’s view is inconsistent when thought is understood in an externalist or anti-individualist way. A key phenomenon in externalist thought experiments is the possibility of incomplete or mistaken understanding, and its correction. This phenomenon is exhibited in our knowledge of language. Expanding on some brief remarks by Chomsky, it is argued that speakers display incomplete understanding in making mistakes in linguistic judgrnents. These mistakes can be irnproved through reflection on cases. In this process of mistake, reflection, and correction, speakers’ knowledge of language remains stable despite the change in linguistic judgments. This stable knowledge of language cannot be understood as kind of knowledge-how, without making the rational efficacy of reflection a constitutive feature of knowledge-how. But to do this is to obliterate the distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. The conclusion is that if externalism about thought is accepted, then the knowledge in language is a kind of knowledge-that.

Quine’s arguments in the final two sections of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” bring semantic and epistemic concerns into spectacular collision. Many have thought that the arguments succeed in irreparably smashing a conception of a distinctively analytic and a priori philosophy to pieces. In Constructing the World, David Chalmers argues that much of this distinctively analytical and a priori conception of philosophy can be reconstructed, with Quine’s criticisms leaving little lasting damage. I agree with Chalmers that Quine’s arguments do not have the lasting damage some take them to have. However, I do not think that Chalmers has succeeded in explaining why. The core of Chalmers’s error lies in the rational dispositionalism that forms the metasemantics of his Carnapian intensionalism. Responding to Quine requires recognizing conceptions of both concepts and epistemic normativity that go beyond the opposition between irrationality and conceptual change that Chalmers brings to bear on Quine. I explain this expanded conception of concepts and epistemic normativity in terms of another fundamental aim of Constructing the World, namely that of providing an account of Fregean sense, or more generally of defending what Chalmers calls epistemological semantics

My discussion of the prospects for a contemporary republicanism will revolve around, primarily, Philip Pettit’s Republicanism and, secondarily, Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Pettit and Habermas may be understood as describing how the conceptions of certain central concepts in political philosophy, in particular, conceptions expressing ideals associated with the republican tradition, were transformed with the expansion of the citizenry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their interest in the matter is more than historical. For both Pettit and Habermas, the pre-transformation world espoused attractive ideals which were lost in the post-transformation world, and indeed are lost in our contemporary world. Beyond their historical interest is a concern for the viability of reinstating republican conceptions of those ideals in our contemporary political culture.

I defend the non-cognitivist outlook on knowledge of grammar from the criticisms levelled against it by Jonathan Knowles. The first part of the paper is largely critical. First, I argue that Knowles's argument against Christopher Peacocke and Martin Davies's non-cognitivist account of the psychological reality of grammar fails, and thus that no reason has been given to think that cognitivism is integral to an understanding of Chomskyan theoretical linguistics. Second, I argue that cognitivism is philosophically problematic. In particular, I argue (a) that Knowles misunderstands Stephen Stich and Gareth Evans's points about inferential integration; and (b) that Knowles misunderstands the philosophical status and demands of Evans's Generality Constraint. In the final, non-critical part of the paper, I try to show that the Stich and Evans's constraints, together with a Self-Knowledge Constraint, are genuine constitutive constraints by showing how they have rationality as their underlying organizing principle. I argue further that recognizing the constitutive character of these constraints allows one to distinguish two kinds of psychological explanation; in this sense, the constraints mark a genuine boundary in our theorizing about the mind.