•  4
    McCullagh on Explaining Substitution Failures
    Southwest Philosophy Review 39 (2): 49-51. 2023.
  •  8
    William James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning New by Todd Lekan (review)
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 59 (1): 105-109. 2023.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:William James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning New by Todd LekanHenry JackmanBy Todd LekanWilliam James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning New York: Routledge, 2022. 156pp., incl. indexWhile William James wrote just a single article in theoretical ethics, it has often been said that ethical concerns animate almost all of his work.1 Indeed, there has been a growing interest in James’s moral phil…Read more
  •  174
    While William James and Charles Sanders Peirce are considered the two fathers of American Pragmatism, Peircian Pragmatism is often being presented as the comparatively ‘objective’ alternative to metaphysical realism, with the Jamesian version being castigated as an overly ‘subjective’ departure from Peirce’s position. However, while James clearly does put more of an emphasis on ‘subjective’ factors than does Peirce, his doing so is often the result of his simply drawing out consequences of the …Read more
  •  416
    Was William James an Evidentialist?
    Southwest Philosophy Review 38 (1): 81-90. 2022.
    William James has traditionally been seen as a critic of evidentialism, with his claim that “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds” being understood as saying that in certain cases we have the right to believe beyond what is certified by the evidence. However, there is an alternate, “expansive”, reading of James (defended most recently by Cheryl Mis…Read more
  •  324
    “James’s Pragmatic Maxim and the ‘Elasticity’ of Meaning”
    In The Jamesian Mind. pp. 274-284. forthcoming.
    To the extent that William James had an account of ‘meaning,’ it is best captured in his “pragmatic maxim”, but James’s maxim has notoriously been open to many conflicting interpretations. It will be argued here that some of these interpretive difficulties stem from the fact that (1) James seriously understates the differences between his own views and those presented by Peirce in “How to Make our Ideas Clear”, and (2) James’s understanding of the maxim typically ties meaning to truth, but sin…Read more
  •  287
    “Putnam, James, and ‘Absolute’ Truth”
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 13 (2). 2021.
    While historians of pragmatism often present William James as the founder of the “subjectivist” wing of pragmatism that came back into prominence with the writings of Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam has argued that James’s views are actually much closer to Peirce’s (and Putnam’s own). Putnam does so by noting that James distinguishes two sorts of truth: “temporary truth,” which is closer to a subjective notion of warranted assertibility, and “absolute truth,” which is closer to Peirce’s own compara…Read more
  •  137
    "The Pragmatic Method"
    In Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John P. Hawthorne (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, Oxford University Press. pp. 193-209. 2016.
    While classical pragmatism quickly became identified with the theory of truth that dominated critical discussions of it, both of its founders, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, understood pragmatism essentially as a method. The article compares Peirce’s conceptions of pragmatism with James’s view that the pragmatic method would allow us to resolve many disputes in philosophy, and argues that their differences undermine any purely ‘Peircian’ reading of James’s Pragmatic Maxim. It then exa…Read more
  •  165
    While Aaron Zimmerman’s Belief is rightly subtitled “A Pragmatic Picture”, it concerns a set of topics about which Pragmatists themselves are not always in agreement. Indeed, while there has been a noticeable push back against evidentialism in contemporary analytic epistemology, the view can at times seem ascendant within the literature on pragmatism itself. In particular, Peirceians tend to presuppose something closer to evidentialism when they accuse Jamesians of taking pragmatism in an unpr…Read more
  •  719
    "William James on Moral Philosophy and its Regulative Ideals"
    William James Studies 15 (2): 1-25. 2019.
    James’s “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” sheds light not only on his views on ethics but also on his general approach to objectivity. Indeed, the paper is most interesting not for the ethical theory it defends but for its general openness to the possibility of our ethical claims lacking objective truth conditions at all. James will turn out to have a very demanding account of what it would take to construct something like objective ethical norms out of more naturalistically respectable…Read more
  •  178
    Temporal externalism, conceptual continuity, meaning, and use
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10): 959-973. 2020.
    ABSTRACT Our ascriptions of content to past utterances assign to them a level of conceptual continuity and determinacy that extends beyond what could be grounded in the usage up to their time of utterance. If one accepts such ascriptions, one can argue either that future use must be added to the grounding base, or that such cases show that meaning is not, ultimately, grounded in use. The following will defend the first option as the more promising of the two, though this ultimately requires unde…Read more
  •  129
    Construction and continuity: conceptual engineering without conceptual change
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10): 909-918. 2020.
  •  2
    Belief, Rationality and Psychophysical Laws
    The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 35 124-129. 1998.
    Davidson argues that the connection between belief and the "constitutive ideal of rationality" precludes the possibility of their being any type-type identities between mental and physical events. However, there are radically different ways to understand both the nature and content of this "constitutive ideal," and the plausibility of Davidson’s argument depends on blurring the distinction between two of these ways. Indeed, it will be argued here that no consistent understanding of the constitut…Read more
  •  219
    Interpretivism and "Canonical" Ascriptions
    Studia Philosophica Estonica 10 (2): 28-37. 2017.
    This paper investigates the crucial notion of a "canonical ascription statement" in Bruno Mölder's /Mind Ascribed/, and argues that the reasons given for preferring the book's approach of canonicallity to a more common understanding of canonicallity in terms of the ascriptions we would "ideally" make are not only unpersuasive, but also leave the interpretivist position more open to skeptical worries than it should be. The paper further argues that the resources for a more compelling justificatio…Read more
  •  72
    "Meaning Holism"
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2014.
    A general introduction to the issues surrounding the question of semantic holism.
  •  454
    William James on Conceptions and Private Language
    Belgrade Philosophical Annual 30 175-193. 2017.
    William James was one of the most frequently cited authors in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but the attention paid to James’s Principles of Psycho- logy in that work is typically explained in terms of James having ‘committed in a clear, exemplary manner, fundamental errors in the philosophy of mind.’ (Goodman 2002, p. viii.) The most notable of these ‘errors’ was James’s purported commitment to a conception of language as ‘private’. Commentators standardly treat James as committed…Read more
  •  328
    Radical interpretation and the permutation principle
    Erkenntnis 44 (3): 317-326. 1996.
    Davidson has claimed that to conclude that reference is inscrutable, one must assume that "If some theory of truth... is satisfactory in the light of all relevant evidence... then any theory that is generated from the first theory by a permutation will also be satisfactory in the light of all relevant evidence." However, given that theories of truth are not directly read off the world, but rather serve as parts of larger theories of behavior, this assumption is far from self-evident. A proper un…Read more
  •  470
    Semantic Norms and Temporal Externalism
    Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1996.
    There has frequently been taken to be a tension, if not an incompatibility, between "externalist" theories of content (which allow the make-up of one's physical environment and the linguistic usage of one's community to contribute to the contents of one's thoughts and utterances) and the "methodologically individualist" intuition that whatever contributes to the content of one's thoughts and utterances must ultimately be grounded in facts about one's own attitudes and behavior. In this dissertat…Read more
  •  493
    Externalism, metasemantic contextualism, and self-knowledge
    In Sanford Goldberg (ed.), Externalism, Self-Knowledge and Skepticism., Oxford University Press. pp. 228-247. 2015.
    This paper examines some of the interactions between holism, contextualism, and externalism, and will argue that an externalist metasemantics that grounds itself in certain plausible assumptions about self- knowledge will also be a contextualist metasemantics, and that such a contextualist metasemantics in turn resolves one of the best known problems externalist theories purportedly have with self-knowledge, namely the problem of how the possibility of various sorts of ‘switching’ cases can appe…Read more
  •  632
    Ordinary Language, Conventionalism and a priori Knowledge
    Dialectica 55 (4): 315-325. 2001.
    This paper examines popular‘conventionalist’explanations of why philosophers need not back up their claims about how‘we’use our words with empirical studies of actual usage. It argues that such explanations are incompatible with a number of currently popular and plausible assumptions about language's ‘social’character. Alternate explanations of the philosopher's purported entitlement to make a priori claims about‘our’usage are then suggested. While these alternate explanations would, unlike the …Read more
  •  8
    Belief, Rationality, and Psychophysical Laws
    The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 9 47-54. 2000.
    Davidson has argued that the connection between belief and the “constitutive ideal of rationality” precludes the possibility of their being any type-type identities between mental and physical events. However, there are radically different ways to understand both the nature and the content of this “constitutive ideal,” and the plausibility of Davidson’s argument depends on blurring the distinction between two of these ways. Indeed, it will be argued here that no consistent understandingthe const…Read more
  •  535
    Prejudice, Humor and Alief
    Southwest Philosophy Review 28 (2): 29-33. 2012.
    In her “Humor, Belief and Prejudice”, Robin Tapley concludes: "Racist/racial, sexist/gender humor is funny because we think it’s true. We know the beliefs exist in the laugher, there’s no way to philosophically maneuver around that." In what follows I’ll be trying to do some philosophical maneuvering of the sort she thinks hopeless in the quote above.
  •  11
    This paper discusses the relationship between the views of James and Royce on representation and their attempts to explain the "possibility of error," views which are, I argue, closer than many have thought. Appreciating where they do differ will point not only to an unstressed problem with Royces' argument for the Absolute but also to some unappreciated features of how James' account of truth ties in with his account of epistemic justification.
  •  392
    Individualism and interpretation
    Southwest Philosophy Review 14 (1): 31-38. 1998.
    'Interpretational' accounts of meaning are frequently treated as incompatible with accounts stressing language's 'social' character. However, this paper argues that one can reconcile interpretational and social accounts by distinguishing "methodological" from "ascriptional" individualism. While methodological individualism requires only that the meaning of one's terms ultimately be grounded in facts about oneself, ascriptional individualism requires that the meaning of one's terms be independent…Read more
  •  647
    We live forwards but understand backwards: Linguistic practices and future behavior
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 80 (2): 157-177. 1999.
    Ascriptions of content are sensitive not only to our physical and social environment, but also to unforeseeable developments in the subsequent usage of our terms. This paper argues that the problems that may seem to come from endorsing such 'temporally sensitive' ascriptions either already follow from accepting the socially and historically sensitive ascriptions Burge and Kripke appeal to, or disappear when the view is developed in detail. If one accepts that one's society's past and current usa…Read more
  •  98
    This paper is concerned with Davidson's argument that very general properties of the theory of interpretation make the skeptical claim that most of our beliefs could turn out to be false insupportable. Conceived as a 'straight' answer to the skeptic Davidson's argument is not especially convincing. In particular, Davidson's answer to the skeptic presupposes a framework that allows for a new and seemingly more radical skepticism according to which we might not even have beliefs at all. Neverthele…Read more
  •  496
    Temporal externalism and our ordinary linguistic practices
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 86 (3): 365-380. 2005.
    Temporal externalists argue that ascriptions of thought and utterance content can legitimately reflect contingent conceptual developments that are only settled after the time of utterance. While the view has been criticized for failing to accord with our “ordinary linguistic practices”, such criticisms (1) conflate our ordinary ascriptional practices with our more general beliefs about meaning, and (2) fail to distinguish epistemically from pragmatically motivated linguistic changes. Temporal ex…Read more
  •  328
    Convention and language
    Synthese 117 (3): 295-312. 1998.
    This paper has three objectives. The first is to show how David Lewis' influential account of how a population is related to its language requires that speakers be 'conceptually autonomous' in a way that is incompatible with content ascriptions following from the assumption that its speakers share a language. The second objective is to sketch an alternate account of the psychological and sociological facts that relate a population to its language. The third is to suggest a modification of Lewis'…Read more