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332Igal Kvart A Coding Conception in Action-Directed-Pragmatics I present formal Pragmatics for a domain in Pragmatics that I call Action-Directed Pragmatics, which focuses on the Pragmatic riddle of how implicit contents are conveyed and understood, by adopting a coding model, in which the speaker and addressee simulate each other iteratively in a deliberative context (an ‘action-pregnant’ one). The implicit content, conveyed by a speaker and decoded by her addressee, in s…Read more
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20Resolving Bank-Type Puzzles via Action-Directed PragmaticsSynthese 200 (4): 1-58. 2022.In this paper I undertake to resolve a main pragmatic puzzle triggered by Bank-type cases. After accepting ‘sanitized’ intuitions about Truth-Values, as reflected in x-phi experiments, the pragmatic puzzle about whether the husband is inconsistent remains, and if he isn’t, which intuitively is the case, how are we to explain it. The context in such cases is pragmatic, with awareness of high risks, and the treatment I propose is pragmatic as well, but not Gricean. I offer a new Pragmatics whose m…Read more
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28The epistemic significance of non-epistemic factors: an introductionSynthese 200 (3): 1-11. 2022.
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19The steering thrust phenomenon in action-directed-pragmaticsSynthese 198 (Suppl 7): 1639-1671. 2020.In this paper I explore the pragmatic phenomenon of Steering Thrust, and specifically how speakers steer others to action and the mechanism that underpins how they so steer. In addition to opening the door to a rich pragmatic domain, understanding the pragmatics of various locutions and assertions in deliberative action-oriented contexts resolves the puzzle of bank-type cases by a pragmatic treatment of the puzzle, and undermines the motivation to seek a semantic remedy, such as via Pragmatic En…Read more
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28Pragmatic Structures for Action‐Directed PragmaticsPhilosophical Perspectives 32 (1): 219-253. 2018.Philosophical Perspectives, EarlyView.
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26A High Token Indicativity Account of KnowledgeActa Analytica 33 (3): 385-393. 2018.In this paper, I provide a probabilistic account of factual knowledge, based on the notion of chance, which is a function of an event given a prior history. This account has some affinity with my chance account of token causation, but it neither relies on it nor presupposes it. Here, I concentrate on the core cases of perceptual knowledge and of knowledge by memory. The analysis of knowledge presented below is externalist. The underlying intuition guiding the treatment of knowledge in this paper…Read more
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462Igal Kvart RATIONAL ASSERTIBILITY, THE STEERING ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE, AND PRAGMATIC ENCROACHMENT Abstract In the past couple of decades, there were a few major attempts to establish the thesis of pragmatic encroachment – that there is a significant pragmatic ingredient in the truth-conditions for knowledge-ascriptions. Epistemic contextualism has flaunted the notion of a conversational standard, and Stanley's subject-sensitive invariantism (SSI) promoted …Read more
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63Probabilistic cause and the thirsty travelerJournal of Philosophical Logic 31 (2): 139-179. 2002.In this paper I start by briefly presenting an analysis of token cause and of token causal relevance that I developed elsewhere, and then apply it to the famous thirsty traveler riddle. One general outcome of the analysis of causal relevance employed here is that in preemption cases (early or late) the preempted cause is not a cause since it is causally irrelevant to the effect. I consider several variations of the thirsty traveler riddle. In the first variation the first enemy emptied the cante…Read more
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38Counterexamples to Lewis' ‘Causation as Influence’Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (3): 411-23. 2001.
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Cause and some positive causal impact: Causation and emergencePhilosophical Perspectives 11 401-432. 1997.
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302In this paper, I present a counter-example to the two most prominent theories of pragmatic encroachment (regarding knowledge ascriptions): Contextualism (specifically, DeRose's version), and Stanley's Subject-Sensitive Invariantism (SSI). The example is a variation on DeRose's bank case. Key words: Knowledge, knowledge ascriptions, pragmatic encroachment, Stanley, DeRose, bank case, standards, stakes.
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147Lewis’s ’Causation as Influence’Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (3). 2001.In his ‘Causation as Influence’,1 David Lewis proposed a counterfactual theory of cause which was designed to improve on his previous account.2 Here I offer counter-examples to this new account, involving early preemption and late preemption, and a revised account, which is no longer an influence theory, that handles those counter-examples.
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73Causal independencePhilosophy of Science 61 (1): 96-114. 1994.In Kvart (1991a), I discussed the analysis of causal relevance presented in A Theory of Counterfactuals (1986) (and first in 1975). I explained there in what respect the notion captured by the analysis of Kvart (1986) is a mere approximation to the requisite notion of causal relevance. In this paper I present another analysis of causal relevance, devoid of the shortcoming of its predecessor. The present analysis of causal relevance is, again, grounded in a chancelike notion of objective probabil…Read more
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37The two main insights of the account that are at the heart of the notion of knowledge are that the belief that p amounts to high token indicativity of the fact that p, and that knowledge endows high level of immunity from error. In this outline we shall deal with perceptual knowledge and perception-based memory. For these modes of knowledge, another condition is required, beyond that of high token indicativity, which secures the appropriate discriminability condition for knowledge. These conditi…Read more
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272Abstract In this paper I consider an easier-to-read and improved to a certain extent version of the causal chance-based analysis of counterfactuals that I proposed and argued for in my A Theory of Counterfactuals. Sections 2, 3 and 4 form Part I: In it, I survey the analysis of the core counterfactuals (in which, very roughly, the antecedent is compatible with history prior to it). In section 2 I go through the three main aspects of this analysis, which are the following. First, it is a caus…Read more
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19Probabilistic cause, edge conditions, late preemption, and discrete casesIn Phil Dowe & Paul Noordhof (eds.), Cause and Chance: Causation in an Indeterministic World, Routledge. pp. 163-188. 2003.
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81Counterfactuals: Ambiguities, true premises, and knowledgeSynthese 100 (1). 1994.In this paper I explore the ambiguity that arises between two readings of the counterfactual construction, then–d and thel–p, analyzed in my bookA Theory of Counterfactuals. I then extend the analysis I offered there to counterfactuals with true antecedents, and offer a more precise formulation of the conception of temporal divergence points used in thel–p interpretation. Finally, I discuss some ramifications of these issues for counterfactual analyses of knowledge.
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102Kripke's Belief PuzzleMidwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1): 287-325. 1986.This article offers a resolution of Kripke’s well-known belief puzzle
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53The Counterfactual Analysis of CauseSynthese 127 (3): 389-427. 2001.David Lewis’s counterfactual analysis of cause consisted of the counterfactual conditional closed under transitivity.2 Namely, a sufficient condition for A’s being a cause of C is that ∼A > ∼C be true; and a necessary as well as sufficient condition is that there be a series of true counterfactuals ∼A > ∼E1, ∼E1 > ∼E2, . . . , ∼En >∼C (n > 0).
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285In the past couple of decades, there were a few major attempts to establish the thesis of pragmatic infringement – that a significant pragmatic ingredient figures significantly in the truth-conditions for knowledge-ascriptions. As candidates, epistemic contextualism and Relativism flaunted conversational standards, and Stanley's SSI promoted stakes. These conceptions were propelled first and foremost by obviously pragmatic examples of knowledge ascriptions that seem to require a pragmatic compon…Read more
Jerusalem, Israel
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
General Philosophy of Science |