Imogen Dickie

Many philosophers have taken it that the conditions for linguistic communication are to be explained in terms of those for the transmission of knowledge. The first part of the chapter argues that this widespread approach mischaracterizes the relationship between communication and linguistic competence. The rest of the chapter motivates an account of aboutness-fixing for thoughts about ordinary things, and shows how this account extends into a story about language use which respects the relationship between linguistic communication and linguistic competence. One upshot is that communication can be lucky in a way that transmission of knowledge cannot. The wider conclusion is that communication and transmission of knowledge do have something to do with one another—but not what proponents of the widespread view have supposed.

This chapter argues for an alternative to what I call the ‘standard view’ of communicative use of singular terms. On this view, communication using a singular term requires that speaker and hearer treat it as standing for the same object, and that their doing so be secured in an appropriately non-lucky way. The first part of the paper uses cases involving ‘felicitous non-specificity’, where communication using a singular term runs smoothly even though participants in the conversation do not have a specific object in mind, to raise an initial challenge to the standard view. The rest of the paper motivates an alternative account of what must go non-luckily right in communicative uses of singular terms, and shows how this account solves the initial puzzle. According to the alternative account, ordinary thinking about ordinary things involves sustaining relations of cognitive focus upon them, and communicative use of singular terms involves engagement in joint cognitive-focus-sustaining activity. But a focus relation has a degree of resolution. So cases of felicitous non-specificity are predicted by the proposal: they are cases where speaker and hearer are engaged in a joint focus-sustaining activity at a degree of resolution too coarse to distinguish one potential referent from another.

This paper develops a radical alternative to standard accounts of descriptive names. A ‘descriptive name’ is a singular term introduced by a stipulation of form ┌ Let _ α _ refer to the _ Ψ _ ┐. It is shown that—contrary to standard views—the reference-fixing mechanism for a descriptive name is not satisfactional. §1 argues for a background view of reference-fixing for ordinary language singular terms. §2 shows how this view generates a non-satisfactional account of reference-fixing for descriptive names. §3 explores the implications of the discussion in §§1–2 for the possibility of descriptively mediated singular thought. §4 argues for a new account of what speaker and hearer are committed to when the speaker makes and the hearer accepts a ┌ Let _ α _ refer to the _ Ψ _ ┐ stipulation.

I propose an amendment to Sosa’s virtue reliabilism. Sosa’s framework assigns a central role to sophisticated, conceptual, motivational states: ‘intentions to affirm aptly’. I argue that the suggestion that ordinary knowers in fact are motivated by such intentions in everyday belief-forming situations is at best problematic, and explore the possibility of an alternative virtue reliabilist framework. In this alternative framework, the role Sosa assigns to ‘intentions to affirm aptly’ is played instead by non-conceptual motivational states, which I call ‘needs’. The first part of the paper sketches Sosa’s framework. The second develops the need-based alternative. I close by comparing the two proposals, concluding that the onus is at least on Sosa to say why his intention-based framework should be preferred.

Here is one argument against realism. (1) Realists are committed to the classical rules for negation. But (2) legitimate rules of inference must conserve evidence. And (3) the classical rules for negation do not conserve evidence. So (4) realism is wrong. Most realists reject 2. But it has recently been argued that if we allow denied sentences as premisses and conclusions in inferences we will be able to reject 3. And this new argument against 3 generates a new response to the antirealist argument: keep 1 and 2, avoiding 4 by rejecting 3. My aim in this paper is to see how much work in the fight against anti-realism this new response can really do. I argue that there is a powerful objection to the response: 2 is in tension with the claim that denied sentences can be premisses and conclusions in inferences. But I show that, even given this objection, the new response has an important role to play.

This paper is about the claim that, necessarily, a subject who can think that a is F must also have the capacities to think that a is G, a is H, a is I, and so on (for some reasonable range of G, H, I), and that b is F, c is F, d is F, and so on (for some reasonable range of b, c, d). I set out, and raise objections to, two arguments for a strong version of this claim (Gareth Evans' generality constraint). I present a new argument for a weaker version of the claim, and sketch some directions of enquiry which this new argument opens up.

Imogen Dickie develops an account of aboutness-fixing for thoughts about ordinary objects, and of reference-fixing for the singular terms we use to express them. Extant discussions of this topic tread a weary path through descriptivist proposals, causalist alternatives, and attempts to combine the most attractive elements of each. The account developed here is a new beginning. It starts with two basic principles, the first of which connects aboutness and truth, and the second of which connects truth and justification. These principles combine to yield a third principle connecting aboutness and justification. Dickie uses the principle to explain how the relations to objects that enable us to think about them--perceptual attention; understanding of proper names; grasp of descriptions--do their aboutness-fixing and thought-enabling work. The book includes discussions of the nature of singular thought and the relation between thought and consciousness.

: ‘Sortalism about demonstrative reference’ is the view that the capacity to refer to things demonstratively rests on the capacity to classify them according to their kinds. This paper argues for one form of sortalism. Section 1 distinguishes two sortalist views. Section 2 argues that one of them is false. Section 3 argues that the other is true. Section 4 uses the argument from Section 3 to develop a new response to the objection to sortalism from examples where we seem to succeed in referring even though we get sortal classification wrong, or do not attempt to classify at all.