Julian Dodd

This chapter argues that alethic pluralism has not been successfully motivated. The strategy deployed to demonstrate this contention is to claim, first, that a deflationary version of alethic monism is the default position in the theory of truth and, second, that no pluralist arguments offered up to now have been sufficient to defeat it. Considerations of theoretical economy suggest that some form or other of deflationism is prima facie correct, and, lest it be alleged that no defensible version of deflationism exists, Wolfgang Künne’s modest account—which deploys sentential quantification—is presented as defensible and as neatly side-stepping problems afflicting Horwich’s minimalist theory. From this deflationary perspective, a general counter is made to those with pluralist sympathies, whose arguments are found to be unconvincing. In particular, the deflationist will remain unmoved by the two most prominent attempts in the literature to motivate pluralism: those of Crispin Wright and Michael Lynch.

This collection brings together key contemporary texts in metaphysics and features an interactive commentary which helps readers engage the texts critically and to use them to develop their own views. Each text is followed by a detailed commentary, setting it in context Includes questions designed to help readers think hard about what the author is saying and why, to think of objections, and to formulate his or her own views Aims to improve the reader’s ability to engage critically with philosophical texts, and to use them as a springboard for philosophical thought and writing Introduces readers to the perennial problems of metaphysics and the ways that different analytic philosophers have approached them.

This paper identifies a previously unrecognized, and philosophically interesting, kind of mistake that can be made by a composer in composing a work of Western classical music. Specifically, she may err by writing some scored instructions for performance that undercut the meaning of her own work. Since following those instructions would frustrate the most fundamental purpose of performing that work—namely, to evince understanding of it—the practice of work-performance sanctions performers to correct those mistakes in performance by departing from the score where necessary. The possibility of this kind of mistake and their correction lies, we argue, in the distinction between a work’s meaning and its elaboration in the scored instructions for performance. We substantiate this claim and defend it against the tight constraint thesis, the view that a work’s meaning is determined by the totality of its score’s instructions. This thesis will be revealed to be both in conflict with the manifest image of our performance practice and philosophically unmotivated. Finally, we consider the scope of the composer’s authority in light of the possibility of the sort of mistakes and their correction that concern us here.

In a sense that will be made more precise in the essay that follows, someone might think that it is possible for an artist's work to be rendered less artistically successful by mere dint of her own immoral behaviour or character. Using Woody Allen's film, Manhattan, as a case study, I explain what lies in the way of making good such a claim and, ultimately, why I am highly sceptical about such a project's prospects. In short, what must be established is that knowledge of the author's putative misdeeds or character flaws enables us to better understand the artwork in question, as opposed to distracting us from doing so, and it is extremely difficult to argue for this thesis in a principled, cogent way. Someone who tries to provide such an argument, in discussing Manhattan, is Erich Hatala Matthes. I explain where his argument fails and, in doing this, also suggest that he misinterprets the film.

Robert Trueman (2022) sets out and defends an ‘immodest’ identity theory of truth: that is, an identity theory in which the facts with which true propositions are identical are things whose totality is the world: i.e. obtaining states of affairs. This brief reply argues that Truman’s theory falls foul of a perennial objection to such immodest identity theories: namely, that it cannot explain how a candidate proposition’s putative elements can be unified into a proposition proper without this proposition being true.

This paper addresses what I call ‘the constitutive question’ concerning the rules we follow: namely, what determines the standard for a rule's correct application. John McDowell has offered a putative ‘middle position’ between two extreme, unacceptable answers: empirical idealism, which takes the requirements of a rule in any given situation to be constituted by our reaction to the case; and hard platonism, which takes these requirements to be delivered by unvarnished reality as absolutely the simplest or most natural way to carry on. Tellingly, however, McDowell's position is itself unacceptably idealist in his picture of the way in which we are ‘involved’ on the right-hand side of biconditionals such as, ‘“Diamonds are hard” is true if and only if diamonds are hard’.In response to this stultifying state of affairs, I suggest that McDowell has followed the empirical idealist and hard platonist in assuming that the requirements of a rule must be grounded by something else: something external to the rule, which mediates between the rule and the standard for its correct application. This assumption is false. What is more, one application of a metaphor to which Wittgenstein has a somewhat equivocal relation—that of rules as rails invisibly laid to infinity—can help this point to stick.

This paper is about style appropriation: the use by someone of stylistic cultural innovations distinctive of a cultural group that is not her own. While I agree with the key insight of C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl : 981-1002) – namely, that style appropriation is sometimes found objectionable because group intimacy is believed to have been breached – I disagree with their core claim that the settled beliefs of the group cannot be wrong about whether its group intimacy has, in fact, been compromised in this way. I accept that facts about group intimacy can generate normative reasons concerning style appropriation, but develop a distinctive account of how this comes to be so: one which holds that such facts are independently grounded, rather than being decided by group opinion. This alternative picture of how group intimacy grounds normative reasons does better justice to the intuitive thought that reality, including its normative regions, is belief-independent. The paper ends with some replies to potential objections.

In his last work, "Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology", Edmund Husserl formulated a radical new approach to phenomenological philosophy. Unlike his previous works, in the "Crisis" Husserl embedded this formulation in an ambitious reflection on the essence and value of the idea of rational thought and culture, a reflection that he considered to be an urgent necessity in light of the political, social, and intellectual crisis of the interwar period. In this book, James Dodd pursues an interpretation of Husserl's text that emphasizes the importance of the problem of the origin of philosophy, as well as advances the thesis that, for Husserl, the "crisis of reason" is not a contingent historical event, but a permanent feature of a life in reason generally.

Suppose that Eleanor is drowsy. Truth's asymmetry is illustrated by the following fact: while we accept that is true because Eleanor is drowsy, we do not accept that Eleanor is drowsy because is true. This asymmetry requires an explanation, but it has been alleged, notably by David Liggins, that the minimalist about truth cannot provide one. This paper counteracts this pessimism by arguing that the minimalist can successfully explain the asymmetry conceptually, rather than metaphysically. It then goes on to defend this account against objections, in the end concluding that explaining truth's asymmetry is no problem for the minimalist.

What is John Cage's 4′33″? This paper disambiguates this question into three sub-questions concerning, respectively, the work's ontological nature, the art form to which it belongs, and the genre it is in. We shall see that the work's performances consist of silence, that it is a work of performance art, and that it belongs to the genre of conceptual art. Seeing the work in these ways helps us to understand it better, and promises to assuage somewhat the puzzlement and irritation of those who are at first resistant to its charms.

We discuss how analysis of contemporary artworks has shaped philosophical theories about the concept of art, the ontology of art, and artistic media. The rapid expansion, during the contemporary period, of the kinds of things that can count as artworks has prompted a shift toward procedural definitions, which focus on how artworks are selected, and away from definitions that focus exclusively on artworks’ features or effects. Some contemporary artworks challenge the traditional art–ontological dichotomy between physical particulars and repeatable entities whose occurrences are physical particulars. And nontraditional techniques and materials employed in contemporary art violate the boundaries of conventional media, prompting a rethinking of what artistic medium might be.

It has recently been suggested that the type/token theorist concerning musical works cannot come up with an adequate semantic theory of those sentences in which we purport to talk about such works. Specifically, it has been claimed that, since types are abstract entities, a type/token theorist can only account for the truth of sentences such as “The 1812 Overture is very loud” and “Bach's Two Part Invention in C has an F-sharp in its fourth measure” by adopting an untenable semantic claim: namely, that the predicates in such sentences, once applied to musical works, undergo a systematic shift in their meanings. This article is a sustained explanation of why our talk about musical works in fact provides no problem for the type/token theorist. First, we demonstrate that the aforementioned “meaning shift” approach to the sentences’ predicates is well motivated and very credible. Second, we explain how the type/token theorist can adopt the best available version of an alternative, generic quantificational approach to such sentences. Third, we establish that other semantic theories, presented as undermining the type/token theory by giving us a reason for adopting eliminativism about types, are much less theoretically virtuous than the two theories that a type/token theorist can freely adopt.

This paper makes the following recommendation when it comes to the IogicaI form of sentences in indirect speech. Davidson’s paratactic account shouId stand, but with one emendation: the demonstrative ‘that’ should be taken to refer to the Fregean Thought expressed by the utterance of the content-sentence, rather than to that utterance itseIf. The argument for this emendation is that it is the onIy way of repIying to the objections to Davidson’s account raised by Schiffer, McFetridge and McDowell.Towards the end of the paper, a view of Fregean Thoughts as utterance-types is defended; and the recommendation offered in the main body of the paper is distinguished from the simiIar account offered by Ian Rumfitt.

Descriptivism in the ontology of art is the thesis that the correct ontological proposal for a kind of artwork cannot show the nascent ontological conception of such things embedded in our critical and appreciative practices to be substantially mistaken. Descriptivists believe that the kinds of revisionary art ontological proposals propounded by Nelson Goodman, Gregory Currie, Mark Sagoff, and me are methodologically misconceived. In this paper I examine the case that has been made for a local form of descriptivism in the ontology of art: a form that does not quarrel with the possibility of revisionism in matters of ‘fundamental metaphysics’, but which argues that special features of the arts make descriptivism in this particular sphere obligatory. David Davies, Andrew Kania and Stephen Davies are local descriptivists in this sense. I argue that the burden of proof lies with the local descriptivist, but that this burden is too heavy for him to carry. Specifically, it emerges that the only way in which the local descriptivist can motivate his position is by arguing that our artistic practices determine the art ontological facts: a thesis that local descriptivists typically appeal to, but have not been able to argue for successfully. My conclusion is that the methodological debate in the ontology of art should now proceed by focussing on the case for global descriptivism: i.e. that form of descriptivism that opposes the possibility of revisionism in ontological matters across the board.

This paper argues that, within the Western ‘classical’ tradition of performing works of music, there exists a performance value of authenticity that is distinct from that of complying with the instructions encoded in the work's score. This kind of authenticity—interpretive authenticity—is a matter of a performance's displaying an understanding of the performed work. In the course of explaining the nature of this norm, two further claims are defended: that the respective values of interpretive authenticity and score compliance can come into conflict; and that when this happens, compromising ideal score compliance for the sake of making the performance more interpretively authentic can make for a better performance.