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8Les tremblements de terre aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: La naissance d'un risque (review)Isis 100 164-165. 2009.
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A Little Sensitivity goes a Long WayIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: New Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics, Oxford University Press Uk. 2007.
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13À L'aube De La Géologie Moderne: Henri Gautier By François Ellenberger (review)Isis 70 619-619. 1979.
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33Rampant moral relativism is widely decried as the leading source of the degeneracy of modern life.1 Though I proudly count myself a relativist, I rather doubt that relativism has anything like the cultural influence that its most ardent critics fearfully attribute to it. Much of what gets criticized under the rubric of relativism is often really no such thing. Relativists need not be hedonists, egoists, nihilists or even moral skeptics. Moreover, when it comes to the upper reaches of our intelle…Read more
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109De Re And De Dicto: Against The Conventional WisdomNoûs 36 (s16): 225-265. 2002.Conventional wisdom has it that there is a class of attitude ascriptions such that in making an ascription of that sort, the ascriber undertakes a commitment to specify the contents of the ascribee’s head in what might be called a notionally sensitive, ascribee-centered way. In making such an ascription, the ascriber is supposed to undertake a commitment to specify the modes of presentation, concepts or notions under which the ascribee cognizes the objects (and properties) that her beliefs are a…Read more
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169Moral relativism is often rejected on grounds that it is either descriptively inadequate, at best, or self-defeating, at worst. In this essay, I swim against the predominant anti-relativistic philosophical tide. My minimal aim is to show that relativism is neither descriptively inadequate nor self-defeating. My maximal aim is to outline the beginnings of an argument that relativism is a truth resting on deep facts about the human normative predicament. And I shall suggest that far from being a s…Read more
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99Meaning, Reference and Cognitive SignificanceMind and Language 10 (1-2): 129-180. 1995.I argue that a certain initially appealing Fregean conception of our shared semantic competence in our shared language cannot be made good. In particular, I show that we must reject two fundamental Fregean principles‐what I call Frege's Adequacy Condition and what I call Frege's Cognitive Constraint on Reference Determination. Frege's adequacy condition says that in an adequate semantic theory, sentence meanings must have the same fineness of grain as attitude contents. The Cognitive Constraint …Read more
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124Singular beliefs and their ascriptionsIn Reference and the Rational Mind, Csli Publications. 2003.This essay defends three interlocking claims about singular beliefs and their ascriptions. The first is a claim about the nature of such beliefs; the second is a claim about the semantic contents of ascriptions of such beliefs; the third is a claim about the pragmatic significance of such ascriptions. With respect to the nature of singular belief, I claim that the contents of our singular beliefs are a joint product of mind and world, with neither mind nor world enjoying any peculiar priority ov…Read more
Stanford, California, United States of America