Marga Reimer

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Understanding First: Exploring Its Scope and Testing Its LimitsMarga Reimer, PhD (bio)I thoroughly enjoyed reading and reflecting on this provocative, engagingly written, and persuasively argued paper. My commentary focuses on the authors’ “understanding first” principle. I begin by exploring that principle’s scope by appeal to aesthetic analogues to the moral cases of Pete and Jacob; I then explore its limits by appeal to cases involving agents struggling with maladaptive traits that are more self-destructive than antisocial.According to the authors, when attempting to eliminate or reduce a maladaptive trait, it is important that the agent begin with a non-moralizing understanding of that trait’s “root cause.” In this way, the agent avoids some of the epistemically distorting and otherwise counterproductive effects associated with an approach that begins with a moralizing assessment of the problematic trait. They can then proceed with a reason-based “dispensation” of that trait.The cases of Pete and Jacob make these points vivid and lend them considerable credence. Moreover, the authors’ “understanding first principle” arguably exemplifies a more general, and no less plausible, principle concerning the remediation of virtually any problem. Who would deny that an objective, non-normative, understanding of a problem’s “root cause” might be useful in addressing that problem? Who would deny that normativizing a problem before understanding its origin might prevent a deeper understanding of that problem and therewith its maximally effective “treatment”?One way to showcase the intuitiveness of the authors’ “understanding first” principle would be to explore the applicability of an analogous principle to problems beyond those involving “moral matters.” Problems involving aesthetics might prove particularly illuminating in this regard insofar as aesthetics, like morality, is inherently normative and yet it lies beyond the scope of morality proper. If an “understanding first” principle can be shown to be applicable to certain types of aesthetic problems, then the authors’ already strong case for the applicability of such a principle to certain types of moral problems would be further strengthened.In the cases of Pete and Jacob, the problems are unambiguously moral: the patently antisocial behaviors of these two individuals are paradigmatically “bad” and their premature assessment as [End Page 205] such can be epistemically distorting and otherwise counterproductive. Consider now analogous cases involving aesthetic problems. Pete and Lucie are getting ready for the holidays and are expecting family from out of town. But there are a couple of problems. Pete notices an “ugly” stain on the living room carpet and Lucie notices a subtle but decidedly “nasty” odor permeating the entire house. Neither Pete nor Lucie know where the stain came from, nor where the odor is coming from. But both the stain and the odor are “pretty gross” and so they need to “get rid of” them before family arrive. There’s no time for investigative work into “root causes.”Pete scrubs the stain until the portion of carpet beneath it is threadbare; Lucie buys three different deodorizers, all of which eliminate the odor but only temporarily. Had Pete and Lucie understood the root causes of the “ugly” stain and “nasty” smell, their treatments might have been different—and, importantly, more effective. The stain turned out to be caused by red wine, easily treatable without leaving a noticeable “bald spot.” The lingering odor was from an easily fixable plumbing problem, albeit one requiring more extensive (and costly) work.Pete and Lucie’s aesthetic evaluations (“ugly,” “nasty”), coupled with a lack of understanding of “root causes,” have predictable results: their control over some “pretty gross” problems is significantly diminished. Similarly, with respect to moral evaluations of maladaptive traits (“bad,” “wrong”) coupled with a lack of understanding of “root causes.” As the authors show, such evaluations can be epistemically distorting and otherwise counterproductive with the result that the agent’s control over the problematic trait is significantly reduced.Further aesthetic analogues are easy to develop and potentially even more revealing. Imagine that Pete and Lucie, who are expecting family later in the week, are experiencing symptoms, both respiratory and gastrointestinal, that are “kind of yucky.” As with the maladaptive traits of Pete and Jacob, the problematic traits in this case are literally “in” the agent (vs...

Metaphor has traditionally been construed as a linguistic phenomenon: as something produced and understood by speakers of natural language. So understood, metaphors are naturally viewed as linguistic expressions of a particular type, or as linguistic expressions used in a particular type of way. This linguistic conception of metaphor is adopted in this article. In doing so, the article does not intend to rule out the possibility of non-linguistic forms of metaphor. Many theorists think that non-linguistic objects or conceptual structures should also be treated as metaphors. Indeed, the idea that metaphors are in the first instance conceptual phenomena, and linguistic devices only derivatively, is the dominant view in what is now the dominant area of metaphor research: cognitive science. In construing metaphor as linguistic, the article merely intends to impose appropriate constraints on a discussion whose focus is the understanding and analysis of metaphor within contemporary philosophy of language.

Whether your scepticism is as absolute and sincere as you claim is something we shall learn later on, when we end this little meeting: we’ll then see whether you leave the room through the door or the window; and whether you really doubt that your body has gravity and can be injured by its fall—which is what people in general think on the basis of their fallacious senses and more fallacious experience. What Could Be more dissimilar than a well-argued philosophical thesis and a psychiatric delusion? Compare, for instance, Hume’s (1739) view that the self is nothing more than a “bundle” of perceptions with the psychiatric patient’s view that the thoughts in his head belong to someone else. Or, compare the ..

In a recent paper Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore challenge an assumption that they rightly claim is pervasive among contemporary philosophers of language. According to this assumption (MA), an adequate semantic theory T for a language L should assign p as the semantic content of a sentence S in L if and only if in uttering S a speaker says that p. I claim that the arguments of Cappelen and Lepore are based upon an uncharitable interpretation of MA. If ‘saying’ is understood in a roughly Gricean sense, MA emerges as an eminently plausible assumption.

Medical professionals, including mental health professionals, largely agree that moral judgment should be kept out of clinical settings. The rationale is simple: moral judgment has the capacity to impair clinical judgment in ways that could harm the patient. However, when the patient is suffering from a "Cluster B" personality disorder, keeping moral judgment out of the clinic might appear impossible, not only in practice but also in theory. For the diagnostic criteria associated with these particular disorders (Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic, Narcissistic) are expressed in overtly moral language. I consider three proposals for dealing with this problem. The first is to eliminate the Cluster B disorders from the DSM on the grounds that they are moral, rather than mental, disorders. The second is to replace the morally laden language of the diagnostic criteria with morally neutral language. The third is to disambiguate the notion of moral judgment so as to respect the distinction between having morally disvalued traits and having moral responsibility for those traits. Sensitivity to this distinction enables the clinician, at least in theory, to employ morally laden diagnostic criteria without adopting the sort of morally judgmental (and potentially harmful) attitude that results from the tacit presumption of moral responsibility. I argue against the first two proposals and in favor of the third. In doing so, I appeal to Grice's distinction between conventional and conversational implicature. I close with a few brief remarks on the irony of retaining overtly moral language in an ostensibly medical manual for the diagnosis of mental disorders.

Three views of demonstrative reference are examined: contextual, intentional, and quasi-intentional. According to the first, such reference is determined entirely by certain publicly accessible features of the context. According to the second, speaker intentions are criterial in demonstrative reference. And according to the third, both contextual features and intentions come into play in the determination of demonstrative reference. The first two views (both of which enjoy current popularity) are rejected as implausible; the third (originally proposed by Kaplan in Dthat) is argued to be highly plausible.

Patients with psychosis often have poor insight into their illness. Poor insight into illness is, at least among patients with psychosis, a good predictor of treatment non-adherence. This is no mystery, for as Xavier Amador asks, "Who would want to take medicine for an illness they did not believe they had?" What is curious is that some patients with psychosis do adhere to treatment despite a lack of insight. Why do these patients adhere to treatment, given that they do not believe they are ill to begin with? In this paper, I attempt to answer this question. I do so by first considering cases of non-psychotic patients who adhere to treatment despite a lack of insight. I point out that these sorts of cases are commonplace, and attempt to explain why they arise. The explanation is given in terms of anticipated treatment benefits. However, these benefits are not conceptualized by the patient in terms of pathology. The patient does not, in other words, think of such benefits in terms of illness, symptoms, treatment, and so forth. I then argue that the proposed explanation can be extended to account for why psychotic patients without insight sometimes adhere to treatment. I conclude by drawing out some of the practical implications of the proposed view. I first argue, on practical as well as ethical grounds, that improving insight for purposes of treatment adherence is misguided. I then suggest that such adherence might be increased simply by explaining treatment benefits in language that does not presuppose that the patient is, in any sense, "ill," "diseased," "sick," "unwell," and so on.

In this paper, I argue against Davidson's (1986) view that our ability to understand malapropisms forces us to re-think the standard construal of literal word meaning as conventional meaning. Specially, I contend that the standard construal is not only intuitive but also well-motivated, for appeal to conventional meaning is necessary to understand why speakers utter the particular words they do. I also contend that, contra Davidson, we can preserve the intuitive distinction between what a speaker means and what his words mean, even while retaining the standard construal of literal word meaning as conventional.

In Talk About Beliefs, Mark Crimmins claims that de re belief reports are not nearly as common as they are generally thought to be. In the following paper, I take issue with this claim. I begin with a critique of Crimmins’arguments on behalf of the claim, and then follow with an argument on behalf of the opposing claim: that de re belief reports are indeed quite common. In defending this claim, I make some observations about the nature of tacit reference, a phenomenon central to Crimmins’account of belief reports.

Does Keith Donnellan's referential/attributive distinction have ‘semantic significance’? Howard Wettstein has claimed (in several papers) that it does; Nathan Salmon has responded (in several papers) that it does not. Specifically, while Wettstein has claimed that definite descriptions, used referentially, function semantically as demonstratives, Salmon has responded to Wettstein's claims by defending a unitary Russellian account of such expressions, according to which they invariably function as quantifiers. This paper involves a critique of the debate between Wettstein and Salmon, and offers a tentative resolution of that debate: one that favors Wettstein's ‘ambiguity’ account over the unitary Russellian account defended by Salmon.

take leave of one’s senses English, Verb. 1. (idiomatic) To go crazy; to stop behaving rationally A Chief concern in “Only a Philosopher or a Madman” was to draw attention to a number of striking yet underappreciated similarities between paradigm psychiatric delusions and standard philosophical doctrines, “nihilistic” as well as “common sense.” The similarities were presented as illuminating given their potential to inform the debate over whether psychiatric delusions are properly (or usefully) conceptualized as beliefs. The paper’s central argument might be summarized as follows: Paradigm psychiatric delusions appear to differ, in particular ways, from ordinary beliefs. In essence, the ..