• Being at home : human beings and human bodies
    In Brian Leiter & Michael Rosen (eds.), The Oxford handbook of continental philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2007.
  •  7
    Radical self-silencing is a particular variety of speech act disablement where the subject silences themselves, whether knowingly or not, because of their own faults or deficiencies. The paper starts with some concrete cases and preparatory comments to help orient and motivate the investigation. It then offers a summary analysis, drawing on a small number of basic concepts to identify its five individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions and discriminating their two basic forms, ‘int…Read more
  •  6
    This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV V.
  •  3
    Wittgenstein on “I” and the Self
    In Hans-Johann Glock & John Hyman (eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein, Wiley-blackwell. 2017.
    Consensus identifies an underlying continuity to Wittgenstein's treatment of the self and 'I', despite certain obvious surface variations and revisions. Almost all Wittgenstein's arguments and observations concerning 'I' and the self in the Tractatus are arranged as attempts to explicate. The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world, not a part of it. The picture that…Read more
  •  4
    Critical notice
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (3). 1996.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  • Words and Life (review)
    Radical Philosophy 76. 1996.
  •  4
    Balance in The Golden Bowl: Attuning Philosophy and Literary Criticism
    In Sanjit Chakraborty & James Ferguson Conant (eds.), Engaging Putnam, De Gruyter. pp. 309-330. 2022.
    This paper argues that Henry James’ treatment of balancing in The Golden Bowl—to which Putnam insightfully draws attention—calls for the attunement of philosophy and literary criticism. The process may undermine Putnam’s own reading of the novel, but it also finds new reasons to endorse what his reading was meant to deliver: the confidence that philosophy and thoughtful appreciation of literature have much to contribute to each other, and the conviction that morality can incorporate (Kantian) se…Read more
  •  16
    Pledging my time
    In C. Sandis & G. Browning (eds.), Dylan at 80, Imprint Academic. forthcoming.
    Prompted by Bob Dylan's song of this title: an essay on the philosophical issues raised by the idea of pledging one's time, and doing so in and by performing a song.
  •  1
    Naturalist Semantics and the Appeal to Structure
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 44 (1): 57-74. 2010.
    We need not accommodate facts about meaning if Quine is right about the indeterminacy of subsentential expressions; there can be no such facts to accommodate. Evans argued that Quine's approach overlooks the ways speakers use predication to endow their use of subsentential expressions with the necessary determinacy. This paper offers a critical assessment of the debate in relation to current arguments about naturalism and shows how Evans's response depends on a basic claim that turns out to be f…Read more
  •  5
    Naturalist Semantics and the Appeal to Structure
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 44 (1): 57-74. 2006.
    We need not accommodate facts about meaning if Quine is right about the indeterminacy of subsentential expressions; there can be no such facts to accommodate. Evans argued that Quine’s approach overlooks the ways speakers use predication to endow their use of subsentential expressions with the necessary determinacy. This paper offers a critical assessment of the debate in relation to current arguments about naturalism and shows how Evans’s response depends on a basic claim that turns out to be f…Read more
  •  7
    Object-dependence in language and thought
    Language and Communication 21 (2). 2001.
  •  2
    How wrong can one be?
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96 (1): 387-394. 1996.
    Max de Gaynesford; How Wrong Can One Be?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 387–394, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.
  •  7
    What is it for poetry to be serious and to be taken seriously? What is it to be open to poetry, exposed to its force, attuned to what it says and alive to what it does? These are important questions that call equally on poetry and philosophy. But poetry and philosophy, notoriously, have an ancient quarrel. Maximilian de Gaynesford sets out to understand and convert their mutual antipathy into something mutually enhancing, so that we can begin to answer these and other questions. The key to attun…Read more
  •  8
    John McDowell on experience: Open to the sceptic?
    Metaphilosophy 29 (1-2): 20-34. 1998.
    The aim of this paper is to show that John McDowell’s approach to perception in terms of “openness”remains problematically vulnerable to the threat of scepticism. The leading thought of the openness view is that objects, events and others in the world, and no substitute, just are what is disclosed in perceptual experience. An account which aims to defend this thought must show, therefore, that the content of perceptual experience does not “all short” of its objects. We shall describe how McDowel…Read more
  • I fulfils its referential function in the deictic mode. Deictic terms fulfil their referential role by the action of making an individual salient. That is the genus to which demonstration, utterance-relative uniqueness, and leading candidature belong as species. I fulfils its referential role by making an individual salient. Salience is the determinant of the term.
  • ‘Rule theory’, or the claim that a simple rule is sufficient to give the meaning of I, is a myth. Theorists have not shown that it is even possible to say what this rule is, what it means, what it determines, or what functions as its context. No such rule could be sufficient to give the meaning of I because there are areas which it does not cover, there are areas in which it applies but is insufficient, there are occasions on which it should not be applied, and there are occasions on which it ca…Read more
  • The referential function of any singular term is to provide a positive answer to the question: ‘which individual is being spoken of?’, that is, to achieve determinacy of reference. What enables a singular term to carry out this function is the ‘determinant’ of the term. Demonstration is not the determinant of deictic terms because they can fulfil their referential function by appeal to utterance-relative uniqueness, or by leading candidacy given the surrounding discourse or perceptual environmen…Read more
  • ‘Independence’, or the claim that one can use I to express thoughts without having to identify what is being referred to, is a myth. It depends on a two-step argument from explanation: that it would make no sense to ask certain questions, and that we must appeal to ‘independence’ to explain this phenomenon. But other explanations are available, such as a pragmatic account. Alternatives are preferable since ‘independence’ not only threatens the referential character of I, its use to express thoug…Read more
  • ‘The guarantee’, or the claim that any use of I is logically guaranteed against reference-failure as a matter of the meaning of the term, is a myth. If security is a semantic truth, I cannot be a genuinely singular referring term. There is no argument for ‘the guarantee’, which is independent of ‘rule theory’ and ‘independence’. Even professed advocates of ‘the guarantee’ turn out to defend a non-semantic explanation of security.
  • The logical character of I is obligatorily deictic. Some variant devices have obligatory anaphoric reference, some are free, and some again have obligatory deictic reference. It is by singling out individuals made salient in the extra-sentential context that uses of this third sort refer. Substitution instances reveal and matching constraints confirm that each use of I must fall into this third category.
  • The inferential role of I is irreducibly deictic. The inferential roles of singular terms are distinguished by appeal to the different mechanisms required to guarantee co-reference in a knowledge-advancing way. Co-typicality is insufficient for variant terms. Anaphoric structures are insufficient for I and other terms used deictically; they depend on identity-judgements and keeping track. The inferential role of I and other deictic terms is irreducibly deictic: it is by singling out individuals …Read more
  • ‘Purism’, the claim that I is a pure indexical, is a contradictory position which requires the truth of three doctrines that have been shown to be myths: ‘rule theory’, ‘independence’, and ‘the guarantee’. A rash craving for simplicity explains its almost-universal support. ‘Purism’ is false for reasons that create a presumption in favour of a sharply diverging conception: that I is a deictic term. Thus, it is now necessary to establish what a ‘deictic term’ is, and whether I counts as one.
  •  42
    Is I Guaranteed to Refer?
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (2): 109-126. 2003.
    One claim about I, regularly made and almost universally endorsed, is that uses of the term are logically guaranteed to refer successfully (if they refer at all). The claim is only rarely formulated perspicuously or argued for. Such obscurity helps disguise the fact that those who profess to advance the claim actually turn out to support not a logical guarantee at all but merely high security through fortunate coincidence. This is not surprising. For we have no good reason to accept the claim – …Read more
  •  93
    What is at stake when J. L. Austin calls poetry ‘non‐serious’, and sidelines it in his speech act theory? (I). Standard explanations polarize sharply along party lines: poets (e.g. Geoffrey Hill) and critics (e.g. Christopher Ricks) are incensed, while philosophers (e.g. P. F. Strawson; John Searle) deny cause (II). Neither line is consistent with Austin's remarks, whose allusions to Plato, Aristotle and Frege are insufficiently noted (III). What Austin thinks is at stake is confusion, which he …Read more
  • The historical development towards the current standard account of I as a ‘pure indexical’ has two main features. First, the gradual acquisition of a logical apparatus which can distinguish genuine from non-singular referring expressions, and categorize the latter into names, descriptive terms, indexicals, and so on. Second, the development and acceptance of three supposed doctrines: that a simple rule is sufficient to give the meaning of I ; that one can use I to express thoughts without having…Read more