Reinaldo Elugardo

In a well known paper, “Mind and Ideas in Berkeley” George Pitcher has argued that Berkeley's account of how minds are related to sensible ideas must be incoherent. Douglas Odegard has already criticized Pitcher's treatment of Berkeley, but the criticisms pertain to other questions. No one appears to have challenged Pitcher's most important argument. I hope to show that, while it is well worth analyzing, the argument fails to provide any effective reductio ad absurdum of Berkeley's real position.Pitcher's argument trades on two logically independent versions of the adverbial analysis of ideas. The first is what I shall call “the identity version”. Its proponent asserts that the ideas are identical with sensings, with mental acts or states of sensing which are adverbially describable. The philosopher who follows the second or “constitutive” version asserts that ideas are sensa and exist as constituents of sensing states. For him ideas are not mental states but are constituents of such states. A sponsor of either version will hold that sensings are qualities of the mind.

In his paper, “Descriptions, Indexicals, and Belief Reports: Some Dilemmas (But Not the Ones You Expect)” (Mind 104, (1995)), Stephen Schiffer presents a powerful argument against anyone who accepts a Russellian account of definite descriptions (including incomplete descriptions) and who also accepts a direct referential account of indexicals. On the one hand, the most plausible version of the Theory of Descriptions, namely, the Hidden-Indexical Theory of Descriptions, entails that a speaker who uses an incomplete description, “the F”, referentially means some description-theoretic, object-independent proposition by an utterance of a sentence of the form, “The F is G”. On the other hand, since speaker meaning supervenes on one’s psychological states, what holds for referential uses of incomplete descriptions must also hold for referential uses of indexicals and demonstatives. In other words, speakers who produce literal, referential, indexical utterances of the form, “" is G” also mean some description-theoretic proposition by their utterances. Furthermore, the Russellian has no non-arbitrary reason for preferring a direct referential account of indexicals, which he should accept, to a rival, incompatible account which treats indexicals as disguised descriptions. In my paper, I argue that the Russellian does have such a reason: the rival account cannot explain all the relevant speaker meaning facts that the direct reference theory can. I conclude the paper by defending the Russellian view that, in producing a referential utterance of “the F is G”, a speaker can mean a description-theoretic proposition and, in addition, mean an object-dependent proposition involving the speaker’s referent.

In this paper, I have argued that Lewis fails to undermine thatP-theory by means of a variation of Kripke'sPuzzle. The flaw in Lewis's argument, given a wide interpretation ofworld-fitness, is that it simply begs the question against theP-theorist. I then argued that, given the narrow interpretation ofworld-fitness, Lewis's argument fails because Pierre doesn't have a belief that is narrowly characterizable by a sentence like,Pierre believes that the city that he identifies asLondon is pretty in either Kripke's story or even in Lewis's own variation of Kripke's story. It now remains to be seen whether theP-theory can be directly refuted by other arguments