•  629
    Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (1): 50-74. 2024.
    Rae Langton and Caroline West argue that pornography silences women by presupposing misogynistic attitudes, such as that women enjoy being raped. More precisely, they claim that a somewhat infamous pictorial, ‘Dirty Pool’, makes such presuppositions, and that it is typical in this respect. I argue for four claims. (1) There are empirical reasons to doubt that women are silenced in the way that Langton and West claim they are. (2) There is no evidence that very much pornography makes the sorts of…Read more
  •  48
    Central to the liar paradox is the phenomenon of 'self-reference'. The paradox typically begins with a sentence like: (L): (L) is not true Historically, doubts about the intelligibility of self-reference have been quite common. In some sense, though, these doubts were answered by Kurt Gödel's famous 'diagonal lemma'. This paper surveys some of the methods by which self-reference can be achieved, focusing first on purely syntactic methods before turning attention to the 'arithmetized' methods…Read more
  •  79
    Sense as Mode of Representation
    In Modes of Representation, . pp. 200-258. forthcoming.
    There are two main models for explaining Frege's notion of sense, both of which have their roots in the work of Sir Michael Dummett. One, nowadays most familiar from the work of David Chalmers, is broadly internalist and descriptivist in character. The other, most familiar from the work of Gareth Evans, is externalist and anti-descriptivist. I first consider the former project, arguing that Dummett anticipated Chalmers's version of the view, and that no version of this view is going to be defens…Read more
  •  481
    Speaker’s Reference, Semantic Reference, and Intuition
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (2): 251-269. 2018.
    Some years ago, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich reported the results of experiments that reveal, they claim, cross-cultural differences in speaker’s ‘intuitions’ about Kripke’s famous Gödel–Schmidt case. Several authors have suggested, however, that the question they asked their subjects is ambiguous between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. Machery and colleagues have since made a number of replies. It is argued here that these are ineffective. The larger lesson, however, concerns…Read more
  •  235
    A Note on the Logic of (Higher-Order) Vagueness
    Analysis 53 (4): 201-208. 1993.
    A discussion of Crispin Wright's 'paradox of higher-order vagueness', I suggest that the paradox may be resolved by careful attention to the logical principles used in its formulation. In particular, I focus attention on the rule of inference that allows for the inference from A to 'Definitely A', and argue that this rule, though valid, may not be used in subordinate deductions, e.g., in the course of a conditional proof. Wright's paradox uses the rule (or its equivalent) in this way.
  •  248
    A teaching document I've used in my courses on truth and on incompleteness. Aimed at students who have a good grasp of basic logic, and decent math skills, it attempts to give them the background they need to understand a proper statement of the classic results due to Gödel and Tarski, and sketches their proofs. Topics covered include the notions of language and theory, the basics of formal syntax and arithmetization, formal arithmetic (Q and PA), representability, diagonalization, and the incom…Read more
  •  207
    This is a completely informal presentation of the ideas behind the diagonal lemma. One really can't see this important result from too many different angles. This one aims at getting the main idea across. (For the cognoscenti, it is in the spirit of Quine's treatment in terms of "appended to its own quotation".)
  •  1725
    Frege’s Theorem: An Introduction
    The Harvard Review of Philosophy 7 (1): 56-73. 1999.
    A brief, non-technical introduction to technical and philosophical aspects of Frege's philosophy of arithmetic. The exposition focuses on Frege's Theorem, which states that the axioms of arithmetic are provable, in second-order logic, from a single non-logical axiom, "Hume's Principle", which itself is: The number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs if, and only if, the Fs and Gs are in one-one correspondence
  •  113
    Semantic Accounts of Vagueness
    In J. C. Beall (ed.), Liars and Heaps: New Essays on Paradox, Clarendon Press. 2004.
    Written as a comment on Crispin Wright's "Vagueness: A Fifth Column Approach", this paper defends a form of supervaluationism against Wright's criticisms. Along the way, however, it takes up the question what is really wrong with Epistemicism, how the appeal of the Sorities ought properly to be understood, and why Contextualist accounts of vagueness won't do.
  •  105
    The Finite and the Infinite in Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik
    In Matthias Schirn (ed.), The Philosophy of Mathematics Today, Clarendon Press. 1998.
    Discusses Frege's formal definitions and characterizations of infinite and finite sets. Speculates that Frege might have discovered the "oddity" in Dedekind's famous proof that all infinite sets are Dedekind infinite and, in doing so, stumbled across an axiom of countable choice.
  •  151
    Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, 82-3
    with George Boolos
    In Matthias Schirn (ed.), The Philosophy of Mathematics Today, Clarendon Press. 1998.
    A close look at Frege's proof in "Foundations of Arithmetic" that every number has a successor. The examination reveals a surprising gap in the proof, one that Frege would later fill in "Basic Laws of Arithmetic".
  •  46
    Perhaps the most important argument against deflationism is the so-called Success Argument: The success of certain behavioral strategies depends upon the truth of a person's beliefs. If so, then the notion of truth appears to play an important role in psychological explanation, contradicting the central thesis of deflationism. I argue here that this type of argument poses a particularly difficult problem for disquotationalism, but that the important case concerns the role that the falsity of a p…Read more
  •  45
    It has been known for some time that context-dependence poses a problem for disquotationalism, but the problem has largely been regarded as one of detail: one that will be solved by the right sort of cleverness. I argue here that the problem is one of principle and that extant solutions, which are based upon the notion of translation, cannot succeed.
  •  367
    What Bar-On and Simmons call 'Conceptual Deflationism' is the thesis that truth is a 'thin' concept in the sense that it is not suited to play any explanatory role in our scientific theorizing. One obvious place it might play such a role is in semantics, so disquotationalists have been widely concerned to argued that 'compositional principles', such as (C) A conjunction is true iff its conjuncts are true are ultimately quite trivial and, more generally, that semantic theorists have misconce…Read more
  •  1097
    How Not To Watch Feminist Pornography
    Feminist Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1). 2021.
    This paper has three goals. The first is to defend Tristan Taromino and Erika Lust (or some of their films) from criticisms that Rebecca Whisnant and Hans Maes make of them. Toward that end, I will be arguing against the narrow conceptions that Whisnant and Maes have of what `feminist' pornography must be like. More generally, I hope to show by example why it is important to take pornographic films seriously as films if we're to understand their potential to shape, or mis-shape, socio-sexual nor…Read more
  •  256
    Disquotationalism is the view that the only notion of truth we really need is one that can be wholly explained in terms of such trivialities as: “Snow is white” is true iff snow is white. The 'Classical Disquotational Strategy' attempts to establish this view case by case, by showing that each extant appeal to truth, in philosophical or scientific explanations, can be unmasked as an appeal only to disquotational truth. I argue here that the Classical Strategy fails in at least two cases: attribu…Read more
  •  110
    Reply to Hintikka and Sandu: Frege and Second-Order Logic
    Journal of Philosophy 90 (8): 416-424. 1993.
    Hintikka and Sandu had argued that 'Frege's failure to grasp the idea of the standard interpretation of higher-order logic turns his entire foundational project into a hopeless daydream' and that he is 'inextricably committed to a non-standard interpretation' of higher-order logic. We disagree.
  •  428
    The Birth of Semantics
    Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 8 (6): 1-31. 2020.
    We attempt here to trace the evolution of Frege’s thought about truth. What most frames the way we approach the problem is a recognition that hardly any of Frege’s most familiar claims about truth appear in his earliest work. We argue that Frege’s mature views about truth emerge from a fundamental re-thinking of the nature of logic instigated, in large part, by a sustained engagement with the work of George Boole and his followers, after the publication of Begriffsschrift and the appearance of c…Read more
  •  798
    Pornography and accommodation
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (8): 830-860. 2021.
    ABSTRACT In ‘Scorekeeping in a Pornographic Language Game’, Rae Langton and Caroline West borrow ideas from David Lewis to attempt to explain how pornography might subordinate and silence women. Pornography is supposed to express certain misogynistic claims implicitly, through presupposition, and to convey them indirectly, through accommodation. I argue that the appeal to accommodation cannot do the sort of work Langton and West want it to do: Their case rests upon an overly simplified model of …Read more
  •  187
    The Logical Strength of Compositional Principles
    Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 59 (1): 1-33. 2018.
    This paper investigates a set of issues connected with the so-called conservativeness argument against deflationism. Although I do not defend that argument, I think the discussion of it has raised some interesting questions about whether what I call “compositional principles,” such as “a conjunction is true iff its conjuncts are true,” have substantial content or are in some sense logically trivial. The paper presents a series of results that purport to show that the compositional principles for…Read more
  •  1107
    Solving Frege's puzzle
    Journal of Philosophy 109 (1-2): 728-732. 2012.
    So-called 'Frege cases' pose a challenge for anyone who would hope to treat the contents of beliefs (and similar mental states) as Russellian propositions: It is then impossible to explain people's behavior in Frege cases without invoking non-intentional features of their mental states, and doing that seems to undermine the intentionality of psychological explanation. In the present paper, I develop this sort of objection in what seems to me to be its strongest form, but then offer a response to…Read more
  •  363
    Formal Arithmetic Before Grundgesetze
    In Philip A. Ebert & Marcus Rossberg (eds.), Essays on Frege's Basic Laws of Arithmetic, Oxford University Press. pp. 497-537. 2019.
    A speculative investigation of how Frege's logical views change between Begriffsschrift and Grundgesetze and how this might have affected the formal development of logicism.
  •  292
    The Basic Laws of Cardinal Number
    In Philip A. Ebert & Marcus Rossberg (eds.), Essays on Frege's Basic Laws of Arithmetic, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-30. 2019.
    An overview of what Frege accomplishes in Part II of Grundgesetze, which contains proofs of axioms for arithmetic and several additional results concerning the finite, the infinite, and the relationship between these notions. One might think of this paper as an extremely compressed form of Part II of my book Reading Frege's Grundgesetze.
  •  386
    Logicism, Ontology, and the Epistemology of Second-Order Logic
    In Ivette Fred Rivera & Jessica Leech (eds.), Being Necessary: Themes of Ontology and Modality from the Work of Bob Hale, Oxford University Press. pp. 140-169. 2018.
    In two recent papers, Bob Hale has attempted to free second-order logic of the 'staggering existential assumptions' with which Quine famously attempted to saddle it. I argue, first, that the ontological issue is at best secondary: the crucial issue about second-order logic, at least for a neo-logicist, is epistemological. I then argue that neither Crispin Wright's attempt to characterize a `neutralist' conception of quantification that is wholly independent of existential commitment, nor Hale's …Read more
  •  15
    Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 43 (171): 223-233. 1993.
  •  252
    One of the earliest discussions of the so-called 'bad company' objection to Neo-Fregeanism, I show that the consistency of an arbitrary second-order 'contextual definition' (nowadays known as an 'abstraction principle' is recursively undecidable. I go on to suggest that an acceptable such principle should satisfy a condition nowadays known as 'stablity'.
  •  289
    Cognitive Hunger: Remarks on Imogen Dickie's Fixing Reference
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (3): 738-744. 2017.
    The main focus of my comments is the role played in Dickie's view by the idea that "the mind has a need to represent things outside itself". But there are also some remarks about her (very interesting) suggestion that descriptive names can sometimes fail to refer to the object that satisfies the associated description.
  •  194
    The Frontloading Argument
    Philosophical Studies 175 (10): 2583-2608. 2018.
    Maybe the most important argument in David Chalmers’s monumental book Constructing the World is the one he calls the ‘Frontloading Argument’, which is used in Chapter 4 to argue for the book’s central thesis, A Priori Scrutability. And, at first blush, the Frontloading Argument looks very strong. I argue here, however, that it is incapable of securing the conclusion it is meant to establish.