Snow Zhang

A metasemantic theory tells us why a particular concept has its particular content, for example, why the concept orang-utan has orang-utans as its content, rather than Sumatran orang-utans or apes. Many believe that the content of a concept has some important causal explanatory connection to that concept. But a plethora of properties stand in a causal explanatory connection to our concepts without being their contents—this is the Filtering Problem. In this paper, I leverage work from the general philosophy of science on causal explanation to make progress on the Filtering Problem. The working hypothesis is that a concept’s content is the property that best explains why that concept was formed. I use the explanatory virtues of proportionality, homogeneity, and distal balance to weed out problematic contents. The picture that emerges is one where much of the work of metasemantics can be accomplished by appealing to general principles in the theory of good explanation rather than the particularities of mental representation itself.

One of the central problems in the philosophy of action is to spell out the distinction between action and what merely happens, e.g., a wink versus an eye twitch. This essay proposes a theory of action offering an account of this distinction. The central claim of the theory is that action is movement that is controlled by the mover, where movement is understood capaciously and control is characterized by a trio of conditions consisting of an aim condition, a modal condition, and an explanatory condition. Importantly, being controlled is shown to be a determinable property of movements, and its determination dimensions are isolated. Paired with the claim that action is movement that is controlled by the mover, this account of control as a determinable illuminates the diversity within the category of action.