Takaaki Matsui

Japan Society for The Promotion of Science
Hitotsubashi University
  •  721
    Inferentialism and Semantic Externalism: A Neglected Debate between Sellars and Putnam
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (1): 126-145. 2021.
    In his 1975 paper “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”, Hilary Putnam famously argued for semantic externalism. Little attention has been paid, however, to the fact that already in 1973, Putnam had presented the idea of the linguistic division of labor and the Twin Earth thought experiment in his comment on Wilfrid Sellars’s “Meaning as Functional Classification” at a conference, and Sellars had replied to Putnam from a broadly inferentialist perspective. The first half of this paper aims to trace the dev…Read more
  •  300
    Sellars, Analyticity, and a Dynamic Picture of Language
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
    Even after Quine’s critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Wilfrid Sellars maintained some forms of analyticity or truth in virtue of meaning. This paper aims to reconstruct his neglected account of the analytic-synthetic distinction and the revisability of analytic sentences, its connection to his inferentialist account of meaning, and his response to Quine. While Sellars’s account of how analytic sentences can be revised bears certain similarities with Car…Read more