There are two main ways in which things with minds, like us, differ from things without minds, like tables and chairs. First, we are conscious--there is something that it is like to be us. We instantiate phenomenal properties. Second, we represent, in various ways, our world as being certain ways. We instantiate representational properties. Jeff Speaks attempts to make progress on three questions: What are phenomenal properties? What are representational properties? How are the phenomenal and the representational related?

I discuss and defend two arguments against semantic theories which wish to avoid commitment to propositions. The first holds that on the most plausible semantics of a class of natural language sentences, the truth of sentences in that class requires the existence of propositions; and some sentences in that class are true. The second holds that, on the best understanding of the form of a semantic theory, the truth of a semantic theory itself entails the existence of propositions. Much of (...) the discussion engages Davidsonian alternatives to a propositionalist semantic theory. (shrink)

What can we know about God by reason alone? Philosophical theology is the attempt to obtain such knowledge. An ancient tradition, which is perhaps more influential now than ever, tries to derive the attributes of God from the principle that God is the greatest possible being. Jeff Speaks argues that that constructive project is a failure. He also argues that the related view that the concept of God is the concept of a greatest possible being is a mistake. In the (...) last chapter, he sketches an alternative path forward. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Transcendence, Immanence, and Ultimacy: The Theological Adequacy of Religious NaturalismJeffrey B. Speaks (bio)I. IntroductionIn the Introduction of Volume II of his Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich positions his “self-transcendent” and “ecstatic” conception of God as a via media that moves beyond the conflict of supranaturalism and naturalism.1 While Tillich’s rejection of Supranaturalism (i.e., God as a being, or the highest being) and more aggressively reductive forms of naturalism (i.e., eliminative (...) materialism) is not surprising, ST:II has remained a challenging piece for the religious naturalist due to Tillich’s rejection of non-reductive, religious forms of naturalism (as well as pantheism) as theologically insufficient. For Tillich, even a religious naturalism that claims God is “identical with natura naturans, the creative nature, the creative ground of all natural objects” is objectionable because it “denies the infinite distance between the whole of finite things and their infinite ground, with the consequence that the term ‘God’ becomes interchangeable with the term ‘universe’ and therefore is semantically superfluous.”2 For the religious naturalist who has taken seriously Tillich’s claim that the object of religious concern should be something ultimate (i.e., the religious ultimate should also be metaphysically ultimate), this critique has the potential to be devastating by leaving the religious naturalist open to the charge of idolatry. Clearly, the challenge that Tillich raises to religious naturalism must be explored, wrestled with, and answered.The central problem that Tillich raises is that of transcendence—namely, that to qualify as metaphysically and religiously ultimate the referent of the word “God” must infinitely transcend the finite creature. How is it possible for a religious naturalism to register infinite transcendence (whether it uses the language of God or not) in what is often considered to be a radically immanentist theology? To establish the theological adequacy of religious naturalism, it is necessary to clarify what are religiously significant conceptions of transcendence and establish a metric by which varieties of religious naturalism can be evaluated. [End Page 44]The first section of this article will unpack Tillich’s conceptions of supra-naturalism, naturalism, and ecstatic/self-transcendent theism to clarify his critique of religious naturalism and explain why Tillich thinks infinite self-transcendence is necessary for a theologically satisfactory religious ultimate. The second section of this article will develop a conceptual framework for evaluating dimensions of transcendence within a religious naturalist metaphysical system. It will establish immanent transcendence as a vague comparative category, within which are three dimensions of transcendence at play: axiological self-transcendence, conceptual transcendence, and ontological transcendence. The three dimensions provide a framework for evaluating a religious naturalist philosophical theology: high scores in all three dimensions show that metaphysics registers a greater degree of transcendence. The third section of the article will test the evaluative framework on a test-subject, by examining the role of transcendence in Donald A. Crosby’s Religion of Nature.3 It will be shown that Crosby’s metaphysics show a great deal of promise in the dimensions of axiological self-transcendence and conceptual transcendence, but cannot register the degree of ontological self-transcendence that Tillich thinks an adequate religious ultimate requires.II. Paul Tillich’s Self-Transcendent TheismIn between the publication of the first and second volumes of his Systematic Theology, Tillich faced substantial criticism over the doctrine of God developed in the first volume: namely, that God is to be identified as being-itself, and beyond this statement “nothing else can be said about God as God which is not symbolic.”4 In the second volume, Tillich hoped to shed new light on his conception by reframing his God as being “beyond naturalism and supranaturalism,” or as “[overcoming] the conflict of naturalism and supranaturalism.”5 As Tillich’s terminology is somewhat idiosyncratic (e.g., supranaturalism), it behooves the reader to carefully determine what Tillich means by these terms in order to properly identify why his ecstatic conception of God overcomes this conflict.Tillich defines supranaturalism as the belief that God is the highest being. “In this position [God] has brought the universe into being at a certain moment... governs it according to his plan, directs it toward an end, interferes... (shrink)

In "Assertion," Geach identified failure to attend to the distinction between meaning and speech act as a source of philosophical errors. I argue that failure to attend to this distinction, along with the parallel distinction between attitude and content, has been behind the idea that meaning and content are, in some sense, normative. By an argument parallel to Geach's argument against performative analyses of "good" we can show that the phenomena identified by theorists of the normativity of content are properties (...) in the first instance of speech act and propositional attitude types, rather than content as such. (shrink)

In Felicitous Underspecification, Jeffrey King draws our attention to a rich and underexplored collection of linguistic data. These are uses of context-sensitive expressions which seem perfectly felicitous despite being such that, on plausible assumptions, the context in which they are used falls short of securing for them a unique semantic value. This raises an immediate puzzle: if, as King argues, these uses of expressions really do lack unique semantic values in context, how can they—as they manifestly do—make contributions to the (...) conversations in which they occur? King answers this question with a novel theory of conversational updating. Here I focus less on this theory than on King’s examples, and consider some ways of accommodating them without positing felicitous underspecification. In some cases I give some reasons for thinking that the alternative explanation is superior. But my aim is less to establish this conclusion than to suggest some new options for thinking about these examples, and hopefully by so doing to advance the conversation about the data to which King has drawn our attention. (shrink)

Since the 1960's, work in the analytic tradition on the nature of mental and linguistic content has converged on the views that social facts about public language meaning are derived from facts about the thoughts of individuals, and that these thoughts are constituted by properties of the internal states of agents. I give a two-part argument against this picture of intentionality: first, that if mental content is prior to public language meaning, then a view of mental content much like the (...) causal-pragmatic theory presented by Robert Stalnaker in Inquiry must be correct; second, that the causal-pragmatic theory is false. I conclude with some positive suggestions regarding alternative solutions to the `problem of intentionality.'. (shrink)

Demonstratives have different semantic values relative to different contexts of utterance. But it is surprisingly difficult to describe the function from contexts to contents which determines the semantic value of a given use of a demonstrative. It is very natural to think that the intentions of the speaker should play a significant role here. The aim of this paper is to discuss a pair of problems that arise for views which give intentions this central role in explaining the characters of (...) demonstratives. As will emerge, these problems lead quickly to a foundational question about the semantics of demonstratives and many other context-sensitive expressions: the question of whether, in explaining their characters, we need to understand them as sensitive, not just to facts about the psychology of the speaker of the context, but also to facts about the audience of the context. I critically examine Jeffrey King’s theory of demonstratives, which answers this question in the affirmative, and argue that it ultimately collapses into a purely speaker-based view of the character of demonstratives. I then show how to develop a much simpler speaker-based theory which both handles all of the cases handled by King’s theory and avoids some of the more serious problems which King’s theory faces. Towards the end I consider how we might solve the very difficult problems which result from cases in which speakers use demonstratives with conflicting referential intentions. (shrink)

In this paper I do four things. (1) I explain one clear thing that ‘the problem of the unity of the proposition’ might mean. (2) I lay out a few different versions of the theory of propositions as cognitive acts, and explain why this problem arises for the version of that theory which has been defended in different forms by Peter Hanks and Scott Soames. (3) I argue that the natural ways in which the act theorist might try to solve (...) the problem fail to solve it; (4) I propose a way to fix the problem, and then I explain how the problem re-emerges in the act theorist’s treatment of propositional attitude relations. (shrink)

Theories of propositions as complex acts, of the sort recently defended by Peter Hanks and Scott Soames, make room for the existence of distinct propositions which nonetheless represent the same objects as having the same properties and standing in the same relations. This theoretical virtue is due to the claim that the complex acts with which propositions are identified can include particular ways of cognizing, or referring to, objects and properties. I raise two questions about this sort of view—one about (...) what it means to stand in a propositional attitude relation to a complex act of this sort, and one about which ways of cognizing can be parts of propositions. Both questions turn out to be difficult for the complex act theorist to answer in a satisfactory way. (shrink)

In recent work, Michael Tye has criticized a certain sort of representationalist view of experience for holding that phenomenal characters are properties of experiences. Instead, Tye holds that phenomenal character is 'out there in the world.' This paper has two aims. One is to argue for the somewhat surprising conclusion that Tye’s apparently radical new view is not a change in view at all, but a notational variant of a standard representationalist theory. My more general aim, though, is to lay (...) out a bit more clearly than is usually done the basic metaphysics of representationalist views of consciousness. In the end, what I argue is that unclarity on this score is what has permitted the choice between standard representationalist theories and Tye’s new position to appear to be something more than a verbal question. I conclude by discussing the bearing of this on the question of whether we can be aware of phenomenal character in introspection, and the relative importance of properties of subjects and properties of experiences in the theory of consciousness. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to lay out a number of theses which are very widely held in contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics, and to argue that, given some extra theses for which I’ll argue, they are inconsistent. Some of this will involve going through some very well-trodden territory—my hope is that presenting this familiar ground in the way that I do will help to make plain the problem that I aim to identify.

One of Kripke's fundamental objections to descriptivism was that the theory misclassifies certain _a posteriori_ propositions expressed by sentences involving names as _a priori_. Though nowadays very few philosophers would endorse a descriptivism of the sort that Kripke criticized, many find two-dimensional semantics attractive as a kind of successor theory. Because two-dimensionalism needn't be a form of descriptivism, it is not open to the epistemic argument as formulated by Kripke; but the most promising versions of two-dimensionalism are open to a (...) close relative of that argument. (shrink)

This is the written version of a reply to Michael Tye's "Transparency, Qualia Realism, and Representationalism," given at the 40th Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy. It argues that, given one standard way of understanding these theses, qualia realism is trivially true and transparency theses are trivially false. I also discuss four objections to Tye's claim that the phenomenal character of the experience of red just is redness, and conclude by arguing that philosophers of perception should state their claims as about the (...) properties of subjects of experience rather than as about the properties of experiences themselves. (shrink)

Increasingly, beginning in the 1970’s and 1980’s, many philosophers of language found themselves in a difficult situation. On the one hand, many came to believe that, in order to do semantics properly, as well as to give an adequate treatment of the attitudes, one needed to posit certain entities — propositions — which could be the meanings of sentences (relative to contexts), the contents of mental states, and the primary bearers of truth and falsity. However, many — largely due to (...) the arguments of Scott Soames1 — also came to distrust the standard theoretical account of the nature of propositions, which treated them as sets of worlds, and came to think of them instead as structured entities of some sort. (shrink)

I reply to the argument of Caplan (Philos Stud 133:181–198, 2007 ) against the conjunction of Millianism with the view that utterances of sentences involving names often pragmatically convey descriptively enriched propositions.

I defend the view that propositions are a kind of property which is true iff it is instantiated. I discuss how we should think about propositional attitudes on this sort of view, and explain why I favor this sort of view over the more familiar Chisholm/Lewis view that attitudes are self-ascriptions of properties. I conclude by raising, and briefly discussing, two problems for the kind of view of propositions I favor.

Millians sometimes claim that we can explain the fact that sentences like "If Hesperus exists, then Hesperus is Phosphorus" seem a posteriori to speakers in terms of the fact that utterances of sentences of this sort would typically pragmatically convey propositions which really are a posteriori. I argue that this kind of pragmatic explanation of the seeming a posterioricity of sentences of this sort fails. The main reason is that for every sentence like the above which (by Millian lights) is (...) a priori, seems a posteriori to most speakers, and would typically be used to convey a posteriori propositions, there is another which (again, by Millian lights) is a priori, seems a posteriori to most speakers, but can only typically be used to convey a priori propositions. (shrink)

The essay which follows is about the relationship between mind and language. Most recent thought about intentionality has it that mental states of individuals are largely, or in the most fundamental cases, independent of social facts about public languages, and these social facts are derived from, or constituted by, the mental states of individuals. The purpose of this essay is to challenge this individualist orthodoxy , and suggest in its place a communitarian picture of intentionality which gives public languages a (...) role to play in the constitution of thought. (shrink)

Comments on one of the main lines of argument in Gillian Russell's excellent _Truth in Virtue of Meaning_.

Some linguistic phenomena can occur in uses of language in thought, whereas others only occur in uses of language in communication. I argue that this distinction can be used as a test for whether a linguistic phenomenon can be explained via Grice’s theory of conversational implicature. I argue further, on the basis of this test, that conversational implicature cannot be used to explain quantifier domain restriction or apparent substitution failures involving coreferential names, but that it must be used to explain (...) the phenomenon of referential uses of definite descriptions. I conclude with a brief discussion of the relevance of this point to the semantics/pragmatics distinction. (shrink)

Appeals to the respective values of free will and of moral and spiritual development (soul‐making) have long been lynchpins in the project of theodicy. The two most prominent contemporary efforts at systematic and comprehensive theodicy have been executed by John Hick and Richard Swinburne, both of whom appeal explicitly to these values. This chapter sympathetically explicates their appeals to these values and considers some of the challenges facing any theodicy that follows them in doing so.

Questions about the relative priorities of mind and language suffer from a double obscurity. First, it is often not clear which mental and linguistic facts are in question: we can ask about the relationship between any of the semantic or syntactic properties of public languages and the judgments, intentions, beliefs, or other propositional attitudes of speakers of those languages. Second, there is an obscurity about what 'priority' comes to here.We can approach the first problem by way of the second. Often, (...) talk about one class of facts being prior to another is glossed in terms of the claim that we can give an account of the latter in terms of the former. This gloss might seem to be a small advance, since it is .. (shrink)

In Narrow Content, Hawthorne & Yli-Vakkuri provide an admirably clear and precise framework for understanding the debate between internalist and externalist theories of mental content. They also present a series of arguments against internalism. They identify two views — which they call 'thought-relativism' and 'quasi-internalism' — which seem to avoid their main line of argument. I discuss Hawthorne & Yli-Vakkuri's arguments against these two views, and explore a few different ways in which they might be developed.

According to libertarianism, free will requires indeterminism. Many opponents of libertarianism have suggested that indeterminism would inject luck or chance into human action in a problematic way. Alfred Mele’s recent “contrast argument” is an especially clear effort to make this kind of objection to libertarianism precise. This paper is response to the contrast argument on behalf of libertarianism. I argue that worries about luck and chance, enshrined in the contrast argument, arise largely from confusion and lack of imagination. I address (...) the confusion by disambiguating various conclusions the contrast argument is supposed to support. In each case, I claim the libertarian turns out to be on solid ground. I address the lack of imagination by developing (rather tentatively) a hint from William James regarding the relationship between chance and gift. (shrink)

Replies to critics (Janet Levin, Casey O'Callaghan, and Adam Pautz) for a book symposium on _The Phenomenal and the Representational_.

In the past twenty years, issues about the relationship between perception and thought have largely been framed in terms of the question of whether the contents of perception are nonconceptual. I argue that this debate has rested on an ambiguity in `nonconceptual content' and some false presuppositions about what is required for concept possession. Once these are cleared away, I argue that none of the arguments which have been advanced about nonconceptual content do much to threaten the natural view that (...) perception and thought are relations to the same kind of content. (shrink)

The nature of predication, and its relation to truth, is the central topic of Davidson’s posthumously published Truth and Predication . The main task which an account of predication should accomplish is a solution to the problem of predication; and that, Davidson tells us, is the problem of explaining what makes some collections of words, but not others, true or false (86). It is so-called because, Davidson thinks, the principal challenge faced by any answer to this problem is the problem (...) of explaining the distinctive contribution made by predicates to the truth or falsity of sentences. (shrink)

In "Truth and Meaning", Davidson suggested that a truth theory can do the work of a theory of meaning: it can give the meanings of expressions of a language, and can explain the semantic competence of speakers of the language by stating information knowledge of which would suffice for competence. From the start, this program faced certain fundamental objections. One response to these objections has been to supplement the truth theory with additional rules of inference (e.g. from T-sentences to meaning (...) theorems). I argue that these modifications of Davidson's original idea fail to solve the problems with Davidsonian semantics, and that the prospects for a solution to these problems within the Davidsonian framework are dim. A general lesson to be drawn is that Davidsonian theories do not provide a viable alternative to Russellian and Fregean approaches to semantics which recognize the reality of language-independent contents. (shrink)

Even if spectrum inversion of various sorts is possible, spectrum inversion without a difference in representation is not. So spectrum inversion does not pose a challenge for the intentionalist thesis that, necessarily, within a given sense modality, if two experiences are alike with respect to content, they are also alike with respect to their phenomenal character. On the contrary, reflection on variants of standard cases of spectrum inversion provides a strong argument for intentionalism. Depending on one’s views about the possibility (...) of spectrum inversion, the impossibility of spectrum inversion without a difference in representation can also be used as an argument against a variety of reductive theories of mental representation. (shrink)

Davidson aimed to explain predication in terms of truth. I explain what is distinctive about his approach by contrasting it with the widely held view that predication and truth must both be explained in terms of the properties of propositions. I consider Davidson's arguments against this propositionalist alternative, and conclude by exploring some commonalities between Davidson's approach and the more recent propositionalist views of King and Soames.

In response to arguments against the existence of God, and in response to perceived conflicts between divine attributes, theists often face pressure to give up some pretheoretically attractive thesis about the divine attributes. One wonders: when does this unacceptably water down our concept of God, and when is it, as van Inwagen says, ‘permissible tinkering’ with the concept of God? A natural and widely deployed answer is that it is permissible tinkering iff it is does not violate the claim that (...) God is the greatest possible being. Call this the ’perfect being defense.’ In this paper I lay out some influential uses of the perfect being defense, and then argue that this strategy for defending theism fails. (shrink)

Some opponents of epistemic two-dimensionalism say that the view should be rejected on the grounds that it misclassifies certain a posteriori claims as a priori. Elliott, McQueen, & Weber [2013] have argued that any argument of this form must fail. I argue that this conclusion is mistaken, and defend my argument [Speaks (2010] against their criticisms.

Most arguments against God’s existence aim to show that it is incompatible with various apparent features of the world, such as the existence of evil or of human free will. In response, theists have sought to show that God’s existence is compatible with these features of the world. However, the fact that the proposition that God exists is necessary if possible introduces some underappreciated difficulties for these arguments.

Discussions of the principle of alternative possibilities have largely ignored the limits of what Frankfurt-style counter-examples can show. Rather than challenging the coherence of the cases, I argue that even if they are taken to demonstrate the falsity of the principle, they cannot advance the compatibilist cause. For a forceful incompatibilist argument can be constructed from the Frankfurtian premise that agents in Frankfurtian circumstances would have done what they did even if they could have done something else. This 'counterfactual stability' (...) meets the same fate under determinism as does the ability to do otherwise. Thus the cases are irrelevant to the compatibility debate. (shrink)

I argue that the transparency of experience provides the basis of arguments both for intentionalism -- understood as the view that there is a necessary connection between perceptual content and perceptual phenomenology -- and for the view that the contents of perceptual experiences are Russellian propositions. While each of these views is popular, there are apparent tensions between them, and some have thought that their combination is unstable. In the second half of the paper, I respond to these worries by (...) arguing that Russellianism is consistent with intentionalism, that their conjunction is consistent with both internalism about phenomenology and externalism about perceptual content, and that the resulting view receives independent support from the relationship between hallucination and thought. (shrink)

In the Christian tradition, it is rather natural to assume that a person can receive salvation only if she believes that certain crucial and relevant propositions are true. Louis Pojman has, however, attacked this assumption. He has formulated what I call the 'ethics' argument against the claim that belief is necessary for salvation. After explicating this argument, I complain that it is based on an unnecessarily controversial premise and that it proves too little. I then construct a parallel argument to (...) the same conclusion that avoids the concerns I raise against Pojman. This new argument depends principally on two intuitive ideas: that 'ought' implies 'can' and that belief is not subject to direct voluntary control. (shrink)

In a recent exchange, John M. Fischer and David Widerker have debated whether or not it is appropriate to employ Frankfurt-style examples in efforts to challenge the intuitively plausible “principle of alternative possibilities.” Most recently, David Widerker and Charlotte Katzoff have tried to defend Widerker’s initial claim that such examples beg the question against libertarianism. As a libertarian sympathizer, I would like very much for these arguments to go through. However, I argue here that (1) their “molinist” critique is off-target, (...) (2) their demonstration of the general falsity of Fischer’s libertarianism misses the point, and (3) they infer the relevance of alternative possibilities from the mere existence of such alternatives in a way that requires unprovided justification. (shrink)