Similarity and difference, patterns of variation, consistency and coherence: these are the reference points of the philosopher. Understanding experience, exploring ideas through particular instantiations, novel and innovative thinking: these are the reference points of the artist. However, at certain points in the proceedings of our Symposium titled, Next to Nothing: Art as Performance, this characterisation of philosopher and artist respectively might have been construed the other way around. The commentator/philosophers referenced their philosophical interests through the particular examples/instantiations created by the (...) artist and in virtue of which they were then able to engage with novel and innovative thinking. From the artists’ presentations, on the other hand, emerged a series of contrasts within which philosophical and artistic ideas resonated. This interface of philosopher-artist bore witness to the fact that just as art approaches philosophy in providing its own analysis, philosophy approaches art in being a co-creator of art’s meaning. In what follows, we discuss the conception of philosophy-art that emerged from the Symposium, and the methodological minimalism which we employed in order to achieve it. We conclude by drawing out an implication of the Symposium’s achievement which is that a counterpoint to Institutional theories of art may well be the point from which future directions will take hold, if philosophy-art gains traction. (shrink)

Propositions are the referents of the ‘that’-clauses that appear in the direct object positions of typical ascriptions of assertion, belief, and other binary cognitive relations. In that sense, propositions are the objects of those cognitive relations. Propositions are also the semantic contents (meanings, in one sense ) of declarative sentences, with respect to contexts. They are what sentences semantically express, with respect to contexts. Propositions also bear truth-values. The truth-value of a sentence, in a context, is the truth-value of the (...) proposition that it semantically expresses, in that context. This much is common ground among many (but not all) philosophers. I accept other claims about propositions that are more controversial. Propositions (I hold) are Russellian: they are structured entities whose constituents include individuals, properties, and relations. The contribution of a proper name to the proposition that a sentence semantically expresses (in a context) is the referent of that name. Thus, the semantic content of ‘Bill Clinton’ is Bill Clinton himself, and the semantic content of ‘Bill Clinton smokes’ is a proposition whose constituents are Bill Clinton and the property of smoking (ignoring tense, as I shall do from here on). Such 1 singular propositions are among the objects of belief, assertion, and other cognitive relations. This combination of a Millian view about proper names with a Russellian theory of propositions might appropriately be called ‘Millian Russellianism’, or ‘MR’ for short. David Chalmers, in his stimulating paper “Probability and Propositions,” defines a closely related view, Referentialism, as follows (see also the penultimate paragraph of his introduction). Referentialist views say that insofar as beliefs are about individuals (such as Nietzche), the objects of these belief are determined by those individuals. On one such view, the objects of belief are Russellian propositions composed from the individuals and properties that one’s belief is about.. (shrink)

McDowell has argued that external world scepticism is a pressing problem only in so far as we accept, on the basis of the argument from illusion, the claim that perceiving that p and hallucinating that p involve a highest common factor.

Criticisms of Rorty’s view of truth are so frequent and from such sagacious sources that it is reasonable to suspect that there must be some truth in them. But what? In this paper I consider perhaps the strongest form of such criticism, Huw Price’s claim that without a distinct norm of truth Rorty is unable to make sense of how someone, justified by her own lights (say, local communal standards), could improve her commitments by reference to another better informed community. (...) My aim in the present paper is twofold: In the first place, I shall argue that Price’s criticism is off-target missing the perfectionist character of the justificatory norms that are criterial for truth on Rorty’s account. Secondly, I argue that Rorty’s actual blindspot concerns the way in which truth figures in internal reflection upon a system of beliefs, e.g., 1st-person reflection upon one’s own beliefs. But this blindspot should not blind us to the lasting insight in Rorty’s resistance to Price’s attempt to instrumentalize truth as if it were an isolable tool of our linguistic practices. (shrink)

The present paper challenges the narrow scientistic conception of Nature that underlies current projects of naturalization involving, say, evaluative or intentional discourse. It is more plausible to hold that science provides only a partial characterization of the natural world. I consider McDowell's articulation of a more liberal naturalism, one which recognizes autonomous normative facts about reasons, meanings and values, as genuine constituents of Nature on a more liberal conception of it. Several critics have claimed that this account is vitiated by (...) the threat of supernaturalism. Responsiveness to normative facts is, I argue, a phenomenological datum that we have good reason to take at face value. I trace the source of the supernaturalist objection to a misreading of McDowell's perceptual analogy with respect to value and a related failing to clearly distinguish physical and logical notions of an object. (shrink)

In his book Intuitionism, David Kaspar is after the truth. That is to say, on his view, “philosophy is the search for the whole truth” (p. 7). Intuitionism, then, “reflects that standpoint” (p. 7). My comments are meant to reflect the same standpoint. More explicitly, my aim in these comments is to evaluate the arguments for intuitionism, as I understand them from reading Kaspar’s book. In what follows, I focus on three arguments in particular, which can be (...) found in Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of Intuitionism: an inference to the best explanation, an argument from the analogy between mathematical knowledge and moral knowledge, and an argument from the epistemic preferability of the intuitive principles. I will discuss them in this order. (shrink)

Reviewing the state of play in the attempt to naturalise content a quarter of a century after John Haugeland’s survey paper “The Intentionality All-Stars”, Dan Hutto and Glenda Satne propose a new naturalistic account of content that supposedly synthesizes what is best in the three failed programs of neo-Cartesianism, neo-Behaviourism and neo-Pragmatism. They propose to appeal to a Relaxed Naturalism, a non-reductive genealogical form of explanation and a primitive notion of contentless ur-intentionality. In this paper I argue that the authors’ (...) Relaxed Naturalism is a broad form of Scientific Naturalism and, as such, it is unable to account for the problem of conceptual normativity that arises for any scientific naturalist attempt to explain content – whether reductive or not. This is based on the irreconcilability of the objective third-personal character of scientific inquiry and the intersubjective second-personal nature of the normativity of content. I suggest that the authors would do better to simply become neo-Pragmatists who, properly understood, are Liberal Naturalists who have the conceptual and methodological resources to acknowledge and do justice to conceptually normative content. (shrink)

From his first publication, the Tractatus, to the posthumous publication of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein draws attention to the way in which surface grammatical similarities mask underlying grammatical diversity. In the Tractatus he writes.

From his first publication, the Tractatus, to the posthumous publication of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein draws attention to the way in which surface grammatical similarities mask underlying grammatical diversity. In the Tractatus he writes.

In the present paper I shall argue that the real problem here is the very idea that there is a dilemma that compels us to choose sides. We can hold both that the meditator's doubts are fully serious, and that they leave the perspective of common sense largely unscathed. The key to dissolving the dilemma is to see that the meditator observes a distinction between two levels of epistemic standards: the very demanding standards appropriate to certainty, understood in a rather (...) technical sense of that term; and the commonplace standards appropriate to reasonable belief. The significance of this levels distinction has not been widely appreciated but it has important consequences both for how we are to understand the skepticism about the senses that is at issue and for appreciating the extent to which Descartes acknowledges and retains our natural trust in the senses. I aim to show that the meditator’s skepticIsm about the senses specifically concerns the possibility of sensory certainties, and is quite serious. It is intended to lead one to a stable change of mind about what is most certain. But a skepticIsm about sense-based certainty leaves the matter of whether experience provides a reliable basis for belief untouched by reasonable doubt. Since the meditator's doubts presuppose very demanding standards they have no bearing on our assessments from within the common sense perspective. I defend this view by arguing that the methodological 'withdrawal of assent' from perceptual beliefs is a mere pretense that is compatible with continued endorsement. Despite the seriousness with which the method of doubt is pursued, there is an important sense in which the meditator never doubts the basic deliverances of his senses. This helps explain the practical insulation of perceptual beliefs from skepticism. With one minor qualification, the meditator retains his natural trust in the senses throughout - although Descartes’ rhetoric sometimes suggests otherwise. Note that I shall be exploring the skepticism about the senses as we find it in the First Meditation. This paper does not purport to discuss all of the skeptical doubts of the First Meditation, e.g., skepticism about mathematical truths, God's existence and reason. Instead I shall focus solely upon the ways in which the meditator's doubts bear on his perceptual beliefs. The rationale for this restriction is twofold: 1) in the first place Descartes describes the general aim of the skeptical doubts of the First Meditation m terms of 'freeing us from our preconceived opinions, and providing the easiest route by which the mind may be led away from the senses’. I am specifically concerned to qualify this ambition and argue that Descartes retains throughout his preconceived trust in the reliability of the senses; and 2) the Meditations has long been thought to provide the grounds for a radical form of external world skepticism which not only denies us knowledge of, but also any reason to believe in, the existence of an external world. My discussion of Descartes' perceptual doubts is intended to show just how distant any such skepticism is from Descartes' own thoughts and intentions. (shrink)

Shaun Gallagher’s [2019] ‘Rethinking Nature’ is an attempt to make conceptual space for the relevance of the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, etc., to cognitive scientific explanation within an embodied enactivist approach to cognition. Since cognitive science currently presupposes orthodox scientific naturalism—for which nature is nothing over and above the objective posits of successful (typically natural) science—it makes no allowance for the lived first-person experiences or intersubjective agency that are central to phenomenology; and so, renders them unavailable to Gallagher’s enactivism. (...) Gallagher leading idea is to qualify the scientific naturalist idea of nature as a totality of ‘objective’ (i.e., mind-independent) physical objects in order to make allowance for subjects and their subjectivity in the scientific image of the world. In this proposal Gallagher continues to think within the scientific naturalist commitment to the completeness of the scientific image of the world. In this brief commentary, although I applaud Gallagher’s description of the problem of subjectivity in relation to science, and his general strategy of rethinking nature, I criticize the specific form this rethinking takes. I argue that a better way to include irreducible subjects and subjectivity in a reconception of nature is to drop the requirement that everything in nature must figure in the scientific image of the world. Thus, I propose the advantages of a liberal naturalism (as I call it), and a retention of an objectivist conception of science, over Gallagher’s reformed scientific naturalism. (shrink)

In this paper I hope to cast light on Wittgenstein enigmatic remark, “one should really only create philosophy poetically”. I discuss Wittgenstein’s ambition to overcome metaphysics by way of an appeal to ordinary language. For this purpose I contrast “realism” in philosophy (i.e., metaphysical realism, particularly its modern scientific version) with “realism” in poetry. My theme is the capacity of poetry to provide a model for Wittgenstein’s resistance to the inhumanity unleashed in metaphysics—exemplified by two distinct forms of skepticism—which obliterates (...) the ordinary world under the guise of discovering its true nature. The poem I shall use to illustrate the difficulty in maintaining our grip on reality, hence our grip on our humanity, is Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Realism”. (shrink)

Despite its oft-noted ambiguities, critical reception of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner ; Director's Cut ; Final Cut ) has tended to converge upon seeing it as a futuristic sci-fi film noir whose central concern is what it means to be human, a question that is fraught given the increasingly human-like replicants designed and manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation for human use on off-world colonies. Within the terms of this way of seeing things a great deal of discussion has been devoted (...) to putative criteria of being human and the question whether the once-retired blade runner, Rick Deckard, is or is not a replicant. I aim to explore a radically different course of interpretation, which sees the film in fundamentally moral and religious terms. Put in the starkest light, the film is not about what makes us human but whether we can be saved from ourselves, from our terrifying inhumanity, our moral blindness. (shrink)

In his Dewey Lectures,1 Hilary Putnam argues that contemporary philosophy cannot solve nor see its way past the traditional problem of how language or thought hooks on to.

Putnam is famous for often changing his allegiance between various forms of realism and antirealism. In this paper I want to use Putnam’s own reflections and insights on the realism-antirealism issue to provide a powerful case for skepticism about the entire debate—in spite of the fact that that is not Putnam’s own ultimate attitude. From this skeptical perspective, I shall argue that Putnam has helped us see that the realism-antirealism debate faces a dilemma: either it resolves into existence questions about (...) particular items that are resolvable by, say, scientific or mathematical or ethical etc. practices rather than by appeal to philosophical argument; or it represents a misguided response to skepticism about an entire class or realm of items given that it hopelessly attempts to answer skepticism on the skeptic’s own terms. What Putnam tends to overlook in his realist moments is that we can philosophically undermine skepticism without being committed to any philosophically substantial realism or antirealism. (shrink)

Naturalism is a term that stands for a family of positions that endorse the general idea of being true to, or guided by, “nature”, an idea as old as Western thought itself (e.g. Aristotle is often called a naturalist) and as various and open-ended as interpretations of “nature”. Since the rise of the modern scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, nature has increasingly come to be identified with the-worldas-studied-by-the-sciences. Consequently, naturalism has come to mean a set of positions defined in (...) terms of the scientific image of nature or the methods of scientific inquiry. In this brief article I shall focus upon explicating three versions of scientific naturalism: 1) naturalism in the arts especially literature; 2) philosophical naturalism; and 3) naturalism in the social sciences. These different naturalisms correspond to different ways of appealing to science, whether it be adopting a scientific stance towards human and social life, or a broadly empirical approach to inquiry in general, or a scientific worldview. Naturalism in field of the arts refers to art that depicts everyday subjects in a ‘realistic’ manner, one free from stylisation, idealization or academic convention. Although the term has been used to describe a style of painting since the late seventeenth century (e.g. Caravaggio’s), it only became an important term of art criticism in the nineteenth century, Gustave Courbet being one of the leading examples. Naturalism as a literary category was first applied to a genre of French fiction exemplified by Emile Zola, which builds on the anti-romantic ‘realist’ fiction of Gustav Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac, writers who deliberately adopt a scientific – that is, detached and objective -- approach to human life. The vision of the human depicted in naturalist literature owes much to a picture of the world suggested by Darwin’s theory of evolution: a purposeless, Godless world of competitive striving where the notion of free will is treated with suspicion.. (shrink)

In Renewing Philosophy (1992), having surveyed a number of metaphysical programs in contemporary analytic philosophy, including Bernard Williams’ appeal to an absolute conception of the world, Ruth Millikan’s attempt to reduce intentionality to biological function, and Nelson Goodman’s irrealism, Putnam concludes as follows: I have argued that the decision of a large part of contemporary analytic philosophy to become a form of metaphysics is a mistake. Indeed, contemporary analytic metaphysics is in many ways a parody of the great metaphysics of (...) the past. As Dewey pointed out, the metaphysics of previous epochs had a vital connection to the culture of those epochs, which is why it was able to change the lives of men and women, and not always for the worse. Contemporary analytic metaphysics has no connection with anything but the “intuitions” of a handful of philosophers. It lacks what Wittgenstein called “weight”. (Putnam 1992, p. 197) If contemporary analytic metaphysics is a mistake then is the point that we should try to revive traditional metaphysical programs? Or should we perhaps renovate metaphysics so that it will, once again, have “a vital connection” to culture? Or, more radically, is the renewal of philosophy that Putnam calls for a vision of a non-metaphysical form of philosophising – what we might call philosophising without philosophical “musts”? That would certainly fit with the invocation of Wittgenstein and Dewey1 whose therapeutic aims seem to stand in stark contrast to the program of constructive metaphysics. And it is undeniable that at least part of Putnam’s vision of what philosophy ought to be involves resisting the revisionist tendencies of substantial metaphysical programs in order to do justice to our everyday life-world. Philosophy, unlike contemporary analytic metaphysics, ought never to lose contact with the question of how we ought to live or with forms of thought that have ‘weight’ in our lives. The question I want to address in this paper is whether this vision spells the end of metaphysics as such or only of a particular kind of metaphysics of which the analytic version is an example? What is the fate of metaphysics on Putnam’s conception? Various features of his position might suggest an end of metaphysics reading in something like the spirit of logical positivism.. (shrink)

In contrast to the recent trend of taking external world skepticism as a narrow problem for a demanding conception of "objective" or "certain" knowledge about the world, my thesis offers a re-examination of the distinctively perceptual basis of the skeptical problem. On my view the skeptic challenges the very possibility of rationally justifying beliefs in so far as they are based on sense experience, a characterization that helps to explain the continuity into the modern period of the ancient skeptical challenge (...) to the pretensions of reason. What is newly radical in external world skepticism is the discovery of the inner realm of the mind, and hence, of inner states as a component of every sense experience. ;I argue that the skeptic relies upon a distinctive, intuitively compelling, conception of sense experience which I call the causal model of experience. This is the view that experience is constituted by self-standing subjective experiences and their external causes, where cause and effect are logically distinct existences. The causal model is not to be identified with a view of perception as epistemically mediated by a "veil of ideas", though it can lead one to embrace that doctrine. My aim is twofold: to understand the motivation for the skeptic's causal model of experience; and to show that, when thought through, this model can ultimately be shown to be incoherent. ;The causal model has its roots in 17th century scientific metaphysics and the idea that the world can be exhaustively explained in terms of mechanical interactions between primary-qualified corpuscles governed by mathematically describable laws. I argue that the perceptual relation is not a mere efficient causal relation and I show that the skeptic is in the incoherent position of wanting a "private" language to describe his subjective experiences despite insisting on conditions of autonomy that deprive his terms of the normativity that is a necessary condition of meaning. Thus I do not answer the skeptical problem so much as undercut the basis upon which it is posed in the first place. (shrink)

Modern skepticism can be usefully divided into two camps: the Cartesian and the Humean.1 Cartesian skepticism is a matter of a theoretical doubt that has little or no practical import in our everyday lives. Its employment concerns whether or not we can achieve a special kind of certain knowledge – something Descartes calls “scientia” 2—that is far removed from our everyday aims or standards of epistemic appraisal. Alternatively, Humean skepticism engages the ancient skeptical concern with whether we have good reason, (...) or any reason at all, for our beliefs, including the common or garden beliefs that are presupposed in our ordinary practical affairs. On this traditional conception, philosophical doubt is a projection of everyday doubt and the lessons of the study are potentially lessons for the street. In this paper I shall focus on the Humean strain of skepticism whose focus concerns whether we have adequate reasons for our beliefs. Henceforth when I speak of skepticism it is this variety of skepticism that I am primarily referring to.3 I want to relate skepticism, so understood, to two kinds of self-knowledge. I shall argue that the failure of past solutions and dissolutions of skepticism to provide a satisfying response to the skeptic can be accounted for in terms of two stances that we can take towards our own.. (shrink)

As a worldview, naturalism depends on a set of cognitive commitments from which flow certain propositions about reality and human nature. These propositions in turn might have implications for how we live, for social policy, and for human flourishing. But the presuppositions, basis, and implications of naturalism are not uncontested, and indeed there’s considerable debate about them among naturalists themselves.

This paper offers a reading of The Awful Truth in order to meditate further on Stanley Cavell's articulation of the themes of the ordinary and perfectionist marriage as exemplified in the genre of films he calls the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage in Cavell and . I explore different ways in which this film and the medium of film generally are capable of making the unseen visible: revealing the ordinary that is hidden behind its very familiarity; making available an awareness that (...) we are unseen by the projected reality of film; and, in this film in particular, showing that this divorcing couple - whose marriage and sexual life are essentially off-screen - are as if married all along even while they pursue other love interests. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell's writings on external world skepticism (which he speaks of as “the repudiation of criteria” and "an attack on the ordinary") are profound but also widely misunderstood. Part of the reason for this is Cavell's commitment to the claim that his understanding of skepticism is continuous with that of the epistemological skepticism of Descartes, Hume and Kant. Another is the painful ambiguity of his pronouncements on the "truth" in skepticism. In this paper I argue that key passages in Sartre's (...) 1938 novel Nausea are an expression of Cavellian skepticism, and so, provide an interpretation of it. According to this Sartre-inspired reading, Cavellian skepticism is not a form of Cartesian skepticism. Cavellian skepticism is not a matter of unanswerable doubts about our knowledge of the external world. Rather, here skepticism is nihilism, the stripping of meaning and value from the world. According to this understanding, Cavellian skepticism Is closer to the post-Kantian thought of Jacobi than to Kant; and a rethinking of the relationship between skepticism and romanticism is required. (shrink)

David Papineau, Jerry Fodor and many others wonder how the conjunction of the following three positions can be true: 1) Special science laws: There are lawlike generalizations in the special sciences. These sciences trade in kinds that are such that statements about salient, reliable correlations that are projectible and that support counterfactuals apply to the tokens coming under these kinds. 2) Non-reductionism: The laws of some of the special sciences cannot be reduced to physical laws. 3) Physicalism: Everything there (...) is in the world supervenes on the physical, that is, is fixed by the distribution of the physical properties in the world. The obvious problem is that (3) implies that the similarities among tokens in the world, accounting for the kinds in which the special sciences trade, and the correlations among such tokens, accounting for the laws of the special sciences, are fixed by the distribution of the physical properties. By contrast, (2) implies that some of the laws seizing such correlations are not reducible to physical laws. By using the term “token”, I mean a particular instantiating a property. Papineau’s proposal to reconcile these three positions is to account for (2) in terms of selection (pp. 6-9): There can be laws in the special sciences that are not reducible to physical laws if and only if these laws focus on effects that are selected for in a given context independently of the mechanisms by which they are brought about. Thus, the fact of there being such laws and their non-reducibility to physics do not contradict physicalism (3). The drawback is that the kinds that figure in such laws cannot enter into a rich network of laws 199 and that nothing can be causally efficacious insofar as it is a member of such a kind. In these comments, I shall try to push Papineau further in the direction of a reductive physicalism, thus solving the problem by simply abandoning (2).. (shrink)

The type in taxonomy is not meant to be a particularly typical specimen, but simply a reference specimen suited to serve as a 'name bearer' whenever doubt arises concerning the identity of a species. The minimum requirement is that the specimen reflects some differentiating characteristics of the species. In analogy, only such individuals should be made the type of an ideological system as adhere to the principal ideologies of that system. Only such an evolutionist could serve as type for Darwinism (...) who on the whole accepts gradual evolution and, as the major moving force in evolution, natural selection. It is very questionable whether the type-method would be of any use where highly heterogeneous, open, or rapidly evolving systems are involved. When the meaning of a system is changing it is less confusing to redefine it than to coin a new term for each change. (shrink)

David Hunter’s On Believing is an ambitious, extremely carefully argued, discussion of what it means to believe. He urges readers to re-think the way to categorize beliefs (or more precisely believ...

David Rosenthal and Josh Weisberg have recently provided a counter argument to Ned Block’s argument that a Higher Order Thought (HOT) theory of consciousness cannot accommodate the existence of hallucinatory conscious states (i.e. a conscious episode consisting of a HOT without the presence of a relevant lower order thought). Their counter argument invokes the idea of mental appearances: a non-existent intentional object which is to aid in an account of subjective conscious awareness. I argue that if mental appearances are (...) to do the work they are supposed to, we cannot draw a mental appearance/reality distinction. I provide an alternative story that a HOT theorist can invoke to account for cases of conscious misrepresentation. Such a story will require denying the existence of hallucinatory conscious states while still accounting for conscious misrepresentation. This is a cost I believe the HOT theorist should be willing to pay. (shrink)

In response to Anderson and Arzyutov’s paper, I argue that ambiguities in the Russian social-scientific concept of “etnos” reveal its place in what I call a “field style” for thinking and doing science. Tolerance for ambiguity is, I suggest, a methodological strength of the field sciences. I support these reflections by also addressing the etnos concept’s origins in the complex history of Ukrainian nationalism.

Johnston maintains that the notion of a proposition -- ”a language independent (abstract) particular” -- can be dispensed with in philosophical semantics and replaced with that of a propositional act. A propositional act is a component of a speech act that is responsible for the propositional content of the speech act. Traditionally, it is thought that a propositional act yields the propositional content of a speech act by being an act of expressing a proposition. And it is the expressed proposition (...) that serves as the propositional content of the speech act. Johnston points out, however, that a propositional act is a structured event consisting minimally of a referential act, a predicative act, and a time-designative act. And on Johnston's view, the propositional content is the structured propositional act itself. (Strictly speaking, Johnston analyzes sameness of propositional content in terms of sameness of propositional act type, from which I, perhaps rashly, inferred that the propositional content of a speech act should be taken to be the propositional act itself). Johnston argues that a semantic analysis in terms of propositional acts enables us to reconcile the necessity of both, (1) Hesperus is Phosphorus (2) Phosphorus is Phosphorus with their intuitive difference in meaning, while maintaining the direct reference theory of proper names. Moreover, he argues that invoking propositional acts rather than propositions has the advantage of being able to capture the various senses in which distinct statements might be said to "say the same thing", as well as that of ontological parsimony. I will address each of these claims in turn, but first, I want to point out that the propositionalist can easily reconcile the necessity of (1) and (2) with their intuitive difference in meaning, without forsaking direct reference. All one needs to do is invoke the Fregean idea that there is a meaning shift in “thatâ€-clauses of (opaque) indirect discourse (and other) ascriptions.. (shrink)

Wittgenstein has been likened to a Pyrrhonian sceptic, one who employs dialectical skills to avoid rather than defend doctrine, but it is his role in exposing and excavating the sands upon which modern scepticisms have been built that is the subject of this new volume of largely original essays. The first three chapters, by Crispin Wright, Akeel Bilgrami and Michael Williams find inspiration in On Certainty for singling out key moves in the initial set-up of external world scepticism; the next (...) four chapters, by James Conant, Denis McManus, Ilham Dilman and Jane Heal involve discussions of external world (Cartesian) scepticism, semantic (Kantian) scepticism, scepticism about language (linguistic idealism) and the factuality of the mental that are either commentaries on, or discussions inspired by, Wittgenstein’s writings. The last five chapters focus on Stanley Cavell’s important and under-appreciated work on other minds scepticism—a form of scepticism that, on Cavell’s reading, is never far from the surface of Philosophical Investigations. Responses to modern scepticisms can be broadly divided into two categories: (1) Problem- Accepting Responses: those that regard the sceptical problem as legitimate and seek an answer that takes the form of an appropriate justification for (what the sceptic characterizes as) our ordinary knowledge or beliefs; and (2) Problem-Rejecting Reponses: those that regard the sceptical ‘problem’ as illegitimate (and so, not requiring an answer) because of hidden and contestable theoretical commitments or because it subtly transgresses conditions of sensemaking. This is a volume devoted entirely to the second of these categories, responses that are directed to, as McManus puts it, “a layer in which our philosophical questions are constituted”(p. (shrink)