Specter of Reason

The following is a post I put together for my Theory of Knowledge class this year: How important is your language for your sense of identity--your identity as an individual, but also as a member of a nation?  It's common nowadays to associate a nation with a language, even though many nations have more than one national language.  Should a nation be defined by a single language? Consider what political factors have shaped the language that you speak.  Why do you speak Polish, Flemish, Danish, Czech, German, Russian or English?  Why did you grow up learning your native tongue, and why are you learning new languages today?  Are you learning new languages so that you can join new knowledge communities?  Bigger knowledge communities?  Better knowledge communities? Communities rely on communication.  Community, communicate:  Both words come from the latin root,  communia , meaning a large gathering of people sharing a way of life. Commu...

I've just turned my attention to Plato's Cratylus for the first time.  Nothing of significance brought it to my attention, but when I learned it is considered his only sustained treatment of language, and that it deals with the question of whether meaning is natural or conventional, I thought I should become familiar with it.  I have only looked at the very beginning, but already I wish I had more time to explore it and its relation to 20th-century philosophy of language. At the beginning of the dialogue, Hermogenes affirms a view of names which is relativistic:  the designation of a name is entirely dependent on conventional usage.  The rightness or wrongness of word meaning is relative to a linguistic community.  If I use the word "horse" to refer to humans, and "human" to refer to horses, then I am right as far as my own usage goes, though I am not in line with the majority. Socrates leads Hermogenes to find a problem with this view with a curious arg...

In my last post, in response to Timothy Williamson's hesitations regarding naturalism, I rambled a bit about possible difficulties in sorting out a naturalistic understanding of mathematical truth.  I was reflecting on the problem of universality:  Logical and mathematical truths are not truths about the actual world, but extend to all possible worlds.  That would seem to be very hard to explain, if logical and mathematical truths are limited by local factors--factors which ground them in facts about our world.  Today I have worked out a possible solution. The first step is to distinguish between two types of possibility:  logical possibility and physical possibility.  Another way of putting it is that possibility can be relative to a logical framework or a physical one.  When we say that something is physically possible, we mean it cannot be ruled out by the laws of physics (or, if you don't want to favor physics above other sciences, we can just sa...

Interesting philosophical issues can arise when we investigate what it is we know or perceive about our actions while we are acting intentionally.  It should probably go without saying that, when we are acting intelligently, we know what we are doing, at least to some extent and in some sense of the verb, "to know."  I'm going to try to motivate the thesis that what we know is not obviously propositional in nature. Consider the following question: (1) What is she doing? It goes without saying that, in many normal situations, a proper response to (1) is a description or identification of an action.  However, (1) has an idiomatic usage.  It can be used to communicate fear or anxiety about what somebody is doing.  It can communicate a desire for an explanation for an action.  Context usually makes it clear which usage is intended. Now consider what happens when (1) is embedded in the following knowledge ascription: (2) She knows what she is doing. It...

I've written another pa per for another graduate "course," entitled "Theories of Linguistic Communication." It's not as strong or thorough as I'd like it to be, and it's a bit disorganized, but I don't have more time to work on it. I'm not sure how committed I am to the views I'm expressing here, either. How's that for a disclaimer? In a nutshell, my arguments and views are still in development, but hopefully this short essay will be of some interest. Rules, Acts and Interpretation: A Wittgensteinian View of Linguistic Communication I According to the standard view of linguistic communication, to know a language is to know a set of rules which allows one to deduce the truth-conditions of any well-formed sentence in that language (Recanati 2002, p. 105). These rules are semantic, which means they relate sentences to the propositions they express. Such rules may be context-sensitive: some linguistic entities may even “wear t...

This week I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Distinguished Professor Michael Devitt (CUNY). On Thursday he gave a talk at the University of Szczecin, and on Saturday there was a full-day workshop focusing on his current work in the philosophy of language. In between, on Friday night, he socialized with local philosophy students over beer and wine (and food). I was fortunately able to participate in all of these events. Devitt and I are both naturalists and atheists. We are both sympathetic to ordinary language philosophy and Ryle, and we both have big problems with Stanley & Williamson's 2001 paper, "Knowing How." Unfortunately, however, I don't think Devitt is Rylean enough. I see talk of minds and mental states just as talk of complex and indefinitely heterogeneous dispositions. Devitt sees it as talk about functional structures which supervene on neurological states. Devitt is strongly anti-behaviorist, favoring the Representational Theory of...

I just reread this post of mine from June, 2008: The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction and The Knowledge Argument . My approach to the distinction is quite different from the one I presented ten days ago , but perhaps these two views are complementary. In the first post, I approach the distinction in epistemological terms. Analyticity and syntheticity are two different ways of testing the validity of the same propositions. They are different propositional attitudes--different knowledge relationships towards propositions. In my more recent post, I regard the distinction as a way of indicating different sorts of speech acts: one in which rules are stated and another in which predictions about the world are made. On the face of it, these are distinct ways of looking at the distinction, though they don't seem so far apart from each other. I'll have to think more about it to see if one entails the other. For now, I have to say that both views make sense to me, and I thi...

For my own edification, I present the following review of a paper I'm reading called "The Distinction Between Semantics and Pragmatics" by Zoltan Gendler Szabo, which appears in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language (2006). (All page references are to this text unless otherwise noted). I. Introduction Szabo defines pragmatics as "the study of contexts of utterance, or more precisely, a study of the way context can influence our understanding of linguistic utterances" (363). Semantics , in turn, is presented as "the study of linguistic meaning, or more precisely, the study of the relation between linguistic expressions and their meanings" (363). This might look simple enough, but I find it impenetrable. Presumably, what a linguistic expression means in some circumstance depends on context. Thus, following Szabo's characterization, pragmatics and semantics both study the relation between linguistic expressions and their meanings. Similarly, i...

I've been discussing moral noncognitivism lately, and the topic turned to the question of whether or not mathematical truths are analytic. Analytic truth is truth by definition (or truth by virtue of meaning), whereas synthetic truth is truth in relation to what is the case. There's a lot of controversial history in philosophy over how to construe this distinciton, and whether or not we should even take the distinction seriously. Some say it is not a principled distinction at all. Much of the disagreement stems from different attitudes towards the very notions of meaning and truth . I prefer a pragmatic view of the distinction, since I regard meaning and truth as matters of how sentences are used, and not as properties of sentences themselves. Thus, sentences are neither analytic nor synthetic, but they can be used to make analytic or synthetic assertions. One consequence of this view is that all sentences can be used to make both analytic and synthetic assertions. The ...

Over at Blog & ~Blog , Ben says that the sentence "this sentence is false" (which I will refer to as P), and similar sentences, are meaningless. Ben says that the Liar Paradox (which occurs whenever we try to decide whether P is true or false) disappears once we accept that P is meaningless. I'm not convinced, which is not to say I think the Liar Paradox poses a real problem. I just prefer a different approach. Ben's view is that the predicate "is true" does not add any content to a sentence, and therefore, a sentence which only has "is true" as its predicate cannot be meaningful. While it may be true that "'Snow is white' is true" means the same as "Snow is white," this analysis (called disquotationalism) does not clearly apply to all cases where "is true" is the predicate of a sentence. I think it only applies to cases where "is true" is predicated of a sentence. Thus, we may find semantic eq...