The abstract structure of inquiry - the process of acquiring and changing beliefs about the world - is the focus of this book which takes the position that the "pragmatic" rather than the "linguistic" approach better solves the philosophical problems about the nature of mental representation, and better accounts for the phenomena of thought and speech. It discusses propositions and propositional attitudes (the cluster of activities that constitute inquiry) in general and takes up the way beliefs change in response to (...) potential new information, suggesting that conditional propositions should be understood as projections of epistemic policies onto the world.Robert C. Stalnaker is a professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

This paper revisits some foundational questions concerning the abstract representation of a discourse context. The context of a conversation is represented by a body of information that is presumed to be shared by the participants in the conversation – the information that the speaker presupposes a point at which a speech act is interpreted. This notion is designed to represent both the information on which context-dependent speech acts depend, and the situation that speech acts are designed to affect, and so (...) to be a representation of context that is appropriate for explaining the interaction of context and the contents expressed in them. After reviewing the motivating ideas and the outlines of the apparatus, the paper responds to a criticism of the framework, and considers the way it can help to clarify some phenomena concerning pronouns with indefinite antecedents. (shrink)

Robert C. Stalnaker presents a set of essays on the structure of inquiry. First he focuses on the concepts of knowledge, belief, and partial belief, and on the rules and procedures we ought to use to determine what to believe. Then he explores the relations between conditionals and causal and explanatory concepts.

Deliberation about what to do in any context requires reasoning about what will or would happen in various alternative situations, including situations that the agent knows will never in fact be realized. In contexts that involve two or more agents who have to take account of each others' deliberation, the counterfactual reasoning may become quite complex. When I deliberate, I have to consider not only what the causal effects would be of alternative choices that I might make, but also what (...) other agents might believe about the potential effects of my choices, and how their alternative possible actions might affect my beliefs. Counterfactual possibilities are implicit in the models that game theorists and decision theorists have developed – in the alternative branches in the trees that model extensive form games and the different cells of the matrices of strategic form representations – but much of the reasoning about those possibilities remains in the informal commentary on and motivation for the models developed. Puzzlement is sometimes expressed by game theorists about the relevance of what happens in a game ‘off the equilibrium path’: of what would happen if what is both true and known by the players to be true were instead false. (shrink)

This dissertation compares the thought and practice of Xunzi, a 4th--3rd century BCE Confucian, with that of Augustine of Hippo, a 4th--5th century CE Christian. Specifically, it compares their versions of the view that human nature is significantly bad or evil, and their prescriptions for the cultivation of ethically and religiously preferable modes of life, through the practice of what Pierre Hadot has called "spiritual exercises." ;Xunzi and Augustine deploy conceptual apparatuses structured by distinctive terms of art, responding to debates (...) within their own contexts. Their articulations of human personhood deeply shape their proposals and hopes for personal cultivation. This thesis examines their different anthropologies, with special attention to Augustine's concept of natura and Xunzi's idea of xing, both traditionally rendered in English as "human nature." It then discusses their positive proposals for ethico-religious education and personal cultivation, focusing on the specific practices they recommend and their accounts of how and why these practices are effective in the production of flourishing human beings. It explores Xunzi's opposition of "nature" and "artifice," his analysis of emotion, desire, and action, and his accounts of study, ritual practice, and music as spiritual exercises. It investigates Augustine's views of original sin and the mind imaging God, his account of disciplina "teaching" and "discipline," and his understandings of the liberal arts, learning from scripture, fasting, the Eucharist, and different types of prayer. ;Comparison of Xunzi and Augustine makes three contributions. First, it refines our analytical categories as students of religious thought and practice, especially in this case "human nature" and "spiritual exercises." Second, it illuminates both thinkers' views more fully, in particular deepening our understanding of Xunzi's moral psychology and Augustine's theories of Christian formation after "conversion" and baptism. Third, it contributes to contemporary debates in religious ethics: first, about moral personhood, proposing a new model of "chastened intellectualism" but underscoring the limitations of universalistic accounts; and second, about spiritual exercises, retrieving elements of Xunzi's account of ritual and Augustine's techniques for affecting one's inner discourse of interpretation and judgment. (shrink)

David Lewis's account of intentionality is a version of what he calls 'global descriptivism'. The rough idea is that the correct interpretation of one's total theory is the one (among the admissible interpretations) that come closest to making it true. I give an exposition of this account, as I understand it, and try to bring out some of its consequences. I argue that there is a tension between Lewis's global descriptivism and his rejection of a linguistic account of the intentionality (...) of thought. I distinguish some different senses in which Lewis's theory might permit, or be committed to, a kind of holism about intentional content, and I consider the sense in which Lewis's account might be said to be an internalist account, and the motivation for this kind of internalism. (shrink)

Comparative religious ethics is a complicated scholarly endeavor, striving to harmonize intellectual goals that are frequently conceived as quite different, or even intrinsically opposed. Against commonly voiced suspicions of comparative work, this essay argues that descriptive, comparative, and normative interests may support rather than conflict with each other, depending on the comparison in question, and how it is pursued. On the basis of a brief comparison of the early Christian Augustine of Hippo and the early Confucians Mencius and Xunzi on (...) the topic of "human nature," this paper advocates a particular account of comparative religious ethics, and argues for the complexity of the idea of "human nature." Different elements of this family of concerns are central to religious ethics generally, and to theories and practices of moral development and personal formation specifically. (shrink)

The explanatory gap . Consciousness is a mystery. No one has ever given an account, even a highly speculative, hypothetical, and incomplete account of how a physical thing could have phenomenal states. Suppose that consciousness is identical to a property of the brain, say activity in the pyramidal cells of layer 5 of the cortex involving reverberatory circuits from cortical layer 6 to the thalamus and back to layers 4 and 6,as Crick and Koch have suggested for visual consciousness. .) (...) Still, that identity itself calls out for explanation! Proponents of an explanatory gap disagree about whether the gap is permanent. Some say that we are like the scientifically naive person who is told that matter = energy, but does not have the concepts required to make sense of the idea. If we can acquire these concepts, the gap is closable. Others say the gap is uncloseable because of our cognitive limitations. Still others say that the gap is a consequence of the fundamental nature of consciousness. (shrink)

In Context and Content Robert Stalnaker develops a philosophical picture of the nature of speech and thought and the relations between them. Two themes in particular run through these collected essays: the role that the context in which speech takes place plays in accounting for the way language is used to express thought, and the role of the external environment in determining the contents of our thoughts. Stalnaker argues against the widespread assumption of the priority of linguistic over (...) mental representation, which he suggests has had a distorting influence on our understanding. The first part of the book develops a framework for representing contexts and the way they interact with the interpretation of what is said in them. This framework is used to help to explain a range of linguistic phenomena concerning presupposition and assertion, conditional statements, the attribution of beliefs, and the use of names, descriptions, and pronouns to refer. Stalnaker then draws out the conception of thought and its content that is implicit in this framework. He defends externalism about thought--the assumption that our thoughts have the contents they have in virtue of the way we are situated in the world--and explores the role of linguistic action and linguistic structure in determining the contents of our thoughts. Context and Content offers philosophers and cognitive scientists a summation of Stalnaker's important and influential work in this area. His new introduction to the volume gives an overview of this work and offers a convenient way in for those who are new to it. The Oxford Cognitive Science series is a new forum for the best contemporary work in this flourishing field, where various disciplines--cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and computational theory--join forces in the investigation of thought, awareness, understanding, and associated workings of the mind. Each book constitutes an original contribution to its subject, but will be accessible beyond the ranks of specialists, so as to reach a broad interdisciplinary readership. The series will be carefully shaped and steered with the aim of representing the most important developments in the field and bringing together its constituent disciplines. (shrink)

Robert Stalnaker explores the contexts in which speech takes place, the ways we represent them, and the roles they play in explaining the interpretation and dynamics of speech. His central thesis is the autonomy of pragmatics: the independence of theory about structure and function of discourse from theory about mechanisms serving those functions.

[Robert Stalnaker] Saul Kripke made a convincing case that there are necessary truths that are knowable only a posteriori as well as contingent truths that are knowable a priori. A number of philosophers have used a two-dimensional model semantic apparatus to represent and clarify the phenomena that Kripke pointed to. According to this analysis, statements have truth-conditions in two different ways depending on whether one considers a possible world 'as actual' or 'as counterfactual' in determining the truth-value of the (...) statement relative to that possible world. There are no necessary a posteriori or contingent a priori propositions: rather, contingent a priori and necessary a posteriori statements are statements that are necessary when evaluated one way, and contingent when evaluated the other way. This paper distinguishes two ways that the two-dimensional framework can be interpreted, and argues that one of them gives the better account of what it means to 'consider a world as actual', but that it provides no support for any notion of purely conceptual a priori truth. /// [Thomas Baldwin] Two-dimensional possible world semantic theory suggests that Kripke's examples of the necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori should be handled by interpreting names as implicitly indexical. Like Stalnaker, I reject this account of names and accept that Kripke's examples have to be accommodated within a metasemantic theory. But whereas Stalnaker maintains that a metasemantic approach undermines the conception of a priori truth, I argue that it offers the opportunity to develop a conception of the a priori aspect of stipulations, conceived as linguistic performances. The resulting position accommodates Kripke's examples in a way which is both intrinsically plausible and fits with Kripke's actual discussion of them. (shrink)

The book also sheds new light on the nature of metaphysical theorizing by exploring the interaction of semantic and metaphysical issues, the connections between different metaphysical issues, and the nature of ontological commitment.

Robert Stalnaker opposes the traditional view that knowledge of one's own current thoughts and feelings is the unproblematic foundation for all knowledge. He argues that we can understand our knowledge of our thoughts and feelings only by viewing ourselves from the outside, by seeing our inner lives as features of the world as it is in itself.

Starting in the middle -- Epistemic possibilities and the knowledge argument -- Locating ourselves in the world -- Notes on models of self-locating belief -- Phenomenal and epistemic indistinguishability -- Acquaintance and essence -- Knowing what one is thinking -- After the fall.

Robert Stalnaker draws together in this volume his seminal work in metaphysics. The central theme is the role of possible worlds in articulating our various metaphysical commitments. The book begins with reflections on the general idea of a possible world, and then uses the framework of possible worlds to formulate and clarify some questions about properties and individuals, reference, thought, and experience. The essays also reflect on the nature of metaphysics, and on the relation between questions about what there (...) is and questions about how we talk and think about what there is. Two of the fourteen essays, plus an extensive introduction that sets the papers in context and draws out the essays' common threads, are published here for the first time. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to draw a connection between a semantical theory of conditional statements and the theory of conditional probability. First, the probability calculus is interpreted as a semantics for truth functional logic. Absolute probabilities are treated as degrees of rational belief. Conditional probabilities are explicitly defined in terms of absolute probabilities in the familiar way. Second, the probability calculus is extended in order to provide an interpretation for counterfactual probabilities--conditional probabilities where the condition has zero probability. (...) Third, conditional propositions are introduced as propositions whose absolute probability is equal to the conditional probability of the consequent on the antecedent. An axiom system for this conditional connective is recovered from the probabilistic definition. Finally, the primary semantics for this axiom system, presented elsewhere, is related to the probabilistic interpretation. (shrink)

Robert Stalnaker is an actualist who holds that merely possible worlds are uninstantiated properties that might have been instantiated. Stalnaker also holds that there are no metaphysically impossible worlds: uninstantiated properties that couldn't have been instantiated. These views motivate Stalnaker's "two dimensional" account of the necessary a posteriori on which there is no single proposition that is both necessary and a posteriori. For a necessary proposition is true in all possible worlds. If there were necessary a posteriori (...) propositions, that would mean that there were propositions true in all possible worlds but which could only be known to be true by acquiring empirical evidence. Consider such a purported proposition P. The role of empirical evidence for establishing P's truth would have to be to rule out worlds in which P is false. If there were no such worlds to be ruled out, we would not require evidence for P. But by hypothesis, P is necessary and so true in all metaphysically possible worlds. And on Stalnaker's view, the metaphysically possible worlds are all the worlds there are. So there can be no proposition that is true in all possible worlds, but that we require evidence to know. In this way, the motivation for Stalnaker's two dimensional account of the necessary a posteriori rests on his denying that there are metaphysically impossible Worlds. I argue that given his view of what possible worlds are, Stalnaker has no principled reason for denying that there are metaphysically impossible worlds. If I am right, this undercuts Stalnaker's motivation for his two dimensional account of the necessary a posteriori. (shrink)

This selection of new approaches to the comparative study of religious ethics provides an accessible introduction to the most current research in the field. The essays in this book show that a variety of approaches to religious ethics are worth pursuing in our contemporary, profusely interconnected world. They also demonstrate that many sorts of analysis are shaped by comparison and comparative interests, even when they focus on a single topic or question, as long as they are informed by analogous studies (...) of other traditions, cultures, or religions. The volume exemplifies a thought-provoking, multidisciplinary engagement with global ethics today. (shrink)