Talk about Beliefs presents a new account of beliefs and of practices of reporting them that yields solutions to foundational problems in the philosophies of...

Beliefs are concrete particulars containing ideas of properties and notions of things, which also are concrete. The claim made in a belief report is that the agent has a belief (i) whose content is a specific singular proposition, and (ii) which involves certain of the agent's notions and ideas in a certain way. No words in the report stand for the notions and ideas, so they are unarticulated constituents of the report's content (like the relevant place in "it's raining"). The (...) belief puzzles (Hesperus, Cicero, Pierre) involve reports about two different notions. So the analysis gets the puzzling truth values right. (shrink)

In “On Sense and Reference,” surrounding his discussion of how we describe what people say and think, identity is Frege’s first stop and his last. We will follow Frege’s plan here, but we will stop also in the land of make-believe.

I present a counterexample to the claim that it is never true to say "I falsely believe that so-and-so." .

I hold that a belief report characterizes the subject's belief not only by its truth conditions, but also by the token mental representations involved in it (based on conversational hints). To what extent does a belief report specify the mental representations required to make it true? I advance two surprising theses: (i) many reports specify representations by actually referring to them, and (ii) it is not clear that any ordinary reports simply leave open what sorts of representations are required for (...) their truth. I defend these claims from the arguments of Marga Reimer and other critics. (shrink)

I wish first to motivate very briefly two points about the kind of context sensitive semantics needed for attitude reports, namely that reports are about referents and about mental representations; then I will compare two proposals for treating the attitudes, both of which capture the two points in question.

I explain and criticize a theory of beliefs and of belief sentences offered by Graeme Forbes. My main criticism will be directed at Forbes' idea that, as a matter of the semantic rules of belief reporting -- as a matter of the meaning of belief ascriptions -- to get at the subject's way of thinking in an attitude ascription, we must use expressions that are "linguistic counterparts" of the subject's expressions. I think we often do something like that, but that (...) we have other, equally good methods of getting at ways of thinking; so what is wanted is a more inclusive characterization of the rules of belief reporting by which we manage to do it -- a characterization more along the lines of: anything goes. (shrink)

It is controversial whether the truth conditions of attitude sentences are opaque. It is not, or shouldn't be controversial, however, that conditions of apt or unexceptionable usage are opaque. A framework for expressing such uncontroversial claims of opacity is developed, and within this framework it is argued that opacity resides at a locutionary level — that it is a matter of expressed content (which might not be truth-conditional). The same claim is made for a related pattern in attitude talk which (...) is labeled the moonlighting use of thing-talk. (shrink)

Utilitarian ideas in nineteenth-centuryAmerica have been given short shrift inmodern historical and philosophicalscholarship. Collecting the relevant publishedwork together in one place is an essentialstarting point for any serious investigation of American utilitarians andtheir critics. James Crimmins and Mark Spencer have made an expertselection from scattered sources of around 60 important articles andessays. These include treatments of Bentham by his friend John Neal,editor of The Yankee, and commentaries on John Stuart Mill gatheredfrom rare American journals. There are also discussions (...) of utilitarianjurisprudence by the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, andpieces by many other writers. This collection, with its substantialeditorial introduction, will be vital reading for historians of ideas,scholars of philosophy and political thought, and any one elseinterested in the fate of utilitarianism in America. (shrink)

In the twelve recent essays collected here, Shoemaker unfolds a comprehensive account of first-personal access to mental phenomena.

In Utilitarianism in the Early American Republic James E. Crimmins provides a fresh perspective on the history of antebellum American political thought. Based on a broad-ranging study of the dissemination and reception of utilitarian ideas in the areas of constitutional politics, law education, law reform, moral theory and political economy, Crimmins illustrates the complexities of the place of utilitarianism in the intellectual ferment of the times, in both its secular and religious forms, intersection with other doctrines, and practical (...) outcomes. The pragmatic character of American political thought revealed--culminating in the postbellum rise of Pragmatism--stands in marked contrast to the conventional interpretations of intellectual history in this period. Utilitarianism in the Early American Republic will be of interest to academic specialists, and graduate and senior undergraduate students engaged in the history of political thought, moral philosophy and legal philosophy, particularly scholars with interests in utilitarianism, the trans-Atlantic transfer of ideas, the American political tradition and modern American intellectual history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Theologian's Doubts:Natural Philosophy and the Skeptical Games of GhazālīLeor HaleviIn the history of skeptical thought, which normally leaps from the Pyrrhonists to the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus in the sixteenth century, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (1058-1111) figures as a medieval curiosity. Skeptical enough to merit passing acknowledgment, he has proven too baffling to be treated fully alongside pagan, atheist, or materialist philosophers. As a theologian defending certain Muslim (...) dogmas, Ghazālī has not met what historians consider the mark of the true skeptic, a mind doubting the possibility of all systems of knowledge. But what is fascinating about him is that he brought into practical operation the tools of what I call "functional skepticism."1He denied the claims to truth of Aristotelian physics—whose basis he showed to rest on groundless belief—then turned and argued for the possibility of the Resurrection tooth and nail. The scholarly debate on The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-falāsifa) has concentrated on the extent to which Ghazālī qua Ashcarite theologian was seduced into Aristotelian philosophy despite himself.2 In my view this debate has been misguided in the attempt to distill the [End Page 19] essence of Ghazālī from the book's eclectic theology; I will argue for a different view of Ghazālī on the basis of a close reading of key passages. In the unusual sections where Ghazālī applies Aristotelian language to a world not following the ordinary laws of physics, some have found Ghazālī slipping, unconsciously perhaps, into an Aristotelian frame of mind. I will show that, as a skeptical theologian with a dialogic imagination, he was rather deconstructing Aristotelian discourse while playing a Wittgensteinian sort of language game.Natural Philosopher or Speculative Theologian?The disagreement about the extent to which philosophy infected Ghazālī is ancient. Ghazālī might have studied philosophy only in order to refute it. He himself defended his philosophizing with the claim that one cannot deconstruct a system of thought until one has understood it so deeply as to elaborate upon its fundamental principles.3 His Maqāṣid al-falāsifa was in fact received, especially in trans-Pyrenean Europe, as a philosopher's genuine summary of the object of philosophy.4 The book strikes me as suspiciously creative in its representation of philosophical discourse, but it appears in any case as an expert and surprisingly unbiased treatment.5 Arabic readers knew that Ghazālī had also written a polemical treatise against philosophy, Tahāfut al-falāsifa, but they still wondered about his engagement with the ideas he challenged. Abū Bakr Ibn al-cArabī, for example, commented that Ghazālī had been unable to extricate himself from philosophy.6 Other philosophers pondered whether or not he had been a closeted member of their charmed circle and sought in his writings traces of esoteric philosophy.7Averroës's own sober sense of distance between philosophy and theology was partially a reaction to what he perceived as Ghazālī's dangerous and carefree mixture of the two sciences.8 He attacked Ghazālī's book in The Incoherence [End Page 20] of the Incoherence to restore philosophy's sense of purity, an aim he sought to accomplish by separating religious concerns from the philosopher's field of inquiry.9 Ironically, such a separation is precisely what Ghazālī might have wished to provoke by crisscrossing and blurring the line between religion and philosophy.The modern debate on chapter 17 of Tahāfut al-falāsifa has concentrated on defining Ghazālī as either a natural philosopher or an occasionalist theologian. In his defense of the possibility of miracles Ghazālī presented two theories of causation, one denying the logical basis of Aristotelian notions of natural causality, and the other more or less adopting these notions. Jointly, the two theories have seemed incompatible, and for this reason scholars have attempted to sort Ghazālī out of the apparent confusion. In 1978 L. E. Goodman argued persuasively that Ghazālī exploited rather than denied the philosophers' ideas of causality. In two articles Michael Marmura challenged Goodman, contending... (shrink)

Anyone weary of endless philosophical debate on belief reports will find welcome relief in this book. Talking not just about belief talk but about belief itself, it offers much that is new, interesting, and subtle. The central thesis, though interestingly and subtly developed, is not exactly new. It is a version of the “hidden indexical theory” (HIT) of..

Gonzales tells Mark Crimmins (1992) that Crimmins knows him under two guises, and that under his other guise Crimmins thinks him an idiot. Knowing his cleverness, but not knowing which guise he has in mind, Crimmins trusts Gonzales but does not know which of his beliefs to revise. He therefore asserts to Gonzales. (FBI) I falsely believe that you are an idiot.

Moore’s paradox occurs with sentences, such as (1) It’s raining and I don’t think it’s raining. which are self-defeating in a way that prevents one from making an asser- tion with them.1 But Mark Crimmins has given us a case of a sentence that is syntactically just like (1) but is nonetheless assertible. Suppose I know somebody, and know or have excellent reason to believe that I know that very person under some other guise. I do not know (...) what that other guise is, though I do know that I believe that the person I know under that other guise is an idiot. (shrink)

Hume's Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition brings together the original American responses to one of Britain's greatest men of letters, David Hume. Now available as a single volume paperback, this new edition includes updated further readings suggestions and dozens of additional primary sources gathered together in a completely new concluding section. From complete pamphlets and booklets, to poems, reviews, and letters, to extracts from newspapers, religious magazines and literary and political journals, this book's contents come from a wide variety (...) of sources published in colonial America and the early United States between 1758 and 1850. As well as classics by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, it contains scores of unknown and hard-to-locate items, many of which have not been reprinted since their original publication. These responses are divided into four parts covering Hume's Essays; his Philosophical Writings; his History of England; and his Character and Death. Each of those parts has a separate introductory essay, and every selection is introduced by a short headnote that sets the piece in its historical context and provides bibliographical references. Packed with new insights into Hume and American thought and culture, Hume's Reception in Early America reveals the relevance and impact of Hume on American political, philosophical, historical, religious, and aesthetic debates. (shrink)

Prologue, invitation to thinking about God In the Hebrew Bible? -- Part I, questions about God? -- Why does God in the Bible have a body? -- What do God's body parts in the Bible mean? -- Why is God angry in the Bible? -- Does God in the Bible have gender or sexuality? -- Part II, questions about God in the world? -- What can creation tell us about God? -- Who-or what-is the Satan? -- Why do people suffer (...) according to the Hebrew Bible? -- Epilogue, God in the Bible and beyond. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 677-696 [Access article in PDF] Bentham and Hobbes:An Issue of Influence James E. Crimmins Historians of political thought commonly assume that the similarities in the thought of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) are the product of Bentham's reading of Hobbes and infer that Bentham was in a certain sense a disciple of Hobbes. 1 This has been generally (...) true through the past one hundred years of scholarship, from the commentator writing at the end of the nineteenth century who had no doubt that Bentham's "chief ideas and methods are to be found in Hobbes," to the end of the last century when Gerald Postema insisted that Bentham was "a careful student of Hobbes." 2 In between George Sabine argued that Hobbes's political philosophy "affected the whole later history of moral and political thought," but its powerful "positive influence" was most fully felt in the nineteenth century when his ideas were incorporated into the thinking of the utilitarians. 3 The implication of Sabine's comment [End Page 677] was that Hobbes's influence was not always of the positive sort. In other words, if one can conceive of influence being positive then it can also be negative, and Hobbes had just such an influence on many who read him until his ideas became respectable in the hands of Bentham and his associates. 4 John Plamenatz concurred. Bentham, he wrote, "lived in the shadow of Hobbes" and, together with James Mill, came close to "an uncritical acceptance" of Hobbes's doctrines. 5 Because Bentham abandoned Hobbes's "vocabulary" (laws of nature, natural rights, covenant, and so forth) "the difference between them appears so much greater than it is," claimed Plamenatz. But eliminate the troublesome phrases from Hobbes's writings and what remains, save for Hobbes's extravagant fear of anarchy, is strikingly similar to the fundamental political doctrines of Bentham. 6At the heart of the syndrome of ideas that the utilitarians are assumed to have inherited from Hobbes is the belief that the methods of physical science were the proper models for political explanation. 7 William Bluhm wrote that the mechanistic and naturalistic framework in which Hobbes couched his theory was not to be approached in the literature of political theory until Bentham set forth his felicific calculus. Since the time of Hobbes, Bluhm argued, Bentham stands out as the great exception to the history of neglect that has been the general fate of mathematical forms of analysis in the study of politics (until the second half of the twentieth century). 8 Moreover, in postulating man as a rational actor motivated by selfish interest and in suggesting that it is in the interest of the ruler to govern in the majority interest as the best way of preserving his own power, Bluhm argued that Hobbes provided "an interesting echo... of a central Benthamic principle, [and thus] good evidence that Hobbes is the forerunner of Utilitarianism." 9 The views of Sabine, Plamenatz, and Bluhm found an impressive echo in John Bowle's influential Hobbes and his Critics, where Hobbes is described as "a forerunner of the Benthamite school of political thought." 10 It is with this kind of understanding in mind, that W. H. Greenleaf [End Page 678] commented, "it is no accident that the modern revival of interest in Hobbesian ideas is associated with the utilitarians...." 11Oddly, these commentators have remarkably few references to Hobbes in Bentham's writings to work with. This paucity of textual evidence was noted by an early reviewer of the first edition of Bentham's works, who chose rather to speak of the "coincidences" between the thought of Hobbes and Bentham, only pausing to note that such is the "slippery" nature of general reasonings of the kind Hobbes and Bentham attempted that it should not startle us to find one a monarchist and the other a republican. 12 Nevertheless, it is generally assumed that Bentham did read Hobbes and that much of what he read he assimilated into his... (shrink)

This paper offers a new way to make sense of disagreement expansion from a polylogical perspective by incorporating various places in addition to players and positions into the analysis. The concepts build on prior implicit ideas about disagreement space by suggesting how to more fully account for argumentative context, and its construction, in large-scale complex controversies. As a basis for our polylogical analysis, we use a New York Times news story reporting on an oil train explosion—a significant point in the (...) broader controversy over producing oil and gas via hydraulic fracturing. (shrink)

A specific issue for argumentation theory is whether information and communication technologies play any role in governing argument — that is, as parties engage in practical activities across space and time via ICTs, does technology matter for the interplay of argumentative content and process in managing disagreement? The case made here is that technologies do matter because they are not merely conduits of communication but have a role in the pragmatics of communication and argumentation. In particular, ICTs should be recognized (...) as communication-information services that are delegated degrees of responsibility for managing disagreements arising from practical activities. These services are organized around practical theories for designing disagreement space. However, recognizing this relationship between argument and technology requires accounting for procedures, techniques, or rules and speech acts that are not argumentative propositions in any strict sense but that are consequential for what becomes argumentation in any setting. An account about designing disagreement space, grounded in Jackson and Jacobs’s theory of Disagreement Management, is put forward to address these issues while more generally contributing to understanding argument in context. (shrink)

It is time to bring the rich resources of these traditions into the contemporary debate about the nature of self. This volume is the first of its kind.

Jeremy Bentham was an ardent secularist convinced that society could be sustained without the support of religious institutions or beliefs. This is writ large in the commonly neglected books on religion he wrote and published during the last twenty-five years of his life. However his earliest writings on the subject date from the 1770s, when as a young man he first embarked on his calling as a legal theorist and social reformer. From that time on, religion was never far from (...) the centre of his thoughts. In Secular Utilitarianism, James Crimmins illustrates the nature, extent, and depth of Jeremy Bentham's concern with religion, from his Oxford days of first doubts to the middle years of quiet unbelief, and finally, the zealous atheism and secularism of his later life. Dr Crimmins provides an interpretation of Bentham's thought in which his religious views, hitherto of little interest to Bentham scholars, are shown to be integral: on the one hand intimately associated with the metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological principles which gave shape to his system as a whole, and on the other central to the development of his entirely secular view of society. (shrink)

Fitting Attitudes accounts of value analogize or equate being good with being desirable, on the premise that ‘desirable’ means not, ‘able to be desired’, as Mill has been accused of mistakenly assuming, but ‘ought to be desired’, or something similar. The appeal of this idea is visible in the critical reaction to Mill, which generally goes along with his equation of ‘good’ with ‘desirable’ and only balks at the second step, and it crosses broad boundaries in terms of philosophers’ other (...) commitments. For example, Fitting Attitudes accounts play a central role both in T.M. Scanlon’s [1998] case against teleology, and in Michael Smith [2003], [unpublished] and Doug Portmore’s [2007] cases for it. And of course they have a long and distinguished history. (shrink)

Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissioned new projects from artists Mark Dion, Peter Fend, and Dan Peterman, each focusing on interrelationships between particular organisms—human beings-and a specific group of sites—a museum building, a river landscape, and a university campus. The results, exhibited at the Smart Museum during the summer of (...) 2000, evoke the varied scales, from the microscopic to the global, at which human actions affect the environment. This catalog documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum Associate Curator Stephanie Smith provides an introduction and brief overviews of the three projects, each of the artists contribute statements, and photographers Susan Anderson and Tom van Eynde document—in over 100 images—the processes and projects that comprise the exhibition. (shrink)

A revelatory new theory of consciousness that returns emotions to the center of mental life. For Mark Solms, one of the boldest thinkers in contemporary neuroscience, discovering how consciousness comes about has been a lifetime's quest. Scientists consider it the "hard problem" because it seems an impossible task to understand why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain. Venturing into the elementary physics of life, Solms has now arrived at an astonishing answer. (...) In The Hidden Spring, he brings forward his discovery in accessible language and graspable analogies. Solms is a frank and fearless guide on an extraordinary voyage from the dawn of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis to the cutting edge of contemporary neuroscience, adhering to the medically provable. But he goes beyond other neuroscientists by paying close attention to the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated, whose uncanny conversations expose much about the brain's obscure reaches. Most importantly, you will be able to recognize the workings of your own mind for what they really are, including every stray thought, pulse of emotion, and shift of attention. The Hidden Spring will profoundly alter your understanding of your own subjective experience. (shrink)

It is argued here that large-scale organization and networked computing enable new divisions of communicative work aimed at shaping the content, direction, and outcomes of societal conversations. The challenge for argumentation theory and practice lies in attending to these new divisions of communicative work in constituting contemporary argumentative realities. Goffman’s conceptualization of participation frameworks and production formats are applied to articulate the communicative work of organizations afforded by networked computing that invents and innovates argument in all of its senses—as product, (...) process, and procedure. Communicative work, however, may be scaffolding argumentative contexts and practices that are quite different than what has constituted past argumentative realities. The computerization of argument happens as organizations invent and innovate argument practice relative to the demands and opportunities of interorganizational communication. The cases and examples examined here suggest that argument practice is evolving around the logic of conversation and the principle of personalization. The analysis challenges argumentation theory to seriously engage with the construction of communicative contexts and the realization of ideas about disagreement management in organizational practice and information infrastructures. Directions for integrating insights from a design perspective on argument with insights from organizational and information systems theory are proposed for coming to terms with an era of large-scale organization and computerization, in particular the evolution of argument practice, the inscription of argument in the built environment, and the absorption of socio-cultural argument practices by organizations and computation. (shrink)

We usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and dispensable, an activity for specialists: poets, prophets, lunatics, and babysitters. Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, for example, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday (...) thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom is wrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thought makes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking. In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination in parable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the role of parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind. Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers to classic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and invention. (shrink)