Online research in philosophy

Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss raise a number of excellent questions in their separate responses to my comments on Gale’s book, On the Nature and Existence of God. They focus on aspects of my discussion that need at least to be clarified, if not retracted, in ways I explain in this reply.

Christopher Hitchcocks discussion of my use of screening-off in analyzing the causal process of natural selection raises some interesting issues to which I am pleased to reply. The bulk of his article is devoted to some fairly general points in the theory of explanation. In particular, he questions whether or not my point that phenotype screens off genotype from reproductive success (in cases of organismic selection) supports my claim that the explanation of differential reproductive success should be in terms of phenotypic differences, not genotypic differences. I will respond to this and show why the two supposed counter-examples to my position fail.

Mind and Language, 2006. Symposium on Insensitive Semantics. Reply to Ann Bezuidenhout, Steven Gross, Francois Recanati, Zoltan Szabo and Charles Travis.

In my commentary on Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s aptly titled book, Insensitive Semantics, I stake out a middle ground between their version of Semantic Minimalism and Contextualism. My kind of Semantic Minimalism does without the “minimal propositions” posited by C&L. It allows that some sentences do not express propositions, even relative to contexts. Instead, they are semantically incomplete. It is not a form of contextualism, since being semantically incomplete is not a way of being context-sensitive. In their reply to my commentary, C&L seem to miss this point. Exaggerating the force of their slippery slope argument, they continue to suppose that contextualism is the only alternative to their version of minimalism. They contend that I haven’t replied to their central criticism, but in fact they haven’t replied to mine.

We begin our discussion of Richard by comparing his and our aims. Richard argues for and begins to develop an account of a connection between the semantic content of (an utterance of) a sentence and correct indirect reports of it. He submits that by doing so he refutes us, but that's just not so. We never challenged the existence of every such connection. Surely there is some connection (probably many). Our paper attempts to show that one alleged connection does not obtain. We articulated two central goals, one specific (1), and one more general (2).