Online research in philosophy

Jason Stanley has proposed that we can account for the effects of extralinguistic context on truth-conditional content whilst remaining loyal to a compositional semantics for natural language. This is possible, he argues, because there are covert variables present in the logical forms of certain sentences whose values are fixed relative to contexts, but which do not register in the overt structure of those sentences. In the present article I assess the plausibility of positing such variables in logical form, focusing particularly (...) on the examples Stanley provides in order to corroborate their presence. I argue that these examples are apt for an alternative treatment than that offered by Stanley—one which does not make recourse to covert variables, and is hence more credible. I end by spelling out some consequences of this argument for Stanley’s proposal. (shrink)

Anosognosia is literally ‘unawareness of or failure to acknowledge one’s hemi- plegia or other disability’ (OED). Etymology would suggest the meaning ‘lack of knowledge of disease’ so that anosognosia would include any denial of impairment, such as denial of blindness (Anton’s syndrome). But Babinski, who introduced the term in 1914, applied it only to patients with hemiplegia who fail to acknowledge their paralysis. Most commonly, this is failure to acknowledge paralysis of the left side of the body following damage to (...) the right hemisphere of the brain. In this paper, we shall mainly be concerned with anosognosia for hemiplegia. But we shall also use the term ‘anosognosia’ in an inclusive way to encompass lack of knowledge or acknowledgement of any impairment. Indeed, in the construction ‘anosognosia for X’, X might even be anosognosia for some Y. (shrink)