The central claim is that the semantic knowledge exercised by people when they speak is practical knowledge. The relevant idea of practical knowledge is explicated, applied to the case of speaking, and connected with an idea of agents’ knowledge. Some defence of the claim is provided.
[Jennifer Hornsby] The central claim is that the semantic knowledge exercised by people when they speak is practical knowledge. The relevant idea of practical knowledge is explicated, applied to the case of speaking, and connected with an idea of agents' knowledge. Some defence of the claim is provided. /// [Jason Stanley] The central claim is that Hornsby's argument that semantic knowledge is practical knowledge is based upon a false premise. I argue, contra Hornsby, that speakers do not voice their (...) thoughts directly. Rather, our actions of voicing our thoughts are justified by decisions we make (albeit rapidly) about what words to use. Along the way, I raise doubts about other aspects of the thesis that semantic knowledge is practical knowledge. (shrink)
Jason Stanley presents a startling and provocative claim about knowledge: that whether or not someone knows a proposition at a given time is in part determined by his or her practical interests, i.e. by how much is at stake for that person at that time. In defending this thesis, Stanley introduces readers to a number of strategies for resolving philosophical paradox, making the book essential not just for specialists in epistemology but for all philosophers interested in philosophical methodology. (...) Since a number of his strategies appeal to linguistic evidence, it will be of great interest to linguists as well. (shrink)
Stanley, Denis This snippet from the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) captures how blind we can be to the presence of God in our lives. In the Gospels, being healed from physical blindness is also a celebration of coming to faith in Christ and using that new gift to follow him. The gift of having one's eyes opened is our constant prayer, more so than ever during Lent.
Many philosophers believe that there is a fundamental distinction between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to do something. According to Gilbert Ryle, to whom the insight is credited, knowledge-how is an ability, which is in turn a complex of dispositions. Knowledge-that, on the other hand, is not an ability, or anything similar. Rather, knowledge-that is a relation between a thinker and a true proposition.
Judging by our folk appraisals, then, knowledge and action are intimately related. The theories of rational action with which we are familiar leave this unexplained. Moreover, discussions of knowledge are frequently silent about this connection. This is a shame, since if there is such a connection it would seem to constitute one of the most fundamental roles for knowledge. Our purpose in this paper is to rectify this lacuna, by exploring ways in which knowing something is related to rationally acting (...) upon it, defending one particular proposal against anticipated objections. (shrink)
A singular thought about an object o is one that is directly about o in a characteristic way—grasp of that thought requires having some special epistemic relation to the object o, and the thought is ontologically dependent on o. One account of the nature of singular thought exploits a Russellian Structured Account of Propositions, according to which contents are represented by means of structured n-tuples of objects, properties, and functions. A proposition is singular, according to this framework, if and only (...) if it contains an object as a constituent. One advantage of the framework of Russellian Structured propositions is that it promises to provide a metaphysical basis for the notion of a singular thought about an object, grounding it in terms of constituency. In this paper, we argue that the attempt to ground the peculiar features of singular thoughts in terms of metaphysical constituency fails, and draw some consequences of our discussion for other debates. (shrink)
Chapter 1: Ryle on Knowing How Chapter 2: Knowledge-wh Chapter 3: PRO and the Representation of First-Person Thought Chapter 4: Ways of Thinking Chapter 5: Knowledge How Chapter 6: Ascribing Knowledge How Chapter 7: The Cognitive Science of Practical Knowledge Chapter 8: Knowledge Justified Preface A fact, as I shall use the term, is a true proposition. A proposition is the sort of thing that is capable of being believed or asserted. A proposition is also something that is characteristically the (...) kind of thing that is true or false; that snow is white is a true proposition, that Barack Obama is President of the United States as I am writing these words is another. Facts in this sense are not only among the things we believe and assert; they are also the kinds of things we know. The thesis of this book is that knowing how to do something is the same as knowing a fact. It follows that learning how to do something is learning a fact. For example, when you learned how to swim, what happened is that you learned some facts about swimming. Knowledge of these facts is what gave you knowledge of how to swim. Something similar occurred with every other activity that you now know how to do, such as riding a bicycle or cooking a meal. You know how to perform activities solely in virtue of your knowledge of facts about those activities. (shrink)
In this paper, I defend the thesis that alleffects of extra-linguistic context on thetruth-conditions of an assertion are traceable toelements in the actual syntactic structure of thesentence uttered. In the first section, I develop thethesis in detail, and discuss its implications for therelation between semantics and pragmatics. The nexttwo sections are devoted to apparent counterexamples.In the second section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of true non-sentential assertions.In the third section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of what (...) John Perry has called`unarticulated constituents''. I conclude by drawingsome consequences of my arguments for appeals tocontext-dependence in the resolution of problems inepistemology and philosophical logic. (shrink)
Contextualism in epistemology is the doctrine that the proposition expressed by a knowledge attribution relative to a context is determined in part by the standards of justification salient in that context. The (non-skeptical) contextualist allows that in some context c, a speaker may truly attribute knowledge at a time of a proposition p to Hannah, despite her possession of only weak inductive evidence for the truth of that proposition. Relative to another context, someone may make the very same knowledge attribution (...) to Hannah, yet be speaking falsely, because the epistemic standards in that context are higher. The reason this is possible, according to the contextualist, is that the two knowledge attributions express different propositions. (shrink)
My philosophical preoccupation has been, and continues to be, the problem of intentionality the problem of saying what it is to represent the world in both speech and thought. The problem expands, since one can never fully disentangle questions about the nature of representation from questions about the nature of what is represented. We can describe and think about the world only with the materials we find in it. -Robert Stalnaker..
This paper is a companion piece to my earlier paper “Fallibilism and Concessive Knowledge Attributions”. There are two intuitive charges against fallibilism. One is that it countenances the truth (and presumably acceptability) of utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, though it might be that he is not a Republican”. The second is that it countenances the truth (and presumably acceptability) of utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, even though (...) I’m not certain that he is”, or “I know that Bush it a Republican, even though it isn’t certain that he is.” In “Fallibilism and Concessive Knowledge Attributions”, I argue that fallibilism in epistemology does not countenance the truth of utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, though it might be that he is not a Republican”. In this paper, I argue that there are independent reasons for thinking that utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, though I’m not certain that he is” and “I know that Bush is a Republican, though it’s not certain that he is” are unassertible. More specifically, I argue that these are simply instances of Moore’s Paradox, such as “Dogs bark, but I don’t know that they do.” The right account of Moore’s Paradox does not involve the falsehood of the semantic content of the relevant utterances, but rather their pragmatic unacceptability. So the anti-fallibilist intuitions turn out to have pragmatic, rather than semantic import, and therefore do not tell against the truth of fallibilism. Fallibilism in epistemology is often thought to be theoretically desirable, but intuitively problematic. My purpose with these two papers is to show that fallibilism is not intuitively problematic. (shrink)
Relevance Theory is the influential theory of linguistic interpretation first championed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance theorists have made important contributions to our understanding of a wide range of constructions, especially constructions that tend to receive less attention in semantics and philosophy of language. But advocates of Relevance Theory also have had a tendency to form a rather closed community, with an unwillingness to translate their own special vocabulary and distinctions into more neutral vernacular. Since Robyn Carston has (...) long been the advocate of Relevance Theory most able to communicate with a broader philosophical and linguistic audience, it is with particular interest that the emergence of her long-awaited volume, Thoughts and Utterances has been greeted. The volume exhibits many of the strengths, but also some of the weaknesses, of this well-known program. (shrink)
This article investigates the semantics of sentences that express numerical averages, focusing initially on cases such as ‘The average American has 2.3 children’. Such sentences have been used both by linguists and philosophers to argue for a disjuncture between semantics and ontology. For example, Noam Chomsky and Norbert Hornstein have used them to provide evidence against the hypothesis that natural language semantics includes a reference relation holding between words and objects in the world, whereas metaphysicians such as Joseph Melia and (...) Stephen Yablo have used them to provide evidence that apparent singular reference need not be taken as ontologically committing. We develop a fully general and independently justified compositional semantics in which such constructions are assigned truth conditions that are not ontologically problematic, and show that our analysis is superior to all extant rivals. Our analysis provides evidence that a good semantics yields a sensible ontology. It also reveals that natural language contains genuine singular terms that refer to numbers. (shrink)
Fictionalist approaches to ontology have been an accepted part of philosophical methodology for some time now. On a fictionalist view, engaging in discourse that involves apparent reference to a realm of problematic entities is best viewed as engaging in a pretense. Although in reality, the problematic entities do not exist, according to the pretense we engage in when using the discourse, they do exist. In the vocabulary of Burgess and Rosen (1997, p. 6), a nominalist construal of a given discourse (...) is revolutionary just in case it involves a “reconstruction or revision” of the original discourse. Revolutionary approaches are therefore prescriptive. In contrast, a nominalist construal of a given discourse is hermeneutic just in case it is a nominalist construal of a discourse that is put forth as a hypothesis about how the discourse is in fact used; that is, hermeneutic approaches are descriptive. I will adopt Burgess and Rosen’s terminology to describe the two different spirits in which a fictionalist hypothesis in ontology might be advanced. Revolutionary fictionalism would involve admitting that while the problematic discourse does in fact involve literal reference to nonexistent entities, we ought to use the discourse in such a way that the reference is simply within the pretense. The hermeneutic fictionalist, in contrast, reads fictionalism into our actual use of the problematic discourse. According to her, normal use of the problematic discourse involves a pretense. According to the pretense, and only according to the pretense, there exist the objects to which the discourse would commit its users, were no pretense involved. My purpose in this paper is to argue that hermeneutic fictionalism is not a viable strategy in ontology. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I discuss in detail several problematic consequences of any interesting application of hermeneutic fictionalism. Of course, if there is good evidence that hermeneutic fictionalism is correct in some cases, then some of these drastic consequences would have to be accepted.. (shrink)
According to what I will call a contextualist solution to the sorites paradox, vague terms are context-sensitive, and one can give a convincing dissolution of the sorites paradox in terms of this context-dependency. The reason, according to the contextualist, that precise boundaries for expressions like “heap” or “tall for a basketball player” are so difficult to detect is that when two entities are sufficiently similar (or saliently similar), we tend to shift the interpretation of the vague expression so that if (...) one counts as falling in the extension of the property expressed by that expression, so does the other. As a consequence, when we look for the boundary of the extension of a vague expression in its penumbra, our very looking has the effect of changing the interpretation of the vague expression so that the boundary is not where we are looking. This accounts for the persuasive force of sorites arguments. (shrink)
Lewis concludes that fallibilism is uncomfortable, though preferable to scepticism. However, he believes that contextualism about knowledge allows us to ‘dodge the choice’ between fallibilism and scepticism. For the contextualist semantics for ‘know’ can explain the oddity of fallibilism, without landing us into scepticism.
In the Twentieth Century, Logic and Philosophy of Language are two of the few areas of philosophy in which philosophers made indisputable progress. For example, even now many of the foremost living ethicists present their theories as somewhat more explicit versions of the ideas of Kant, Mill, or Aristotle. In contrast, it would be patently absurd for a contemporary philosopher of language or logician to think of herself as working in the shadow of any figure who died before the Twentieth (...) Century began. Advances in these disciplines make even the most unaccomplished of its practitioners vastly more sophisticated than Kant. There were previous periods in which the problems of language and logic were studied extensively (e.g. the medieval period). But from the perspective of the progress made in the last 120 years, previous work is at most a source of interesting data or occasional insight. All systematic theorizing about content that meets contemporary standards of rigor has been done subsequently. (shrink)
If, relative to a context, what a sentence says is necessarily true, then what it says must be so. If, relative to a context, what a sentence says is possible, then what it says could be true. Following natural philosophical usage, it would thus seem clear that in assessing an occurrence of a sentence for possibility or necessity, one is assessing what is said by that occurrence. In this paper, I argue that natural philosophical usage misleads here. In assessing an (...) occurrence of a sentence for possibility or necessity, one is not assessing the modal status of the proposition expressed by that occurrence of the sentence. (shrink)
Hintikka and Sandu had argued that 'Frege's failure to grasp the idea of the standard interpretation of higher-order logic turns his entire foundational project into a hopeless daydream' and that he is 'inextricably committed to a non-standard interpretation' of higher-order logic. We disagree.
When we utter sentences containing quantifiers, typically we are not to be taken to speak about absolutely everything there is. Suppose Mary has invited her friend John to a party to which she is going. If, upon entering the party, Mary turns to Jack and utters (1), it would be rather odd of Jack to object by pointing out that John in fact knows several people who are not present.
Egalitarianism, the view that equality matters, attracts a great deal of attention amongst contemporary political theorists. And yet it has turned out to be surprisingly difficult to provide a fully satisfactory egalitarian theory. The cutting-edge articles in Egalitarianism move the debate forward. They are written by some of the leading political philosophers in the field.
This paper examines the foreign direct investment decision from an ethical perspective, and considers the moral agency involved in such decisions, with emphasis upon the corporate decision-maker. Historical capital allocation models once regarded as both financially and ethically normative are shown to be deficient in today's environment. Work of modern western philososphical and theological ethicists is included in analyses of the applicability of selected ethical approaches or metaphors to multinational foreign direct investment decisions and the corporate manager's role and responsibility (...) as corporate decision-maker and moral agent. The ethical perspectives reviewed can serve as an aid to the individual manager's determination of what constitutes a responsible exercise of decision-making power. (shrink)
What is philosophy about? Has it a content all its own? A method? This paper examines a few responses to these questions. At the extremes are the Proper Content and the No Content views. The former identifies philosophy with a delimited set of core issues. The latter, abandoning any proper subject-matter for philosophy, identifies it with a core modus operandi. Neither of these is especially compelling. More dynamically conceived is the Vanishing Content view which sees philosophy as continually and inevitably (...) abandoning its business to newly emerging sciences, acting largely as an exploratory initiator of inquiry which is ultimately eliminable. Though promising, this view underrates the resilience and adaptability of philosophy, especially its current drive to forge alliances with and ultimately amalgamate itself into newer areas of study. This tendency is explored via the Partners-for-Progress view, which foresees philosophy becoming dependently indistinguishable from the theoretical wings of various autonomous disciplines. Finally, I examine the Family Inheritance view, which suggests that philosophy cannot merely vanish into the sciences because of idiosyncrasies in its very institutions which are self-sustaining and, more than most, deeply beholden to its own past which it keeps ever present. (shrink)
Spiritual practices such as prayer have been shown to improve health and quality of life for those facing chronic or terminal illness. The early Christian healing tradition distinguished between types of prayer and their role in healing, placing great emphasis on the healing power of more integrated relational forms of prayer such as prayers of gratitude and contemplative prayer. Because autonomic tone is impaired in most disease states, autonomic homeostasis may provide insight into the healing effects of prayer. I report (...) on observations in five volunteers engaging in five types of prayer. Using heart rate variability as a measure of autonomic tone and adaptability, I review the potential correlation of type of prayer with autonomic rebalance as measured specifically by psychophysiological coherence ratios. The five types—supplication, devotion, intercession, gratefulness, and contemplative prayer—elicited varying degrees of improvements in heart rate variability and corresponding psychophysiological coherence. These observations suggest a correlation of innate healing to prayer type that is consistent with teachings from the Christian healing tradition and with modern research. Further research is warranted to verify these hypotheses. (shrink)
Our intuitions about whether someone knows that p vary even fixing the intuitively epistemic features of that person’s situation. Sometimes they vary with features of our own situation, and sometimes they vary with features of the putative knower’s situation. If the putative knower is in a risky situation and her belief that p is pivotal in achieving a positive outcome of one of the actions available to her, or avoiding a negative one, we often feel she must be in a (...) particularly good epistemic position to know that p. If however she is not in a risky situation, we tend to be considerably more permissive in our attributions of knowledge. Our intuitions about when someone knows that p and when she doesn’t also fluctuate with what is salient, either to the putative knower or ourselves. If someone claims to know where their car is, and I raise the possibility that it has been stolen, she may retract her claim to know. Which of these tendencies, if any, reveal something about the nature of our epistemic terms or concepts? (shrink)
Recent highly publicized ethical breaches including those at Enron and WorldCom have focused attention on ethical behavior within the accounting profession. At the heart of the debate is whether ethical attitudes of accountants are to blame. Using a nationally representative sample of accounting practitioners and a multidisciplinary student sample at two Southern United States universities, we compare sample responses to 25 ethically charged vignettes to test whether they differ. Overall, we find no significant difference – even for a specific “accounting (...) tricks” vignette, which resembles the Enron and WorldCom situations. We do find, however, that the practitioners were more accepting of vignettes that involved physical harm (PH) to individuals and those that were legal (but ethically questionable). We postulate that accounting practitioners may apply a legalistic framework to their assessment of the acceptability of each vignette. Focusing on an “accounting tricks” vignette, we also find no significant difference between auditors and institutional practitioners compared to all other types of accountants in the sample. We conclude that ethical attitudes of accounting practitioners do not differ significantly by specialty area. (shrink)
Remembering Fermi MORREL H. COHEN Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University Frelinghuysen Road. Piscataway, NJ 08854-8019 USA and Department ...
We introduce a reducibility preordering between classes of countable structures, each class containing only structures of a given similarity type (which is allowed to vary from class to class). Though we sometimes work in a slightly larger context, we are principally concerned with the case where each class is an invariant Borel class (i.e. the class of all models, with underlying set = ω, of an L ω 1 ω sentence; from this point of view, the reducibility can be thought (...) of as a (rather weak) sort of L ω 1 ω -interpretability notion). We prove a number of general results about this notion, but our main thrust is to situate various mathematically natural classes with respect to the preordering, most notably classes of algebraic structures such as groups and fields. (shrink)
A fairly quotable special, but still representative, case of our main result is that for 2 ≤ n ≤ ω, there is a natural number m (n) such that, the following holds. Assume GCH: If $\lambda are regular, there is a cofinality preserving forcing extension in which 2 λ = μ and, for all $\sigma such that η +m(n)-1) ≤ μ, ((η +m(n)-1) ) σ ) → ((κ) σ ) η (1)n . This generalizes results of [3], Section 1, and (...) the forcing is a "many cardinals" version of the forcing there. (shrink)
We lay the combinatorial foundations for [5] by setting up and proving the essential properties of the coding apparatus for singular cardinals. We also prove another result concerning the coding apparatus for inaccessible cardinals.
Complex systems can be characterized by classes of equivalency of their elements defined according to system specific rules. We propose a generalized preferential attachment model to describe the class size distribution. The model postulates preferential growth of the existing classes and the steady influx of new classes. According to the model, the distribution changes from a pure exponential form for zero influx of new classes to a power law with an exponential cut-off form when the influx of new classes is (...) substantial. Predictions of the model are tested through the analysis of a unique industrial database, which covers both elementary units (products) and classes (markets, firms) in a given industry (pharmaceuticals), covering the entire size distribution. The model's predictions are in good agreement with the data. The paper sheds light on the emergence of the exponent tau approximately 2 observed as a universal feature of many biological, social and economic problems. (shrink)
Two broad metaphysical perspectives deriving from Parmenides and Heraclitus have implications for our notion of sustainability. The Parmenidian defends a deepseated orderliness and permanence in things, while the Heraclitian finds only chance and change. Two further outlooks, the nomic (or the big-picture scientific) and the prudential, present differing accounts of our place in the world. While the nomic outlook accepts nothing privileged about the human perspective or even life itself, the prudential outlook is obviously welfare-centered. It is argued that nomic (...) views, whether Parmenidian or Heraclitian, fail to provide any rationale for sustainability measures or concerns. The only such rationale comes from Parmenidian prudentialism, which, I argue, can operate only if it disowns at its peril the nomic point of view and couches sustainability entirely under the rubric of maximizing certain preferred opportunities drawn from collective self-love. But doing so merely evades rather than answers the tension imposed by the nomic Heraclitian for whom nothing lasts and nothing human counts specially in the measure. The liabilities of Parmenidian prudentialism are examined and found to be too great for any consistent notion of sustainability to bear. (shrink)
Assuming 0 ♯ does not exist, we present a combinatorial approach to Jensen's method of coding by a real. The forcing uses combinatorial consequences of fine structure (including the Covering Lemma, in various guises), but makes no direct appeal to fine structure itself.
We present two different types of models where, for certain singular cardinals λ of uncountable cofinality, λ → (λ,ω + 1) 2 , although λ is not a strong limit cardinal. We announce, here, and will present in a subsequent paper, [7], that, for example, consistently, $\aleph_{\omega_1} \nrightarrow (\aleph_{\omega_1}, \omega + 1)^2$ and consistently, 2 $^{\aleph_0} \nrightarrow (2^{\aleph_0},\omega + 1)^2$.
It is shown that if κ is an uncountable successor cardinal in L[ 0 ♯ ], then there is a normal tree T ∈ L [ 0 ♯ ] of height κ such that $0^\sharp \not\in L\lbrack\mathbf{T}\rbrack$ . Yet T is $ -distributive in L[ 0 ♯ ]. A proper class version of this theorem yields an analogous L[ 0 ♯ ]-definable tree such that distinct branches in the presence of 0 ♯ collapse the universe. A heretofore unutilized method for (...) constructing in L[ 0 ♯ ] generic objects for certain L-definable forcings and "exotic sequences", combinatorial principles introduced by C. Gray, are used in constructing these trees. (shrink)
It is proved (Theorem 1) that if 0♯ exists, then any constructible forcing property which over L adds no reals, over V collapses an uncountable L-cardinal to cardinality ω. This improves a theorem of Foreman, Magidor, and Shelah. Also, a method for approximating this phenomenon generically is found (Theorem 2). The strategy is first to reduce the problem of `disabling' forcing properties to that of specializing certain trees in a weak sense.
