Online research in philosophy

That reference is inscrutable is demonstrated, it is argued, not only by W. V. Quine's arguments but by Peter Unger's "Problem of the Many." Applied to our own language, this is a paradoxical result, since nothing could be more obvious to speakers of English than that, when they use the word "rabbit," they are talking about rabbits. The solution to this paradox is to take a disquotational view of reference for one's own language, so that "When I use 'rabbit,' I (...) refer to rabbits" is made true by the meaning of the word "refer." The reference relation is extended to other languages by translation. The explanation for this peculiarly egocentric conception of semantics-questions of others' meanings are settled by asking what I mean by words of my language-is to be found in our practice of predicting and explaining other people's behavior by empathetic identification. I understand other people's behavior by asking what I would do in their place. (shrink)

There is no preferred reduction of number theory to set theory. Nonetheless, we confidently accept axioms obtained by substituting formulas from the language of set theory into the induction axiom schema. This is only possible, it is argued, because our acceptance of the induction axioms depends solely on the meanings of aritlunetical and logical terms, which is only possible if our 'intended models' of number theory are standard. Similarly, our acceptance of the second-order natural deduction rules depends solely on the (...) meanings of the logical terms, which implies, it is argued, that our second-order quantifiers have to be standard. (shrink)

Tarski and Mautner proposed to characterize the logical operations on a given domain as those invariant under arbitrary permutations. These operations are the ones that can be obtained as combinations of the operations on the following list: identity; substitution of variables; negation; finite or infinite disjunction; and existential quantification with respect to a finite or infinite block of variables. Inasmuch as every operation on this list is intuitively logical, this lends support to the Tarski-Mautner proposal.

If it is certain that performing an observation to determine whether P is true will in no way influence whether P is tme, then the proposition that the observation is performed ought to be probabilistically independent of P. Applying the notion of "observation" liberally, so that a wide variety of actions are treated as observations, this proposed new principle of belief revision yields the result that simple utihty maximization gives the correct solution to the Fisher smoking paradox and the two-box (...) solution to Newcomb's paradox. Contrary intuitions are explained as arising from mistakenly treating subjective probability as a measure of the intensity of conscious assent, whereas it ought to be regarded as measuring dispositions to action. (shrink)