As the title suggests, this paper is something of a leftover – or perhaps a new branch – to my "Meaning in Time: on temporal externalism and Kripkenstein’s skeptical challenge". In that work I essayed to portray my understanding of the sceptical challenge uncovered by Saul Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein’s later works in a nutshell as to its nature and resolution. Here, my task is to dig a little deeper into the key phrase of the earlier paper, (...) namely the claim that meanings, facts grounding meaning facts, and ascriptions of meaning have an important historical dimension to them. In particular, I explore the ideas that (i) the problem of finitude is fundamentally a logical and not a metaphysical problem and (ii) Devitt's development of Kripke's causal-historical theory of reference implies a natural explanation for how at least the meanings of some terms can have a historical dimension. (shrink)

In their delightfully provocative paper, “Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style,” Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich (2004),[1] make several striking claims about theories of reference. First, they claim: (I) Philosophical views about reference “are assessed by consulting one’s intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations” (p. B1). This claim is prompted by their observations of the role of intuitions in Saul Kripke’s refutation of the descriptivist view of proper names in favor of a causal-historical (...) view (1980). The particular intuitions they attend to are those aired in discussing Kripke’s cases of Gödel and Jonah. This prompts the next claim: (II) Those particular cases are “central” to Kripke’s refutation (p. B1). Indeed, Machery et al describe these cases as “some of the most influential thought experiments in the philosophy of reference” (p. B8). Inspired by recent work in psychology (e.g., Nisbett et al 2001) that shows “systematic cognitive differences between East Asians and Westerners” (p. B1), Machery et al predicted that there would be cultural differences in referential intuitions. They conducted some ingenious experiments on Gödel and Jonah cases to test this predication. The results in the Gödel cases, although not in the Jonah cases, confirmed their prediction, leading them to conclude: “Westerners are more likely than East Asians to report intuitions that are consistent with the causal-historical view” (p. B1). And, implicitly, they claim: (III) These results raise serious doubts about Kripke’s refutation, which relies solely on the intuitions of Westerners. They are explicit about the following bolder claim: (IV) The fact of these cultural differences “raises questions about the nature of the philosophical enterprise of developing a theory of reference” (p. B1); it points to “significant philosophical conclusions” (p.. (shrink)

This important new book is the first of a series of volumes collecting essential work by an influential philosopher. It presents a mixture of published and unpublished works from various stages of Kripke's storied career. Included here are seminal and much discussed pieces such as “Identity and Necessity,” “Outline of a Theory of Truth,” and “A Puzzle About Belief.” More recent published work include “Russell's Notion of Scope” and “Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference” among others. Several of (...) the works included here are published for the first time, including both older works “Two Paradoxes of Knowledge,” “Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities,” “Nozick on Knowledge” as well as newer “The First Person” and “Unrestricted Exportation.” “A Puzzle on Time and Thought” was written for this volume. The publication of this volume—which ranges over epistemology, linguistics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, history of analytic philosophy, theory of truth, and metaphysics—represents a major event in contemporary analytic philosophy. This collection aims to be a testament to one of philosophy's greatest living figures. (shrink)

This engaging and accessible introduction to the philosophy of language provides an important guide to one of the liveliest and most challenging areas of study in philosophy. Interweaving the historical development of the subject with a thematic overview of the different approaches to meaning, the book provides students with the tools necessary to understand contemporary analytical philosophy. The second edition includes new material on: Chomsky, Wittgenstein and Davidson as well as new chapters on the causal theory of reference, (...) possible worlds semantics and semantic externalism. (shrink)

In "the semantics of singular terms," brian loar described and criticized a "causal" theory of reference and offered a new "description" theory. It is argued that the particular causal theory described is not to be found in the papers by donnellan and kripke cited as evidence for it, And is a straw man. Further "prima facie", Loar's new description theory fails to meet kripke's noncircularity condition. Should loar attempt to meet it, His theory is likely to run foul (...) of kripke's usual "arguments from ignorance and error" against description theories. (shrink)

Peter Finch's translation of Wittgenstein's remarks on culture and value presents all entries chronologically, with the German text alongside the English and a subject index for reference. "It was Wittgenstein's habit to record his thoughts in sequences of more or less closely related 'remarks' which he kept in notebooks throughout his life. The editor of this collection has gone through these notebooks in order to select those 'remarks' which deal with Wittgenstein's views abou the less technical (...) issues in his philosophy. So here we have Wittgenstein's thoughts about religion, music, architecture, the nature of philosophy, the spirit of our times, genius, being Jewish, and so on. The work is a masterpiece by a mastermind."—Leonard Linsky. (shrink)

In 1938 Wittgenstein delivered a short course of lectures on aesthetics to a small group of students at Cambridge. The present volume has been compiled from notes taken down at the time by three of the students: Rush Rhees, Yorick Smythies, and James Taylor. They have been supplemented by notes of conversations on Freud (to whom reference was made in the course on aesthetics) between Wittgenstein and Rush Rhees, and by notes of some lectures on religious (...) belief. As very little is known of Wittgenstein's views on these subjects from his published works, these notes should be of considerable interest to students of contemporary philosophy. Further, their fresh and informal style should recommend Wittgenstein to those who find his Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations a little formidable. (shrink)

Kripke in his famous book on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy argues, on behalf of Wittgenstein, that there can be no fact of the matter as to what a speaker means by her words, that is, no fact that can meet the Constitution Demand and the Normativity Demand. He particularly argues against the dispositional view, according to which meaning facts are constituted by facts about the speaker's dispositions to respond in a certain way on certain occasions. He argues that facts (...) about dispositions are finite and are incapable of constituting facts about what speakers mean by their words; they are also essentially descriptive, not prescriptive and thus, cannot meet the Normativity Demand. Hannah Ginsborg, one of the most important contemporary philosophers of language, has recently attempted to resist Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s arguments against by defending a new sort of reductive dispositionalism which can meet both demands at the same time. In this paper, I will argue that she would not be successful in her project. (shrink)

Problem: A dualistic position faces considerable problems as Mitterer, inter alia, clearly pointed out. Mitterer not only wants to name these problems, but to provide a genuine alternative with his non-dualism. However, this non-dualistic alternative also contains severe problems. Thus this text suggests preferring Wittgenstein's concept of a pragmatic investigation of language-games to Mitterer's non-dualism in order to tackle the problems of dualism. Solution: With recourse to Wittgenstein's pragmatic investigation of language-games, a fundamental problem of dualism can be (...) solved. With the concept of certainty, Wittgenstein succeeds in avoiding an ontological grounding in an independent world -- or, as Mitterer would put it, the assumption of a "beyond of discourse." At the same time, the assumption of an independent world as a concept that provides a basis for our language-games is maintained on an epistemological level. This assumption, however, is not maintained as a phenomenon that requires to be substantiated but as a certainty that is constitutive for language-games and does not need to be substantiated. Such a concept is suitable for preventing epistemological operations such as knowledge, doubt, giving reasons, etc., from being made void, without having to provide an ontological basis for them. Implications: Wittgenstein's point of view therefore provides an attractive alternative to Mitterer's non-dualism. By getting rid of the "beyond of discourse," Mitterer's non-dualism faces the problem of not being able to explain how we can manage to understand epistemological operations within our language-games without referring to a "beyond of discourse." From this point of view arises the consequence that it would make sense to analyze language-games from a pragmatic standpoint rather than to keep on honing non-dualistic vocabulary. (shrink)

The main question of metasemantics, or foundational semantics, is why an expression token has the meaning (semantic value) that it in fact has. In his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, Saul Kripke presented a skeptical challenge that threatened to make the foundational question unanswerable. My first contention in this paper is that the skeptical challenge indeed poses an insoluble paradox, but only for a certain kind of metasemantic theory, against which the challenge effectively works as a reductio ad (...) absurdum argument. My second contention is that as a result of rejecting the theory which entails a paradoxical outcome, we will see that the foundational question essentially involves a temporal dimension. After arguing that the skeptical challenge gives us a strong reason to adopt a historical view of meaning, I shall further argue against certain authors who claim that meanings not only have histories but futures as well, or that the meaning of a word may change retroactively in time as a consequence of counterfactual change in its future use. The major aim of the paper is thus to bring together the arguably interrelated debates about the skeptical challenge and temporal externalism in philosophy of language. (shrink)

am going to discuss some issues inspired by a well-known paper ofKeith Donnellan, "Reference and Definite Descriptions,”2 but the interest—to me—of the contrast mentioned in my title goes beyond Donnellan's paper: I think it is of considerable constructive as well as critical importance to the philosophy oflanguage. These applications, however, and even everything I might want to say relative to Donnellan’s paper, cannot be discussed in full here because of problems of length. Moreover, although I have a considerable interest (...) in the substantive issues raised by Donnellan’s paper, and by related literature, my own conclusions will be methodological, not substantive. I can put the matter this way: Donnellan’s paper claims to give decisive objections both to Russell’s theory of definite descriptions (taken as a theory about English) and to Strawson’s. My concem is not primarily with the question; is Donnellan right, or is Russell (or Strawson)? Rather, it is with the question: do the considerations in Donneilarfs paper refute Russell’s theory (or Strawson’s)? For definiteness, I will concentrate on Donnellan versus Russell, leaving Strawson aside. And about this issue I will draw a definite conclusion, one which I think will illuminate a few methodological maxims about language. Namely, I will conclude that the considerations in Donnellan’s paper, by themselves, do not refute Russell’s theory. Any conclusions about Russell’s views per se, or Donnellan’s, must be tentative, IfI were to be asked for a tentative stab about Russell, I would say that although his theory does a far better job of handling ordinary discourse than many have thought, and although many popular arguments against it are inconclusive, probably it ultimately fails. The considerations I have in mind have to do with the existence of “improper” definite descriptions, such as “the table," where uniquely specifying conditions are not contained in the description itself.. (shrink)

Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it is taken for granted that externalist accounts of meaning and mental content are, in principle, orthogonal to the matter of whether cognition itself is bound within the biological brain or whether it can constitutively include parts of the world. Accordingly, Clark and Chalmers (1998) distinguish these varieties of externalism as ‘passive’ and ‘active’ respectively. The aim here is to suggest that we should resist the received way of thinking about these dividing lines. With (...) reference to Brandom’s (1994; 2000; 2008) broad semantic inferentialism, we show that a theory of meaning can be at the same time a variety of active externalism. While we grant that supporters of other varieties of content externalism (e.g., Putnam 1975 and Burge 1986) can deny active externalism, this is not an option for semantic inferentialists: On this latter view, the role of the environment (both in its social and natural form) is not ‘passive’ in the sense assumed by the alternative approaches to content externalism. (shrink)

Governments must keep agricultural systems free of pests that threaten agricultural production and international trade. Biosecurity surveillance already makes use of a wide range of technologies, such as insect traps and lures, geographic information systems, and diagnostic biochemical tests. The rise of cheap and usable surveillance technologies such as remotely piloted aircraft systems presents value conflicts not addressed in international biosurveillance guidelines. The costs of keeping agriculture pest-free include privacy violations and reduced autonomy for farmers. We argue that physical and (...) digital privacy in the age of ubiquitous aerial and ground surveillance is a natural right to allow people to function freely on their land. Surveillance methods must be co-created and justified through using ethically defensible processes such as discourse theory, value-centred design and responsible innovation to forge a cooperative social contract between diverse stakeholders. We propose an ethical framework for biosurveillance activities that balances the collective benefits for food security with individual privacy: establish the boundaries of a biosurveillance social contract; justify surveillance operations for the farmers, researchers, industry, the public and regulators; give decision makers a reasonable measure of control over their personal and agricultural data; and choose surveillance methodologies that give the appropriate information. The benefits of incorporating an ethical framework for responsible biosurveillance innovation include increased participation and accumulated trust over time. Long term trust and cooperation will support food security, producing higher quality data overall and mitigating against anticipated information gaps that may emerge due to disrespecting landholder rights. (shrink)

In this book Saul Kripke brings his powerful philosophical intelligence to bear on Wittgenstein's analysis of the notion of following a rule.

These works, as the sub-title makes clear, are unfinished sketches for Philosophical Investigations, possibly the most important and influential philosophical work of modern times. The 'Blue Book' is a set of notes dictated to Witgenstein's Cambridge students in 1933-1934: the 'Brown Book' was a draft for what eventually became the growth of the first part of Philosophical Investigations. This book reveals the germination and growth of the ideas which found their final expression in Witgenstein's later work. It is indispensable therefore (...) to students of Witgenstein's thought and to all those who wish to study at first-hand the mental processes of a thinker who fundamentally changed the course of modern philosophy. (shrink)

Reference and Existence, Saul Kripke's John Locke Lectures for 1973, can be read as a sequel to his classic Naming and Necessity. It confronts important issues left open in that work -- among them, the semantics of proper names and natural kind terms as they occur in fiction and in myth; negative existential statements; the ontology of fiction and myth. In treating these questions, he makes a number of methodological observations that go beyond the framework of his earlier (...) book -- including the striking claim that fiction cannot provide a test for theories of reference and naming. In addition, these lectures provide a glimpse into the transition to the pragmatics of singular reference that dominated his influential paper, " Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference " -- a paper that helped reorient linguistic and philosophical semantics. Some of the themes have been worked out in later writings by other philosophers -- many influenced by typescripts of the lectures in circulation -- but none have approached the careful, systematic treatment provided here. The virtuosity of Naming and Necessity -- the colloquial ease of the tone, the dazzling, on-the-spot formulations, the logical structure of the overall view gradually emerging over the course of the lectures -- is on display here as well. (shrink)

Frege's theory of indirect contexts and the shift of sense and reference in these contexts has puzzled many. What can the hierarchy of indirect senses, doubly indirect senses, and so on, be? Donald Davidson gave a well-known 'unlearnability' argument against Frege's theory. The present paper argues that the key to Frege's theory lies in the fact that whenever a reference is specified (even though many senses determine a single reference), it is specified in a particular way, so (...) that giving a reference implies giving a sense; and that one must be 'acquainted' with the sense. It is argued that an indirect sense must be 'immediately revelatory' of its reference. General principles for Frege's doctrine of sense and reference are sated, for both direct and indirect quotation, to be understood iteratively. I also discuss Frege's doctrine of tensed and first person statements in the light of my analysis. The views of various other authors are examined. The conclusion is to ascribe to Frege an implicit doctrine of acquaintance similar to that of Russell. (shrink)

In his paper on the incompleteness theorems, Gödel seemed to say that a direct way of constructing a formula that says of itself that it is unprovable might involve a faulty circularity. In this note, it is proved that ‘direct’ self-reference can actually be used to prove his result.

Part I argues that the usc theory in Horwich’s Meaning does not give sufficient attention to the relation between language and thought. A development of the theory is proposed that gives explanatory priority to the mental. The paper also urges that Horwich’s identification of a word’s meaning by its role in explaining the cause of sentences should be broadened to include its role in explaining the linguistic and non linguistic behavior that sentences cause. Part II argues that Horwich greatly overstates (...) the case for his use theory; that the arguments from ignorance and error against description theories of reference can be adapted against the use theory; and that a tempting development of the use theory would risk both the collapse of the theory into truth referentialism and the difficulties that have plagued truth referentialism. Finally, a consideration of our ordinary thought ascriptions provides evidence against any use theory. (shrink)

This book criticizes the methodology of the recent semantics-pragmatics debate in the theory of language and proposes an alternative. It applies this methodology to argue for a traditional view against a group of “contextualists” and “pragmatists”, including Sperber and Wilson, Bach, Carston, Recanati, Neale, and many others. The author disagrees with these theorists who hold that the meaning of the sentence in an utterance never, or hardly ever, yields its literal truth-conditional content, even after disambiguation and reference fixing; it (...) needs to be pragmatically supplemented in context. The standard methodology of this debate is to consult intuitions. The book argues that theories should be tested against linguistic usage. Theoretical distinctions, however intuitive, need to be scientifically motivated. Also we should not be guided by Grice’s “Modified Occam’s Razor”, Ruhl’s “Monosemantic Bias”, or other such strategies for “meaning denialism”. From this novel perspective, the striking examples of context relativity that motivate contextualists and pragmatists typically exemplify semantic rather than pragmatic properties. In particular, polysemous phenomena should typically be treated as semantic ambiguity. The author argues that conventions have been overlooked, that there’s no extensive “semantic underdetermination” and that the new theoretical framework of “truth-conditional pragmatics” is a mistake. (shrink)

Part I argues that the use theory in Horwich's Meaning does not give sufficient attention to the relation between language and thought. A development of the theory is proposed that gives explanatory priority to the mental. The paper also urges that Horwich's identification of a word's meaning by its role in explaining the cause of sentences should be broadened to include its role in explaining the linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior that sentences cause. Part II argues that Horwich greatly overstates the (...) case for his use theory; that the arguments from ignorance and error against description theories of reference can be adapted against the use theory; and that a tempting development of the use theory would risk both the collapse of the theory into truth referentialism and the difficulties that have plagued truth referentialism. Finally, a consideration of our ordinary thought ascriptions provides evidence against any use theory. (shrink)

_Naming and Necessity_ has had a great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of naming, and of identity. This seminal work, to which today's thriving essentialist metaphysics largely owes its impetus, is here reissued in a newly corrected form with a new preface by the author. If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics, or in philosophy of language, this is (...) it. (shrink)

Quine, in his 1980 forward to From a Logical Point of View wrote: ‘The time for revision is past. The book is dated, and its dates are 1953 and 1961’ (p. viii). Quine wrote modestly about himself, as he almost always did. His point—not stated loudly—was that the book was now an important historical document, and so its author had lost the right to tamper with it. -/- The book I’m reviewing may seem different. Although Kripke’s Locke Lectures were (...) given in 1973, the book has appeared in print forty years later. Kripke writes: ‘… the transcript has been available at the Oxford University library for many years … and it has had, since then, a modest life of its own, passed on among members of the profession, sometimes even being discussed and criticized in print’ (pp. xi-xii). -/- Kripke understates the transcript’s impact. It influenced everyone in the profession who wrote on these topics, if only because it was read carefully and absorbed by so many philosophers working in this area. Thomasson, on a back-blurb, writes: ‘For decades getting a copy of these lectures has been a holy grail for philosophers working on fiction’. And in the Oxford advertising, included with my review copy of the book, I read: ‘At last in print—the most famous unpublished philosophy manuscript of recent decades’. (shrink)

The main goal of the paper is to propose a methodology for the theory of reference in which experiments feature prominently. These experiments should primarily test linguistic usage rather than the folk’s referential intuitions. The proposed methodology urges the use of: (A) philosophers’ referential intuitions, both informally and, occasionally, scientifically gathered; (B) the corpus, both informally and scientifically gathered; (C) elicited production; and, occasionally,_ _(D) folk’s referential intuitions. The most novel part of this is (C) and that is where (...) most of the experimental work should be. The secondary goal of the paper is to defend my earlier paper “Experimental Semantics” from the criticisms of Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich in “If Folk Intuitions Vary, Then What?” They charge that I have seriously misunderstood their goal in “Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style” and that many of my arguments are “largely irrelevant”. I argue that these charges are baseless. (shrink)

Saul Kripke is one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. His most celebrated work, Naming and Necessity , makes arguably the most important contribution to the philosophy of language and metaphysics in recent years. Asking fundamental questions – how do names refer to things in the world? Do objects have essential properties? What are natural kind terms and to what do they refer? – he challenges prevailing theories of language and conceptions of metaphysics, especially the descriptivist account (...) of reference, which Kripke argues is found in Frege, Wittgenstein and Russell, and the anti-essentialist metaphysics of Quine. In this invaluable guidebook to Kripke's classic work, Harold Noonan introduces and assesses: Kripke's life and the background to his philosophy the ideas and text of Naming and Necessity the continuing importance of Kripke's work to the philosophy of language and metaphysics. The Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kripke and Naming and Necessity is an ideal starting point for anyone coming Kripke's work for the first time. It is essential reading for philosophy students studying philosophy of language, metaphysics, logic, or the history of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Under the influence of Quine’s famous manifesto, many philosophers have thought that logical theories are scientific theories that can be ‘adopted’ and tested as scientific theories. Here we argue that this idea is untenable. We discuss it with special reference to Putnam’s proposal to ‘adopt’ a particular non-classical logic to solve the foundational problems of quantum mechanics in his famous paper ‘Is Logic Empirical?’ (1968), which we argue was not really coherent.

In his 1982 book Wittgenstein On Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke maintains that Wittgenstein´s rule following considerations land us with a skeptical argument about meaning. This essay contains a short exposition of Kripke´s argument. In addition, I hold, both on textual grounds and by an appeal to some select secondary literature, that Wittgenstein offered no such skeptical argument in the Philosophical Investigations . Although Wittgenstein certainly repudiates a view of meaning based on temporally located mental (...) states, it does not follow that there can be no meaning-grounding facts of other sorts. Although it is true that mental states, viewed atomistically, offer no sure foundation for meaning, I argue that it need not follow, pace Kripke, that no facts about an individual´s past mental life can ever make it clear that he meant ‘plus’ rather than ‘quus’ while performing any addition. For the individual´s past mental life is indeed relevant to meaning when considered in its unfolding in time. The essay further contains explorations on the very nature of the practice of following a rule and ends with a discussion of the solitary rule follower. (shrink)

According to Mario Gómez-Torrente in Roads to Reference, the reference of a demonstrative is fixed in an object by the speaker’s referential intentions. I argue that this is a mistake. First, I draw attention to a venerable alternative theory that Gómez-Torrente surprisingly overlooks: the reference is fixed in an object directly by a relation established in perceiving the object. Next I criticize IRH, arguing that it is implausible, redundant, and misleading. Finally, I present a theory of demonstrations (...) that is like the alternative theory for demonstratives. For, though demonstrations do not determine the reference of demonstratives, they play an independent referential role which is important in explaining David Kaplan’s famous Carnap-Agnew example and many others including some of Gómez-Torrente’s. (shrink)

Concerns with cultural variation and epistemic perspectives have played major roles in experimental semantics. They dominate Li's book (2023). Li's own experimental work provides two promising explanations of the cultural variation: Chinese, but not Americans, tend to agree with a character's false statement because they think it is not her fault that she is wrong or because they are socially conforming. So, the notice argues, the cultural variation is a red herring to the theory of reference. Li preferred explanation (...) is that Chinese and Americans take different epistemic perspectives. The notice argues that this is misguided and another red herring. (shrink)

Can we change our logic and if so how? In ‘The Question of Logic’ (this volume), Saul Kripke takes a certain message about this from Lewis Carroll’s famous pape.

In his 1982 book Wittgenstein On Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke maintains that Wittgenstein´s rule following considerations land us with a skeptical argument about meaning. This essay contains a short exposition of Kripke´s argument. In addition, I hold, both on textual grounds and by an appeal to some select secondary literature, that Wittgenstein offered no such skeptical argument in the Philosophical Investigations . Although Wittgenstein certainly repudiates a view of meaning based on temporally located mental (...) states, it does not follow that there can be no meaning-grounding facts of other sorts. Although it is true that mental states, viewed atomistically, offer no sure foundation for meaning, I argue that it need not follow, pace Kripke, that no facts about an individual´s past mental life can ever make it clear that he meant ‘plus’ rather than ‘quus’ while performing any addition. For the individual´s past mental life is indeed relevant to meaning when considered in its unfolding in time. The essay further contains explorations on the very nature of the practice of following a rule and ends with a discussion of the solitary rule follower. (shrink)

Machery argues: that “philosophers’ intuitions about reference are not more reliable than lay people’s —if anything, they are probably worse”; that “intuitions about the reference of proper names and uses of proper names provide equally good evidence for theories of reference”. lacks theoretical and empirical support. cannot be right because usage provides the evidence that intuitions are reliable.

The book has two parts: one metaphysical, the other epistemological. The metaphysical part is largely concerned with realism issues. It starts with realism about universals, dismissing Plato's notorious ‘one over many’ problem. Several chapters argue for a fairly uncompromisingly realist view of the external physical world of commonsense and science. Both the nonfactualism of moral noncognitivism and positivistic instrumentalism, and deflationism about truth, are found to rest on antirealisms about their subject matters that are hard to characterize. A case is (...) presented for moral realism. Various biological realisms are considered. Finally, an argument is presented for an unfashionable biological essentialism. The epistemological part of the book argues against the a priori and for a Quinean naturalism. The intuitions that so dominate ‘armchair philosophy’ are empirical not a priori. There is an emphasis throughout the book on distinguishing metaphysical issues about what there is and what it's like from semantic issues about meaning, truth, and reference. Another central theme, captured in the title, is that we should ‘put metaphysics first’. We should approach epistemology and semantics from a metaphysical perspective rather than vice versa. The epistemological turn in modern philosophy and the linguistic turn in contemporary philosophy were something of disasters. (shrink)

Wittgenstein gave a clearly erroneous refutation of Russell’s logicist project. The errors were ably pointed out by Mark Steiner. Nevertheless, I was motivated by Wittgenstein and Steiner to consider various ideas about the natural numbers. I ask which notations for natural numbers are ‘buck-stoppers’. For us it is the decimal notation and the corresponding verbal system. Based on the idea that a proper notation should be ‘structurally revelatory’, I draw various conclusions about our own concept of the natural (...) numbers. (shrink)

Between 1937 and 1951 Wittgenstein had numerous philosophical conversations with his student and close friend, Rush Rhees. This article is composed of Rhees’s notes of twenty such conversations — namely, all those which have not yet been published — as well as some supplements from Rhees’s correspondence and miscellaneous notes. The principal value of the notes collected here is that they fill some interesting and important gaps in Wittgenstein ’s corpus. Thus, firstly, the notes touch on a wide (...) range of subjects, a number of which are only briefly addressed by Wittgenstein elsewhere, if at all. The subjects discussed include: explanation, ethics, anarchism, contradiction, psychoanalysis, colour, religion, concepts, classification, seeing-as, evolution, the relation between science and philosophy, and free will, amongst others. Secondly, the notes contain references to, and brief remarks about, philosophers of whom Wittgenstein otherwise says very little, if anything — such as Brentano, Heidegger, Aquinas, and Marx, amongst others. And thirdly, the notes provide us with valuable examples of Wittgenstein ’s use of some key ‘Wittgensteinian’ terms of art which are surprisingly rare in his written works, such as ‘surface-’ and ‘depth-grammar’, and ‘centres of variation’. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Theory of Reference as Folk Semantics The Theory of Reference as Proto‐Science Metaphysics Before Semantics How Then Do We Do the Metaphysics? Conclusion References.

The paper I gave at the Dublin conference celebrating Hilary Putnam’s 80th birthday was “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism” (2008). This was suitable for a celebratory event because it defended Putnam’s position on biological essentialism (1975) from the consensus in the philosophy of biology. This consensus has led to some severe criticisms of Putnam. Michael Ruse, for example, places Putnam, along with Saul Kripke and David Wiggins, “somewhere to the right of Aristotle” on essentialism and talks of them showing “an almost proud (...) ignorance of the organic world” (1987, 358n). John Dupré argues that the views of Putnam and Kripke are fatally divergent from “some actual biological facts and theories” (1981, 66). I argue that the consensus is quite wrong about essentialism and hence that these criticisms are misplaced. (shrink)

This book was inadvertently published with the addition of the editor’s name, C. J. Posy, as co-author of the chapter. His name has been removed now and the author’s name Saul A. Kripke has been updated in the chapter.

In this paper, we present and discuss the findings of two experiments about reference change. Cases of reference change have sometimes been invoked to challenge traditional versions of semantic externalism, but the relevant cases have never been tested empirically. The experiments we have conducted use variants of the famous Twin Earth scenario to test folk intuitions about whether natural kind terms such as ‘water’ or ‘salt’ switch reference after being constantly (mis)applied to different kinds. Our results (...) indicate that this is indeed so. We argue that this finding is evidence against Saul Kripke’s causal-historical view of reference, and at least provisional evidence in favor of the causal source view of reference as suggested by Gareth Evans and Michael Devitt. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Bach’s stand on the “semantics-pragmatics” issue. A bit of Good Bach is his skepticism about the evidential role of intuitions. Another bit is his firm stand against the widespread confusion of what constitutes the meanings of utterances with how hearers interpret utterances. The paper argues at length against two bits of Bad Bach. There is no sound theoretical motivation for his excluding the reference fixing of demonstratives, pronouns and names from “what-is-said”. His methodology for (...) deciding what is “semantic” is flawed in three respects: first, in its commitment to the mistaken Modified Occam’s Razor; second, in its placing inappropriate syntactic constraints on conventional meanings; and, third, in explaining many regularities in usage as standardizations rather than conventionalizations. This flawed methodology has the conservative effect of ruling out new meanings. (shrink)

Machery argues: (1) that “philosophers’ intuitions about reference are not more reliable than lay people’s—if anything, they are probably worse”; (2) that “intuitions about the reference of proper names and uses of proper names provide equally good evidence for theories of reference”. (1) lacks theoretical and empirical support. (2) cannot be right because usage provides the evidence that intuitions are reliable.Machery defiende que (1) “las intuiciones de los filósofos sobre la referencia no son más fiables que las (...) de los legos —si acaso, serían peores”; (2) las “intuiciones acerca de la referencia de los nombres propios y los usos de los nombres propios ofrecen evidencia de igual valor para las teorías de la referencia”. (1) carece de base empírica o teórica. (2) no puede ser correcta, puesto que el uso ofrece evidencia de que las intuiciones son fiables. (shrink)

Una Stojnić urges the radical view that the meaning of context-sensitive language is not “partially determined by non-linguistic features of utterance situation”, as traditionally thought, but rather “is determined entirely by grammar—by rules of language that have largely been missed”. The missed rules are ones of discourse coherence. The paper argues against this radical view as it applies to demonstrations, demonstratives, and the indexical ‘I’. Stojnić’s theories of demon-strations and demonstratives are found to be seriously incomplete, failing to meet the (...) demands on any theory of reference. Furthermore, the paper argues that, so far as Stojnić’s theories of these terms go, they are false. This argument appeals to perception-based theories of demonstratives, a part of the tradition that Stojnić strangely overlooks. The paper ends by arguing briefly that though coherence has a place in a theory of understanding, it has no place in a theory of meaning. (shrink)

Stojnić holds the radical view that coherence relations determine the reference of context-sensitive language. I argue against this from the theoretical perspective presented in Overlooking Conventions (2021). Theoretical interest in language comes from an interest in thoughts and their communication. A language is a system of symbols, constituted by a set of governing rules, used (inter alia) to communicate the meanings (contents) of thoughts. Thought meanings, hence speaker meanings, are explanatorily prior to semantic meanings. So, we start our consideration (...) of the theoretical place of coherence by considering the bearing of coherence on thought meanings. The paper argues that a person can have any thought at all, however incoherent. So, a thought’s meaning is independent of its coherence. Any thought can be expressed in an utterance. The semantic meaning of any utterance governed by the linguistic rules will be the meaning of the thought it expresses. So, the utterance’s meaning is independent of its coherence. The paper concludes that coherence has no place in the theory of meaning or reference. Nonetheless, it has a place in the theory of communication. I suspect that the error exemplifi es the widespread confusion of the metaphysics of meaning with the epistemology of interpretation. (shrink)

It is common to believe that a speaker refers to x in virtue of intending to do so. I have four objections. The view is too intellectualized. It is theoretically incomplete: In virtue of what did the speaker intend to refer to x? Once completed it is redundant. It is misleading. A central idea of Gricean “intention-based semantics” is that speaker meaning is constituted by the speaker’s intention to communicate a certain content to an audience. I argue that the meaning (...) is constituted by the content of the thought expressed. The requirement that the speaker intends to communicate that thought is theoretically unmotivated. It is standard among Griceans to believe that there is some constitutive constraint on what a speaker can intend by an utterance, a belief arising from one about a constraint on intentions in general. That alleged constraint ranges from the astonishingly strong “positive” one that X cannot intend to A unless X believes that she will A, to the much weaker “negative” one that X cannot intend to A unless she lacks the belief that she cannot A. I argue that there are no such constitutive constraints on intentions. (shrink)

My paper, “Good and Bad Bach”, describes Bach’s position on the semantics-pragmatics issue and then makes four objections. The first objection is to Bach’s austere notion of what-is-said. The other three are to Bach’s conservative methodology for deciding what is “semantic”. I object to his “Modified Occam’s Razor”; to his “correspondence” principle that I describe as “the tyranny of syntax”; and to his application of his notion of standardization. Bach’s “Reply to Michael Devitt on Meaning and Reference” is (...) very disappointing. He fails even to mention my objections to his positions on what-is-said and standardization. And he makes hardly any serious attempt to address my objections to his Modified Occam’s Razor and the tyranny of syntax. All my objections still stand. (shrink)

My overall aim is to show that there is a serious and compelling argument in Stanley Cavell’s work for why any philosophical theorizing that fails to recognize what Cavell refers to as “our common world of background” as a condition for the sense of anything we say or do, and to acknowledge its own dependence on that background and the vulnerability implied by that dependence, runs the risk of rendering itself, thereby, ultimately unintelligible. I begin with a characterization of Cavell’s (...) unique way of inheriting Austin and Wittgenstein – I call it “ordinary language philosophy existentialism” – as it relates to what Cavell calls “skepticism”. I then turn to Cavell’s response to Kripke in “The Argument of the Ordinary”, which is different from all other responses to Kripke’s _Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language_ in that Cavell’s response, while _theoretically_ powerful, is at the same time also _existentialist_, in the sense that Cavell finds a way of _acknowledging in his writing_ the fundamental fact that his writing constitutes an _instance _of what he is writing about. This unique achievement of Cavell’s response to Kripke is not _additional _to his argument, but _essential_ to it: it enables him not merely to say, but to _show _that, and how, Kripke’s account falsifies what it purports to elucidate, and thereby to show that the theoretical question of linguistic sense is not truly separable, not even theoretically, from the broadly ethical question of how we relate to others, and how we conduct ourselves in relation to them from one moment to the next. (shrink)

The book addresses three main issues. The first concerns the essences (natures, identities) of biological taxa, particularly species. Kripke and other metaphysicians hold that these essences are (at least partly) intrinsic, underlying, probably largely genetic properties. This view, based largely on intuitions, is dismissed by the consensus in the philosophy of biology as being incompatible with Darwinism and reflecting ignorance of biology. The book argues that the demands of biological explanation show that the metaphysicians are right. The positive view of (...) the consensus is that the essences are wholly relational: taxa must have certain histories. The book argues that there is indeed an historical component to the essence, but this component presupposes an intrinsic component. The book’s second issue concerns the essences of biological individuals. Metaphysicians have had much to say about this, again on the basis of intuitions. Many hold that an individual is essentially a member of its species. This has recently been unequivocally rejected by philosophers of biology. The book appeals to biological explanation again to argue for essential membership; furthermore, to argue for the Kripkean view that an organism’s essence is partly intrinsic and partly relational (a matter of origin). Finally, the book addresses the lively contemporary issue of whether race is biologically “real”. From the perspective developed earlier, the book argues that there are indeed racial kinds, in some sense, that are “in the realm of the biological”. These kinds also have partly historical and partly intrinsic underlying essences. (shrink)