Philosophy of Language

In recent decades the analysis of the connection of truth, meaning, and the mental has been a major philosophical question, and Donald Davidson has brought together these subjects in a unified theory of thought, meaning, action, and evaluation. This volume features specially written essays from the most important philosophers working on the subject, and the collection reappraises Davidson’s philosophy with an engaging and illuminating discussion of various problems in the philosophy of truth, meaning, and the mental. In particular, Lepore and Ludwig’s interpretation of Davidson’s philosophy presents a new look and systematization of his philosophy of language, meaning, and thought. Davidson has been a considerable presence in the philosophical landscape since the 1970s, but from the contemporary point of view we have yet to come to a decision about his final place in the annals of philosophy.

Many people (both philosophers and not) find it very natural to think that deceiving someone in a way that avoids lying — by merely misleading — is morally preferable to simply lying. Others think this preference is deeply misguided. But all sides agree that there is a distinction. In this book, I undertake a close examination of the lying/misleading distinction. First, I use this very intuitive distinction to shed new light on entrenched debates in philosophy of language over notions like what is said. Next, I tackle the puzzling but widespread moral preference for misleading over lying, arriving at a new view regarding the moral significance of the distinction. Finally, I bring all this together in an examination of historically important and interesting cases, ranging from modern politicians to early Jesuits

The concepts of meaning and mental content resist naturalistic analysis and this, Kripke’s Wittgenstein suggests, is because these concepts are normative. The book draws, motivates, and sketches an analysis of these concepts in terms of oughts, which in turn are explained through expressivism. Devices from metaethics thus inform philosophy of language. The oughts are primitive and subjective. Central devices for the project are drawn from Horwich but are taken normative; these include treating meaning through deflation and synonymy. Horwich’s naturalistic treatment yields Quine-like indeterminacy of meaning that a normative theory might render determinate. Conceptual truth for thoughts and analyticity for sentences voicing thoughts are explained as specially invariant normative features, and the treatment is internalistic, invoking the credence one should have given total evidence. Talk of analyticity is initially provisional, with a gloss developed in terms of the ensuing metatheory of meaning. Concepts of truth and reference with context dependence are treated so as to capture direct reference theory’s virtues without its vices. Tests for this metatheory are then devised in terms of the metatheory itself. Expressivism has two prongs: an oblique substantive theory of meanings of normative terms, and a normative rendering of what this substantive theory is claiming. Strongest forms of expressivism and nonnaturalism converge in their theses, but not in their explanations. Nonnaturalists’ explanations mystify, whereas expressivists explain normative thinking as what natural beings like us, conversing products of natural selection, would legitimately practice.

This book attempts to recast the ‘nondescriptivist’ approach to reference that has dominated the philosophy of language and mind in the late twentieth-century in terms of mental files. According to this book, we refer through mental files, which play the role of so-called ‘modes of presentation’. The reference of linguistic expressions is inherited from that of the files we associate with them. The reference of a file is determined relationally, not satisfactionally; so a file is not to be equated to the body of (mis-)information it contains. Files are like singular terms in the language of thought, with a nondescriptivist semantics. In contrast to other authors, this book offers an indexical model according to which files are typed by their function, which is to store information derived through certain types of relation to objects in the environment. The type of the file corresponds to the type of contextual relation it exploits. Even detached files or ‘encyclopedia entries’ are based on epistemically rewarding relations to their referent, on this account. Among the topics discussed in this wide-ranging book are: acquaintance relations and singular thought; cognitive significance; the vehicle/content distinction; the nature of indexical concepts; co-reference de jureand judgments of identity; cognitive dynamics; recognitional and perceptual concepts; confused thought and the transparency requirement on modes of presentation; descriptive names and ‘acquaintanceless’ singular thought; the communication of indexical thoughts; two-dimensional defences of Descriptivism; the Generality Constraint; attitude ascriptions and the ‘vicarious’ use of mental files; first-person thinking; token-reflexivity in language and thought.

In this BOOK, the first one of two volumes dedicated to Crispin Wright, thirteen chapters discuss some of the main themes in the philosophy of one of Great Britain’s most important living philosophers. These chapters are divided into four sections, preceded by a substantial Introduction, which places them in the context of the development of Wright’s ideas. The chapters address issues such as the rule-following problem, knowledge of our meanings and minds, truth, realism, anti-realism and relativism as well as the nature of perceptual justification, the cogency of arguments like G. E. Moore’s celebrated proof of an external world, and scepticism about the material world. Some of them explore the relationship of Wright’s ideas with those of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose influence has always been a prominent aspect in Wright’s philosophy. The volume also contains Wright’s substantial responses to his critics, which offer the most up-to-date version of his ideas and a vigorous defence of his philosophy.

This book articulates and defends the position that terms for properties are rigid designators and that property designators' rigidity is put to good use in important philosophical arguments supporting and impugning various theoretical identity statements, including psychophysical identity statements. In the first chapter, rigidity in general is explained. Special problems raised by property designators specifically are discussed. In the next two chapters it is argued that designators for properties are subject to a genuine distinction and one that plays the same role that the rigid–nonrigid distinction plays for concrete-object designators: hence it is a rigid–nonrigid distinction. This distinction can be understood whether property designators are construed as singular terms (perhaps higher-order singular terms) or as merely predicative terms, as chapters 4 and 5 argue. In the final three chapters, the necessity of theoretical identities like ‘water = H2O’ is upheld, as is a skeptical argument impugning psychophysical identities like ‘pain = c-fiber firing’. Special attention is paid to the skeptical argument, which has been rejected by analytic functionalists (including Lewis), concept dualists (including Papineau), and scientific necessitarians (most of whom embrace scientific essentialism: including Shoemaker). Arguments aiming to establish scientific necessitarianism are rejected in favor of a broadly empiricist skepticism regarding psychophysical identities and many other statements that scientific necessitarians would regard as true and necessary. The book as a whole constitutes a broad defense of a tradition or set of traditions originating largely in seminal work from Kripke.