Papers

Arguments for semantic contextualism generally appeal to certain intuitions about the truth conditions of specific utterances in specific imagined contexts. I assess three lines of thought that have been offered in support of a policy of taking those intuitions at face value: 1) that respecting our initial intuitions about these differences is necessitated by a proper respect for "ordinary usage"; 2) that the existence of these differences is supported by the premise that content is constitutively dependent upon point (coupled with plausible hypotheses about the points of the utterances); and 3) that these differences correspond to differences in what it is for a given kind of object to have a given property, such differences registering at the level of content in virtue of a putatively Wittgensteinian picture of the nature of understanding. I argue that all three lines of thought are misguided, and outline an alternative picture of the relationship between utterance content and linguistic meaning suggested by their failure.

Although in everyday life and thought we take for granted that there are norms of rationality, their existence presents severe philosophical problems. Kolodny (2005) is thus moved to deny that rationality is normative. But this denial is not itself unproblematic, and I argue that Kolodny’s defense of it—especially his Transparency Account, which aims to explain why rationality appears to be normative even though it isn’t—is unsuccessful. (Versions of this paper have circulated under the name, "The Normativity of Rationality", but as I'm now writing a new paper under that name that offers an alternative solution to the problems attendant to ascribing normativity to rationality, I've changed the title of this one accordingly.)

I critique attempts by Charles Travis and others to read contextualism back into Philosophical Investigations. My central interpretive claim is that this reading is not only unsupported; it gets Wittgenstein's intent, in the parts of the text at issue, precisely backwards. The focus of the paper is on Wittgenstein's treatment of explanation and understanding in the passages on proper names and so-called family-resemblance concepts.

In this paper, I argue that informational semantics, the most well-known and worked-out naturalistic account of intentional content, conflicts with a fundamental psychological principle about the conditions of belief-formation. Since this principle is an important premise in the argument for informational semantics, the upshot is that the view is self-contradictory—indeed, it turns out to be guilty of a sophisticated version of the fallacy famously committed by Euthyphro in the eponymous Platonic dialogue. Criticisms of naturalistic accounts of content typically proceed piecemeal by narrowly constructed counterexamples, but I argue that the current result is more robust. It affects a broad family of accounts, and provokes a wider doubt about the possibility of successful execution of the naturalistic project.

One of the chief aims of Donald Davidson’s later work was to show that participation in a certain causal nexus involving two creatures and a shared environment—Davidson calls this nexus “triangulation”—is a metaphysically necessary condition for the acquisition of thought. This doctrine, I suggest, is aptly regarded as a form of what I call transcendental externalism. I extract two arguments for the transcendental-externalist doctrine from Davidson’s writings, and argue that neither succeeds. A central interpretive claim is that the arguments are primarily funded by a particular conception of the nature of non-human animal life. This conception turns out to be insupportable. The failure of Davidson’s arguments presses the question of whether we could ever hope to arrive at far-reaching claims about the conditions for thought if we deny, as does Davidson, the legitimacy of the naturalistic project in the philosophy of mind.

Attempts to ‘naturalize’ intentional content tend to focus narrowly on the goal of extensional adequacy; other criteria of adequacy are bracketed for future consideration or ignored entirely. Fred Dretske’s work in this area is distinctive: his teleofunctional theory of content is designed from the outset with a view toward both achieving extensional adequacy and accounting for the role of content in our everyday psychological explanations of thought and action. It is argued here that his theory fails on the latter score. Indeed, the theory entails that content can have no place in causal explanation at all. The argument for this conclusion depends upon on only extremely weak premises about the nature of causal explanation. The problems Dretske’s theory encounters, it is suggested, indicate the enormous challenges involved in arriving at a non-superficial naturalistic understanding of the mind.

This is a copy of a talk in which I argue against semantic contextualism, focusing on the views of Charles Travis and Hilary Putnam. The talk is poorly named, as I say almost nothing about Wittgenstein.