Philosophy, et cetera

[This post is by guest blogger Tristan Haze of Sprachlogik .] We have concepts of particular objects. The recognition of this piece of com...

What exactly do we mean when we ask the deliberative question, "What should I do"? It's surprisingly elusive. With a bit of w...

Sometimes people think they disagree when really they are making perfectly compatible claims. What criteria determine whether an apparent d...

Philosophers who refuse to bother about semantics, on the grounds that they want to study the non-linguistic world, not our talk about that ...

JJ writes : The Canadian-based What Sorts of People Should There Be? project , has 61 researchers from 15 different disciplines. The team a...

Eliezer's anti-zombie argument was based on the premise that words refer to whatever generally causes us to utter them. (So 'consci...

Stephen Yablo gave a very impressive series of lectures here last week. His core insight was that often we can communicate important truths ...

Ophelia Benson has got me thinking about the intersection of ethics and philosophy of language: A face is shown... What makes it Muhammad...

Suppose young Timmy mistakenly takes 'prime number' to be roughly synonymous with 'cool number'. So he goes around saying th...

Alex's comment to my previous post reminded me that I need to say a bit more about my treatment of indeterminacy. He wonders how the fo...

I think that descriptivists may have to reject semantic compositionality in some cases. In particular, the two sentences (1) 'Bob is hu...

There are indefinitely many ways we might fit a curve to data, or generalize from finitely many cases to a universal rule that gives the rig...

De dicto belief ascription : (1) Jones believes that the tallest spy is a spy. De re belief ascription : (2) Jones believes, of the tallest...

Anne thinks or utters to herself some sentence S. Who is the authority on what Anne's utterance means? Anne herself, I should think. Tha...

More on relative truth and disagreement . Let 'Pa' denote that P is true relative to Anne. I suggested before that such relativity c...

Consider sophisticated moral relativism . Say Anne's idealized self would conclude that abortion is wrong, whereas Bob's would not. ...

Markosian (1993) defends the suspicious move from tensed language to tensed reality, by claiming that if we cannot paraphrase away talk of ...

Some interesting remarks from Jason Kuznicki : Fundamentalism is an interpretive strategy . Fundamentalism is not a divine command; it is a ...

Here's a quick and dirty argument (inspired by Frank Jackson's seminar last night): Premise: Signs are no use to us if we don't ...

Jonathan Ichikawa discusses a curious puzzle, 'It must be so (but I wouldn’t say that it is so)': “it must be that X” can be [used...