Croatian Journal of Philosophy

It is generally believed that natural languages have lots of contextually sensitive expressions. In addition to familiar examples like ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘today’, ‘he’, ‘that’ and so on that everyone takes to be contextually sensitive, examples of expressions that many would take to be contextually sensitive include tense, modals, gradable adjectives, relational terms (‘local’; ‘enemy’), possessives (‘Annie’s book’) and quantifi ers (via quantifier domains). With the exception of contextually sensitive expressions discussed by Kaplan [1977], there has not been a lot of discussion as to the mechanism whereby contextually sensitive expressions get their values in context, aside from vague references to speakers’ intentions. In a recent paper, I proposed a candidate for being this mechanism and defended the claim that it is such. Because, as I suggested, these issues have been most extensively discussed in the case of demonstratives, I focused on these expressions by way of contrasting the mechanism I proposed with others in the literature. In the present work, I simply state what I claim is the mechanism by means of which demonstratives secure semantic values in contexts without defending the claim that it is so. I then consider some claims made by Kent Bach, and arguments for those claims, which would undermine the account I propose of how demonstratives secure semantic values in context.

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. (1) There is no sound theoretical motivation for his excluding the reference fixing of demonstratives, pronouns and names from “what-is-said”. (2) 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.

My aim in this paper is to examine how Kent Bach’s theory of singular thought about material objects meets the requirements of transmitting de re thought. I identify a certain possible paradox haunting Bach’s move of extending acquaintance in order to widen the scope of singular thought and I attempt to answer this possible paradox. First, I briefly present the manner in which Bach motivates extended acquaintance and which constraints he puts on it. I then address the problem of the sorites paradox which might lead not only to Bach’s communication-based de re thoughts, but perception-based de re thoughts in general, thus defined. Finally, I offer my tentative solution to the problem of extended acquaintance which consists in introducing two constraints on singular thought, namely (i) the (external) acquaintance constraint and (ii) the (internal) cognitive significance constraint, and two types of representations, namely indexical-iconic representations and indexical-discursive representations which are together crucial for having a singular thought.

I thank my critics for time, thought, and effort put into their commentaries. Since obviously I can’t respond to everything, I will try to address what strike me as the most important questions they ask and objections they raise. I think I have decent answers to some questions and decent responses to some objections, in other cases it seems enough to clarify the relevant view, and in still others I need to modify the view in question. One complication, which I won’t elaborate on, is that the views under consideration have evolved, or at least changed, over the years, so that my critics are aiming at a moving target, albeit a slowly moving one. Before responding, I will sketch some of the main ideas behind my view, including their unifying motivation, and mention a few key distinctions that are particularly relevant to topics addressed by my critics.

The problem of fuzzy boundaries when delineating cortical areas is widely known in human brain mapping and its adjacent subdisciplines (anatomy, physiology and functional neuroimaging). Yet, a conceptual framework for understanding indeterminacy in neuroscience is missing, and there has been no discussion in the philosophy of neuroscience whether indeterminacy poses an issue for good neuroscientific explanations. My paper addresses both these issues by applying philosophical theories of vagueness to three levels of neuroscientific research, namely to (i) cytoarchitectonic studies at the neuron level (ii) intra-areal neuronalinteraction measured by the BOLD-signal of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and (iii) inter-areal connectivity between different cortical areas. The rest of the paper explores how this framework can be extended to mechanistic explanations in neuroscience. I discuss a semantic and an ontic interpretation of vagueness in mechanistic explanations and argue how both become scientifically interesting from the perspective of a philosophy of scientific practice.

My aim in this paper is to investigate what epistemic role, if any, do appeals to representations play in cognitive neuroscience. I suggest that while at present they seem to play something in between a minimal and a substantive explanatory role, there is reason to believe that representations have a substantial contribution to the construction of neuroscientic explanations of cognitive phenomena.

It is a dominant view in the philosophical literature on the later Wittgenstein that Chomsky’s approach to the investigation of natural language stands in stark contrast to Wittgenstein’s, and that their respective conceptions of language and linguistic understanding are irreconcilable. The aim in this paper is to show that this view is largely incorrect and that the two approaches to language and its use are indeed compatible, notwithstanding their distinctive foci of interest. The author argues that there is a signifi cant correspondence in at least five different areas of their work, and that once we pay attention to these there will be lesstemptation to see Wittgenstein and Chomsky as enemies.

This is an introduction to the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of binding, with a special focus on the so-called principles of linguistic economy. I shall first look at the (syntactic) Binding Principles, and stress some of their limitations. Consequently, additional constraints are needed to complement the robust syntactic generalisations already ensured by the Binding Principles and thus to overcome their limitations. Subsequently, we shall explore the basic mechanisms underlying the reconstruction of Binding Theory under the new set of constraints introduced by the economy principles. It is this variety of principles of economy that is the main theme of the present paper. I spell out the idea of linguistic economy, its ramifications as well as its explanatory uses.

I briefly rehearse the positive conception of philosophy in my book The Philosophy of Philosophy, as an introduction to the symposium on it that follows.

The paper addresses Williamson’s original and challenging proposal for understanding of thought experiments (TEs). First, it puts it on the map of positions, describing it as “ordinarism”, the view that sees thinker’s reaction to the thought-experimental question as nothing extraordinary, let alone mysterious. Then, it passes to Williamson’s proposal to use counterfactuals in order to understand TEs, agrees with the main idea, but proposes a more structured view of capacities or “competences” active in the understanding and answering. Intuitions are important, and they are voice of competencies, at least in the good case. Finally, on the normative level, it argues for the view of justification as being structured, containing both a priori and a posteriori elements.

In this paper I concentrate on three issues concerning Williamson’s book The Philosophy of Philosophy: the problem of analytic statements being first-order propositions, the issue concerning aposteriority and the concerns related to the semantic vs. metasemantic distinction.

T. Williamson argues against the thesis he recognizes as one of the inferentialist basic idea that he formulates as understanding/assent link, the claim that the assent to a sentence (believing a thought, at conceptual level) is constitutive for understanding it. This paper aims to show that appropriately articulated dispositional theory, could plausibly account for a weak version of inferentialism.

I reply to critical discussions by Majda Trobok, Nenad Smokrović, and Nenad Miščević on theses and arguments from my book The Philosophy of Philosophy. I take issue with them on matters such as the following. Should philosophical questions apparently about the world be taken at face value, or are they implicitly metalinguistic or metaconceptual? Are there ‘epistemologically analytic’ sentences that one can understand only if one has a (possibly unmanifested) disposition to accept them? Can ‘philosophical intuitions’ be explained as the products of separable domain-specific competencies?

The paper proposes and defends the following characterization of response dependent property: a property is response-dependent iff there is a response-dependence biconditional for a concept signifying it which holds in virtue of the nature of the property. Finding out whether a property is such is to a large extent a posteriori matter. Finally, colors are response dependent: they are essentially tied to issuing the relevant experiences, so that having those experiences does give access to their, dispositional, nature. Finally, some important contrary views are critically discussed in the paper.

Time travel is a theme that provokes scientific curiosity, as well as philosophical speculation. The problems it raises, however, are being tackled by science fiction only, and are still not resolved by science either theoretically, or practically. My aim here is, firstly, to present some curious facts about time travel and to have a look at the nature of different ontological constraints confronting time travel; secondly, to outline three cases for which time travel might be meaningfully contended; and thirdly, to defend the “unexpected” claim that human conscious presence in the world is the genuine-and-natural time travel.

The aim of this paper is to develop a new connection between naming and necessity. I argue that Kripke’s historical account of naming presupposes the functional necessity of naming. My argument appeals to the etiological notion of function, which can be thought to capture the necessity of functionality in historical terms. It is shown that the historical account of naming entails all conditions in an etiological defi nition of function.

The paper offers one of Parsons’ main themes in his book Mathematical Thought and Its Objects of 2008 (Cambridge University Press, New York): the role of intuition in our understanding of arithmetic. Our discussion does not cover all of the issues that have relevance for Parsons’ account of mathematical intuition, but we focus on the question: whether our knowledge that there is a model for arithmetic can reasonably be called intuitive. We focus on this question because we have some concerns about that.

According to Agrippa’s trilemma, an attempt to justify something leads to either infinite regress, circularity, or dogmatism. This essay examines whether and to what extent the trilemma applies to ethics. There are various responses to the trilemma, such as foundationalism, coherentism, contextualism, infinitism, and German idealism. Examining those responses, the essay shows that the trilemma applies at least to rational justification of contentful moral beliefs. This means that rationalist ethics based on any contentful moral belief are rationally unjustifiable.