PHIL 383B: What's an Inference?
Fundamental issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind and language: issues relating to the notion (or rather, notions) of an inference. What's inferential justification? What's an inferential reasoning process? What are inference rules, and what distinguishes a good rule of inference from a bad rule? Subtopics to be discussed include: the problem of mental causation, the distinction between personal and sub-personal levels of explanation, preservation of content and warrant, the epistemic support relation, and time permitting the nature of perceptual justification.
PHIL 384: Seminar in Metaphysics and Epistemology
May be repeated for credit.
| Repeatable
for credit
PHIL 385: Pragmatics and Reference
Problems about reference have played a large role in the philosophy of language since the days of Frege and Russell. An approach to reference from the point of view of pragmatics, that Kepa Korta and John Perry have developed in their book CRITICAL PRAGMATICS. Rely on ideas from John Perry's book REFERENCE AND REFLEXIVITY. Also look at other approaches to reference, and to pragmatics.
| Repeatable
5 times
(up to 20 units total)
PHIL 385B: Topics in Metaphysics and Epistemology: Vaguenes
Contemporary proposals for how and whether to explain and accommodate vagueness in reality and in representation.Theories of mental and linguistic representation that struggle to explain imprecise representation, and metaphysical theories of the ultimate structure of reality that are threatened with incoherence if worldly boundaries are vague. May be repeated for credit.
| Repeatable
for credit
PHIL 385C: Topics in Philosophy of Language: The Frege-Russell Problems
Explore various approaches to the difficulties for semantic theories raised by the behavior of propositional attitude sentences. How, if Superman and Clark are the same person, can Lois have different beliefs about them? "Classic" treatments of the issues including Frege, Russell, Quine, Davidson, and Kripke. Contemporary debates about the most promising approaches, including "naive Russellianism" and "unarticulated constituent" accounts.
PHIL 385M: The Metaphysics of Meaning
One central project in the philosophy of language is to explain the relationships between paradigmatically semantic phenomena like meaning, truth, and reference (as well as entailment, satisfaction, application, and others). Often the pursuit of this project generates orders of explanation in which some notions are privileged as more "fundamental" than others, in what is arguably a metaphysical sense of the expression. The dominant order of explanation in both philosophical and linguistic semantics seems to be Referentialism, according to which word/world relationships like reference and application are taken to be more fundamental than sentential truth or meaning. (Think: correspondence theory + model-theoretic semantics.) Alternatives to the orthodoxy include certain versions of conceptual-role semantics, Brandom's inferentialism, and Horwich's use theory of meaning. The aims of this seminar will be to acquaint ourselves with these and other going concerns in the theory of meaning, to organize logical space so that gaps might more easily be spotted, and to help the instructor develop his own, as yet nascent form of opposition to Referentialism. Of special interest will be the alleged normativity of meaning and the Field/Wright dispute over reference to abstracta. Besides the authors already mentioned, readings will be drawn from Katz, King, Kripke, and perhaps (time permitting) Millikan, Peacocke, and/or Taylor as well. But we should probably begin by rehashing Davidson v. Dummett.
PHIL 385R: Metaphysics of Reference
This seminar is an investigation of the nature of reference in both private thought and public talk. Just what is it for some bits of either our shared public language or our inner thoughts to refer to or stand for bits of the world? In virtue of what does the relation of reference obtain between some bit of the world and some bit of either outer language or inner thought? What about apparent reference to putatively non-existent objects, like Santa Claus or Sherlock Holmes? We appear to think and talk about objects that do not exist. But there are no such objects. So just how do we manage to think and talk about them? Or consider abstract objects, like numbers, that are thought by some to exist outside the spatial-temporal order. We appear to think and talk about such objects as well. But it is a mystery how, if at all, the reach of our thought could possibly extend beyond even the bounds of space and time. Though we will canvass a a number of different answers to this questions, proposed by a variety of philosophers, my main goal will be to develop and defend a view that I call two-factor referentialism. Readings will be drawn from a number of sources, including several chapters of my book in progress Referring to the World.
PHIL 386B: Husserl and Adam Smith
Readings from Husserl and others in the phenomenological tradition, and recent work on intentionality and consciousness by philosophers and cognitive scientists.
PHIL 386C: Subjectivity
Continuation of 386B.
PHIL 386D: Personal Identity
Focus on personal identity as a case study in metaphysical indeterminacy. The classic puzzles of PI can be construed as arguments that it can be indeterminate whether person A is identical to person B, and indeed, whether person A exists. Can such cases of indeterminacy be plausibly interpreted as semantic (or epistemic), or do they support the possibility of worldly or "ontic" indeterminacy? Is ontic indeterminacy even coherent? How might it be modeled? Parallel questions arise in the metaphysics of ordinary material objects, of course; but it's not obvious that their answers should also run parallel. And even if they do, focusing on PI lends the questions some real urgency. How should I feel about the interests of a past or future person who's only indeterminately me? Should I fear a future in which I merely indeterminately exist? Maybe outright death is preferable to being literally liminal. Seminar. Graduate work in core philosophy a prerequisite.
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