Henry Jackman

We live forwards but understand backwards: Linguistic practices and future behavior

Ascriptions of content are sensitive not only to our physical and social environment, but also to unforeseeable developments in the subsequent usage of our terms. The paper argues that the problems that may seem to come from endorsing such ‘temporally sensitive’ ascriptions either already follow from accepting the socially and historically sensitive ascriptions Burge and Kripke appeal to, or disappear when the view is developed in detail. If one accepts that one’s societys past and current usage contributes to what one’s terms mean, there is little reason not to let its future usage to do so as well.

TEMPORAL EXTERNALISM AND EPISTEMIC THEORIES OF VAGUENESS

‘Epistemic’ theories of vagueness notoriously claim that (despite the appearances to the contrary) all of our vague terms have sharp boundaries; it’s just that we can’t know what they are. Epistemic theories are typically criticized for failing to explain (1) the source of the ignorance postulated, and (2) how our terms could come to have such precise boundaries. Both of these objections will, however, be shown to rest on certain ‘presentist’ assumptions about the relation between use and meaning, and once these assumptions are rejected, the possibility of a new sort of ‘normative epistemicism’ will emerge.

Foundationalism, Coherentism and Rule-Following Scepticism

Semantic holists view what ones terms mean as function of all of ones beliefs and applications. Holists will thus be coherentists about how ones usage is justified: showing that ones usage of a term is justified involves showing how it coheres with the rest of ones beliefs and applications. Semantic reductionists, on the other hand, will understand such justification in a classically foundationalist fashion. Now Saul Kripke has, on Wittgensteins behalf, famously argued for a type of scepticism about meaning and the possibility of demonstrating the correctness of ones usage. However, Kripkes argument has bite only if one understands justification in classically foundationalist terms. Consequently, Kripkes arguments, if good, lead not to a type of scepticism about meaning, but rather to the conclusion that one should be a coherentist about the justification of our usage, and thus a holist about semantic facts.

Radical interpretation and the permutation principle

Davidson has claimed that to conclude that reference is inscrutable, one must assume that “If some theory of truth ... is satisfactory in the light of all relevant evidence ... then any theory that is generated from the first theory by a permutation will also be satisfactory in the light of all relevant evidence.” However, given that theories of truth are not directly read off the world, but rather serve as parts of larger theories of behavior, this assumption is far from self-evident. A proper understanding of the role truth theories play in theories of interpretation makes the inscrutability of reference much less wide-spread than Davidson suggests, and, as a result, the radical interpretation methodology is much less likely to saddle its defenders with counterintuitive cases of indeterminacy than is commonly supposed.

Comments on Hales: Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy

In Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy , Hales presents a novel defence of the coherence of relativism, particularly relativism about philosophical propositions, and I won’t have any objections here to Hales’s arguments for this coherence claim. Rather, I will be concerned with Hales’s arguments for the stronger claim that relativism is not only a coherent option, but also the one that philosophers rationally ought to adopt. I suppose that my worries may ultimately be seen as coming from the ‘naturalist’ camp, though perhaps not from the sort of naturalism that Hales targets explicitly in his book. In particular, my doubts about his position stem not from doubts about whether there are facts of the matter relating to topics traditionally considered ‘philosophical’, but rather from a sort of scepticism I have about that ‘naturalness’ of the kinds ‘philosophical proposition’ and ‘rational intuition’. I’m less than convinced that it is philosophically fruitful to treat these as explanatory kinds when discussing philosophical methodology, and in what follows I’ll hope to show why.

Epistemology and Language

There has always been a close relation between semantics (how does language represents the world?) and epistemology (can we tell that such representations are correct?). Theories of language have typically been used to solve skeptical problems by either (1) providing an analysis of epistemic terms, such as ‘know’ or ‘justified,’ that rule out skepticism or (2) providing general semantic theories that rule out the possibility of widespread misrepresentation. Both approaches, and the problems with them, are discussed.

Contextualism in Epistemology

Contextualists in epistemology maintain that the conditions for the correct application of epistemic terms like ‘know’ vary from context to context. Contextualists may disagree about whose context, and which features of that context, are relevant, but they typically agree that in some contexts the standards for knowledge are low enough to underwrite the truth of everyday knowledge claims, while in other (skeptical) contexts we may not be able to truly claim to know anything. Contextualism thus explains both why we find skeptical arguments compelling when faced with them and why we so easily go back to our everyday knowledge-attributions afterward.

Prejudice, Humor and Alief: Comments on Robin Tapley’s “Humour, Beliefs, and Prejudice”

While both Tapley and I believe Wrong Telling, I ’m unpersuaded by her arguments for Racist/Sexist Laughing, and in what follows I’ll be trying to do some philosophical maneuvering o f the sort that she thinks hopeless in the quote above. Tapley contrasts her own view with the much more benign explana tion o f the person who laughs at a racist or sexist joke. According to the benign explanation, one can find such jokes funny by simply hypotheti cally holding (or imagining that one holds) the racist or sexist beliefs in question. Tapley argues that given our current understanding about how humor works, hypothetical or imagined belief cannot do the work needed to cause the ‘flickering’ that LaFollette and Shanks take to be characteristic o f humor.2 As they put it: