John Biro

Spinoza : metaphysical themes

This collection of previously unpublished essays on Spinoza provides a representative sample of new and interesting research on the philosopher. Spinozas philosophy still has an underserved reputation for being obscure and incomprehensible. In these chapters, Spinoza is seen mostly as a metaphysician who tried to pave the way for the new science. The essays investigate several themes, notably Spinozas monism, the nature of the individual, the relation between mind and body, and his place in 17th century philosophy including his relation to Descartes and Leibniz. The top scholars working on Spinoza today are all represented, including John Carriero, Michael Della Rocca, and Don Garrett.

Epistemic Normativity, Argumentation, and Fallacies

In Biro and Siegel (1992) we argued that a theory of argumentation mustfully engage the normativity of judgments about arguments, and we developedsuch a theory. In this paper we further develop and defend our theory.

Hume's new science of the mind

“Human Nature is the only science of man.” T 1.4.7.14 For Hume, understanding the workings of the mind is the key to understanding everything else. There is a sense, therefore, in which to write about Humes philosophy of mind is to write about all of his philosophy. With that said, I shall nonetheless focus here on those specific doctrines that belong to what we today call the philosophy of mind, given our somewhat narrower conception of that subject. It should also be remembered that Hume describes his inquiry into the nature and workings of the mind as a science. This is an important clue to understanding both the goals and the results of that inquiry, as well as the methods Hume uses in pursuing it. As we will see, there is a thread running from Humes project of founding a science of the mind to that of the so-called cognitive sciences of the late twentieth century. For both, the study of the mind is in important respects just like the study of any other natural phenomenon. While it would be an overstatement to say that Humes entire interest lies in the construction of a science in this sense - he has other, more traditionally “philosophical,” concerns - recognizing the centrality of this scientific aim is essential for understanding him.

Hume and Cognitive Science

In this paper, I want to explore what Hume’s science of man and the new cognitivism have in common, and wherein they differ. I think that by taking a closer look at their similarities and differences we may understand both better. Indeed, I shall argue that we may learn some lessons from Hume’s old science that the new could well take to heart.

Pragma-dialectic versus epistemic theories of arguing and arguments: Rivals or partners?

The research of the Amsterdam School has spread outward across the discipline of argumentation studies like a new day, awakening us to new vistas, casting light on new opportunities, and offering a fresh look at our familiar surroundings. When it first appeared, the pragma-dialectical approach challenged so many existing assumptions that is seemed almost radical, and entirely disrupted the established view. Yet over the years this approach has proved so remarkably effective that many of its central tenets have begun to be widely recognized and accepted. These tenets are even becoming a part of science, as they are increasingly adopted into the standard model of argument used in computing. Along with Rob Grootendorst, Frans van Eemeren was the founding father of the Amsterdam School, and of the pragma-dialectical approach to the study of argumentation. This new approach found its inspiration in the critical rationalism of Popper (1972, 1974), Barth and Krabbe’s (1982) theory of formal dialectic, and the speech act theory of Austin (1962), Searle (1969), and Grice (1975) (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004, p. 51). Argumentation, as a growing interdisciplinary field of research, was conducted mainly in logic, philosophy, and communication studies in the beginning. It has now branched and become truly interdisciplinary as it has affected more and more fields, like cognitive science, where models of rational thinking are an essential part of the research program. At some point, argumentation methods and findings began to be imported into computing, especially in the area called artificial intelligence, or AI. Since that time, other researchers in argumentation began to use tools developed in AI. In this chapter, we explore the development and importance of this connection between argumentation and artificial intelligence. Specifically, we show that the influence of argumentation on AI has occurred within a framework that is consistent with the basic approach of Pragma-Dialectics. While the pragma-dialectical approach is typically conceived

Frege: Sense and Reference One Hundred Years Later

Three Puzzles in Freges Theory of Truth T. Baldwin. Truth and Sense G. Segal. Frege and Comsky: Sense and Psychologism B. Smith. Meaning and the Third Realm P. Kotatko. Putnams Doctrine of Natural Kind Words and Freges Doctrines of Sense, Reference and Extension: Can They Cohere? D. Wiggins. Concept-Reference and Kinds A. Grayling. The Communication of First Person Thoughts F. Recanati. Transparency, Sense and Self-Knowledge T. Stoneham. The Sense and Reference of Evaluative Terms C. Tappolet. The Next Best Thing to Sense in Begriffsschrift P. Simons. Why is Freges Puzzle Still Puzzling? E. Corazza, J. Dokic. The Frege Puzzle One More Time M. Hahn. The Neo-Fregean Argument J. Biro.

A Point of View on Points of View

A number of writers have deployed the notion of a point of view as a key to the allegedly theory-resistant subjective aspect of experience. I examine that notion more closely than is usually done and find that it cannot support the anti-objectivists case. Experience may indeed have an irreducibly subjective aspect, but the notion of a point of view cannot be used to show that it does.

Cognitive Science and David Hume’s Science of the Mind

What reason is there for coupling one of the newest branches of modern science with a long-dead philosopher, however august? And why with Hume, of all people? Was he not a sceptic, famous for questioning the possibility of any, and, thus, a fortiori,scientific, knowledge? Interesting as his reasons for such doubts may be to other philosophers, can they not be safely ignored by scientists, those actually engaged in pursuing and, surely, gaining, the knowledge he said was unattainable? But, then, what else has he to say to the latter? In what follows, I shall argue that far from being sceptical about the possibility of a science of the mind, Hume was perhaps the first to embark self-consciously on the project of constructing one. Furthermore, some of the goals and some of the results of his project anticipate in interesting and rarely noticed ways those of recent cognitive science and its philosophy.

A Logically Transparent Approach to Discourse Reporting

In this essay we develop a theory of discourse reports. The theory provides a common set of structural and interpretive principles that together account for the truth conditions of direct, indirect and mixed reports. A distinguishing feature of our view is the assumption that the complement sentence of a report divides exclusively and exhaustively into regions that characterize the content of the reported utterance and regions that characterize the form of the utterance. This assumption implies that mixed reports do not imply full direct or indirect reports. We discuss a classical David-sonian proposal by Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore which conflicts with our theory on this latter point and show that it is unable to account for many of the phenomena we discuss.

The Neo-Fregean Argument

Is a name a mere meaningless tag, whose function is simply to denote its bearer, as Mill maintained? Or does it, as Frege thought, have, in addition to its reference, a sense, one its user can associate with it, understand, or ‘grasp’? An argument in favour of the second, Fregean, alternative many philosophers have found well-nigh irresistible is one that takes as its starting point the fact that co-denoting names are apparently not always substitutable salva veritate in sentences ascribing propositional attitudes. Only the postulation of senses, this argument -- which I shall call neo-Fregean -- goes on to claim, can explain this: only a difference in the senses of the names could account for (what is seen as) their different semantic contributions to the sentences in which they occur.1