John Hawthorne

Advice for Physicalists

This paper engages with two compelling challenges to physicalism,each designed to show that the nature of experience is elusive fromthe standpoint of physical science. It is argued that the physicalistis ultimately well placed to meet both challenges.

Semantic Plasticity and Speech Reports

Most meanings we express belong to large families of variant meanings, among which it would be implausible to suppose that some are much more apt for being expressed than others. This abundance of candidate meanings creates pressure to think that the proposition attributing any particular meaning to an expression is modally plastic: its truth depends very sensitively on the exact microphysical state of the world. However, such plasticity seems to threaten ordinary counterfactuals whose consequents contain speech reports, since it is hard to see how we could reasonably be confident in a counterfactual whose consequent can be true only if a certain very finely tuned microphysical configuration obtains. This essay develops the foregoing puzzle and explores several possible solutions.

On the compatibility of connectionist and classical models

Abstract This paper presents considerations in favour of the view that traditional (classical) architectures can be seen as emergent features of connectionist networks with distributed representation. A recent paper by William Bechtel (1988) which argues for a similar conclusion is unsatisfactory in that it fails to consider whether the compositional syntax and semantics attributed to mental representations by classical models can emerge within a connectionist network. The compatibility of the two paradigms hinges largely, I suggest, on how this question is answered. Focusing on the issue of syntax, I argue that while such structure is lacking in connectionist models with local representation, it can be accommodated within networks where representation is distributed. I discuss an important paper by Smolenski (1988) which attempts to show how connectionists can incorporate the relevant syntactic structure, suggesting that some criticisms levelled against that paper by Fodor & Pylyshyn (1988) are wanting. ...

Lewis, the lottery and the preface

Context-dependence is commonly believed to be a widespread phenomenon in natural language. In a context where the standards of precision are very demanding (say, a rocket launch), an utterance of ‘It’s 3 pm’ said at 3.01 will be reckoned false. Reduce the standards of precision and an utterance of the same sentence at the same time will be reckoned true. Semanticists habitually accommodate phenomena of this type by allowing that utterances of the same sentence type express different propositions on different occasions of use, owing to variations along contextual parameters that are not explicitly marked in the surface structure of the sentence itself. Contextualists in epistemology hold that the verb ‘know’ provides yet another case of context-dependence, expressing diverse relations on different occasions of use owing to shifting standards for its application. In Lewis’s particular version of contextualism, the key contextual parameter is the divide between the possible worlds that are being properly ignored by the ascriber and those that are not. He offers the following definition:

Comments on Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions (Berit Brogaard)

Abstract This paper distinguishes two importantly different kinds of temporalism. According to one version, the truth value of propositions is parameterized to times. According to a second version, propositions have a truth value simpliciter, but some propositions that are true will be or were false. I point out that the second version is neglected in Berit Brogaards Transient Truths (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), and explore whether there are good arguments against it implicit in that work. I also critically engage with various arguments presented by Brogaard against semantic eternalism.