Josh Dever
University of Texas at Austin
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Featured researches published by Josh Dever.
Archive | 2013
Herman Cappelen; Josh Dever
1. Introductory Overview: The Role of Indexicality, Perspective and the De Se in Philosophy 2. Preliminaries: Language-Mind, Super Indexicals, and Opacity 3. Indexicality, the De Se, and Agency 4. Indexicality, Opacity, and Fregeanism 5. Lewis on the De Se, Self-Ascription, and Centered Worlds 6. Functionalism to the Rescue? 7. Indexicality and Immunity to Error 8. A Brief Note on Perceptual Content and the De Se 9. The De Se and the Semantics of PRO Constructions 10. The View From Everywhere
Archive | 2009
Josh Dever
§§3–4 of the Begriffsschrift present Frege’s objections to a dominant if murky nineteenth century semantic picture. I sketch a minimalist variant of the pre-Fregean picture which escapes Frege’s criticisms by positing a thin notion of semantic content which then interacts with a multiplicity of kinds of truth to account for phenomena such as modality. After exploring several ways in which we can understand the existence of multiple truth properties, I discuss the roles of pointwise and setwise truth properties in modal logic. I argue that thinking of supertruth and determinate truth as setwise truth properties allows an understanding of supervaluationist approaches to vagueness which escapes both Williamson’s objections to and a needless metalinguistic orientation of traditional supervaluationism.
Philosophical Studies | 2003
Josh Dever
Modal fictionalists propose to defuse the unwanted ontological commitments of modal realism by treating modal realism as a fictional story, and modal assertions as assertions, prefixed by a fictionalist operator, that something is true in that story. However, consideration of conditionals with modal antecedents raises the problem ofembedding, which shows that the simple prefixing strategy cannotsucceed. A compositional version of the fictionalist strategy isdeveloped and critiqued, and some general semantic morals aredrawn from the failures of both strategies.
Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines | 2017
Herman Cappelen; Josh Dever
Abstract In her very interesting ‘First-personal modes of presentation and the problem of empathy’ (2017, 315–336), L. A. Paul argues that the phenomenon of empathy gives us reason to care about the first person point of view: that as theorists we can only understand, and as humans only evince, empathy by appealing to that point of view. We are skeptics about the importance of the first person point of view, although not about empathy. The goal of this paper is to see if we can account for empathy without the ideology of the first person. We conclude that we can.
Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines | 2015
Josh Dever
Abstract In her Transient Truths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), Berit Brogaard defends temporalism about proposition content from the more traditional eternalist views. I argue that both temporalism and eternalism are equally capable of accommodating all the data, and thus suggest that we should adopt a neutralism that holds there is no serious or resolvable dispute. Contra Brogaard, I argue that neither disagreement patterns nor belief dynamics favor temporalism over eternalism. I also suggest that Brogaards defense of operator over quantificational semantics for tense is unnecessary, because quantificational tense semantics can be given a temporalist reading, and operator tense semantics can be given an eternalist reading.
Logic: A History of its Central Concepts | 2012
Daniel Bonevac; Josh Dever
Contemporary students of logic tend to think of the logic of the connectives as the most basic area of the subject, which can then be extended with a logic of quantifiers. Historically, however, the logic of the quantifiers, in the form of the Aristotelian theory of the syllogism, came first. Truth conditions for negation, conjunction, and disjunction were well understood in ancient times, though not until Leibniz did anyone appreciate the algebraic features of these connectives. Approaches to the conditional, meanwhile, depended on drawing an analogy between conditionals and universal affirmative propositions. That remained true throughout the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods, and extended well into the nineteenth century, when Boole constructed an algebraic theory designed to handle sentential and quantificational phenomena in one go. The strength of the analogy, moreover, undercuts a common and otherwise appealing picture of the history of logic, according to which sentential and quantificational threads developed largely independently and, sometimes, in opposition to each other, until Frege wove them together in what we now consider classical logic. Frege did contribute greatly to our understanding of the connectives as well as the quantifiers. But his contribution consists in something other than unifying them into a single theory.
The Philosophical Review | 2006
Daniel Bonevac; Josh Dever; David Sosa
Mind | 2011
Daniel Bonevac; Josh Dever; David Sosa
Philosophical Books | 2007
Josh Dever
Mind | 1997
Stephen Neale; Josh Dever