Paul Horwich

Naturalism without representationalism

1. The relevance of science to philosophy What is philosophical naturalism? Most fundamentally, presumably, it is the view that natural science constrains philosophy, in the following sense. The concerns of the two disciplines are not simply disjoint, and science takes the lead where the two overlap. At the very least, then, to be a philosophical naturalist is to believe that philosophy is not simply a different enterprise from science, and that philosophy properly defers to science, where the concerns of the two disciplines coincide. Naturalism as spare as this is by no means platitudinous. However, most opposition to naturalism in contemporary philosophy is not opposition to naturalism in this basic sense, but to a more specific view of the relevance of science to philosophy. Similarly on the pro-naturalistic side. What most self-styled naturalists have in mind is the more specific view. As a result, I think, both sides of the contemporary debate pay insufficient attention to a different kind of philosophical naturalism — a different view of the impact of science on philosophy. This different view is certainly not new — it has been with us at least since Hume — but nor is it prominent in many contemporary debates. In this paper I try to do something to remedy this deficit. I begin by making good the claim that the position commonly called naturalism is not a necessary corollary of naturalism in the basic sense outlined above. There are two very different ways of taking science to be relevant to philosophy. And contrary, perhaps, to first appearances, the major implications of these two views for philosophy arise from a common starting point. There is a single kind of core problem, to which the two kinds of naturalism recommend very different sorts of answer.

A Minimalist Critique of Tarski on Truth

The recent ‘minimalist’ view of truth is in fundamental respects very close to the account offered by Alfred Tarski in 1933.1 It agrees with him that—putting the matter informally—just about the whole story of what it is for the statement or belief, , to be true is given by the equivalence: is true ↔ snow is white It agrees with Tarski that a full theory of truth should do nothing more than in some way generalize this thesis. It agrees that such an account will implicitly capture the idea that ‘truth is correspondence with reality’, but without having to resort to the obscure notions of ‘correspondence’ or `reality’ : thus it will qualify, in Jan Wolaiski’s terms, as a “weak correspondence theory” And it agrees that an even worse mistake would be to attempt to define truth in terms of ‘coherence’ or ‘verification’ or ‘utility’.

GrÜnbaum on the Metric of Space and Time

1 This paper is about Adolf Griinbaums theory of the magnitudes of spatial and temporal intervals. It is based upon his many writings on the subject which have recently been collected together in the Second Edition of his Philosophical Problems of Space and Time. Griinbaums key idea is that facts about the equality (congruence) of intervals are not solely spatial or temporal facts, but concern the relations between space or time and certain physical standards such as rulers and clocks. In his words, the metrics of space and time are extrinsic. This view leads Griinbaum to conventionalism. It follows, he believes, that whether or not two intervals are congruent is a matter of convention. I shall try to show first of all that Griinbaum provides only a vacuous basis for his so-called conventionalism. Secondly, I discuss his view that the metrics of space and time are extrinsic. This claim is criticised as regards (a) its justification and plausibility (b) its compatibility with Grunbaums causal theory of time, and (c) its claim to be an elucidation of Riemanns position. Finally I take up Grunbaums criticism of Geometrodynamics—the theory that matter is made out of space-time. I argue that the difficulty rests upon an equivocation, and I attempt to clarify and resolve the issue by means of Kripkes notion of a reference fixing definition.

Is truth a normative concept

My answer will be ‘no’. And I’ll defend it by: (i) distinguishing a concept’s having normative import from its being functionally normative; (ii) sketching a method for telling whether or not a concept is of the latter sort; (iii) responding to the antideflationist, Dummettian argument (extended in different directions by Crispin Wright, Huw Price, and Michael Lynch) in favor of the conclusion that truth is functionally normative; (iv) proceeding to address a less familiar route to that conclusion—one that’s consistent with deflationism about truth, but that depends on the further assumption that meaning is intrinsically normative; and (v) arguing that this further assumption is mistaken.

Deflationary Truth, Aboutness and Meaning

This paper concerns the relationship between three concepts: namely, truth, aboutness and meaning,The general idea is to show how a certain philosophical view of truth — known as deflationism — helps to dissolve a certain problem regarding aboutness — the notorious problem of intentionality — and thereby puts us in a good position to discern the nature of meaning. So there will be three questions on the table. First: what is truth? What is the characteristic shared by ‘Snow is white’, ‘Electrons are negatively charged’, and other true propositions? Second: how can a word — a mere sound or mark — be about, or represent,a certain aspect of external reality? How is it possible for the word ‘Plato’, that I might use here and now, to reach out through space and time and latch on to a particular person living a long time ago and a long way away? And third: which underlying, non-semantic property of a word provides it which the particular meaning it has? What is it about different words — ‘dog’, ‘and’, ‘good’, and so on — that is responsible for their meaning what they do and is the basis for our translating them as we do into foreign languages? Addressing these questions in turn, I will proceed in three stages. First I will say what I think is the essence of the deflationary perspective on truth, outlining the evidence in favor of adopting it. Second I will show, from that perspective, how the problem of aboutness should be approached and dissolved. And third I will indicate how this view of the problem opens the door to a certain account of meaning: the so-called ‘use theory’.

Sosa’s theory of knowledge

This paper is a critical discussion of Ernest Sosa’s recent analysis of reflective knowledge.

Kripke’s Paradox of Meaning

Given the common-sense assumption that words possess distinctive meanings — e.g. that Jan’s word, ‘pies’, has the property of meaning DOG — we can reasonably address ourselves to the question of where such phenomena come from, how facts of this sort are to be explained.1 More specifically: To what, if anything, are meaning-properties, such as ‘w means DOG’, conceptually (a priori) analyzable? To what, if anything, are they empirically (a posteriori) reducible? Which causal processes, if any, are responsible for their exemplification?

On the Existence of Meanings

How is it possible for a word or a sentence to be meaningful and yet not to have a meaning? That this is not merely possible but generally true is the startling conclusion of the considerations Quine advanced in chapter II of Word and Object and which he has refined in subsequent writings, notably “Ontological Relativity” and Pursuit of Truth.l In the present essay I would like to hazard a reconstruction of Quine’s argument — a reconstruction which I hope does justice to it, but which reveals, I believe, a serious defect: namely that although its main assumptions are indeed correct the shocking conclusion cannot really be derived from them. More specifically, I will argue that we should welcome Quine’s sceptical scrutiny of the naive conception of meaning, which he calls “the museum myth”, and in addition that we should endorse a qualified form of his behaviourism regarding semantics; but I will suggest that these ideas ought to have led him, and ought to lead us, to a use theory of meanings rather than to a denial of meanings.

Comment on Dretske

The conclusion of Fred Dretskes paper is strikingly counterintuitive, as he himself is the first to admit. For there is a strong inclination to hold that our sensations and feelings are internal -implying, if we are materialists, that an exact physical duplicate of a given person must be undergoing the same sensations and feelings as that person. But the point of Dretskes paper it to challenge this idea. He argues that there is, on reflection, no reason to agree with it: no reason to think that the way pains feel to S, or the way red things look to S, are facts solely about S; no reason to think that what its like to be a molecular duplicate of S must be the same as what its like to be S; no reason, in other words, to assume that there is such a thing as purely internal experience. The way Dretske arrives at this conclusion is surprising and ingenious. For the usual basis of the inclination to hold that phenomenal states are internal is the special epistemological access each of us has to what we are experiencing: if I have a pain then I know I do, and vice versa; and how could this be so unless the pain is wholly inside me. But Dretske argues, on the contrary, that if phenomenal states really were internal, then this fact about them would militate against first-person awareness. Thus, according to Dretske, the idea that phenomenal states are internal, far from explaining our special

Meaning and Metaphilosophy@@@The Metaphysics of Meaning.

Jerry Katzs book touches on just about every area of philosophy, raising hard questions wherever it goes, and offering provocative answers to them. In this paper I would like to focus on just one of the issues he engages, but one I take to be central: namely, what is the relationship between Wittgensteins account of meaning and his metaphilosophy? Katz supposes that Wittgensteins treatment of meaning -including his identification of the meaning of an expression with its useis the basis of his metaphilosophy and of his accounts of logic, mathematics, the mind, and other matters. Thus he says