Stephen K. McLeod

Knowledge of Need

Some of the duties of individuals and organisations involve responsiveness to need. This requires knowledge of need, so the epistemology of need is relevant to practice. The prevailing contention among philosophers who have broached the topic is that one can know one’s own needs (as one can know some kinds of desires) by feeling them. The article argues against this view. The main positive claims made in the article are as follows. Knowledge of need, in both first‐person and second‐person cases, is a type of knowledge‐that with no basic epistemological source. Needs, like medical conditions, have signs and symptoms. Knowledge of these, with inference, results in knowledge of need. Finally, it is argued that need is akin to, but not a special case of, metaphysical necessity de re. Some implications of this for the epistemology of need are explained.

Knowledge of necessity: Logical positivism and Kripkean essentialism

Abstract By the lights of a central logical positivist thesis in modal epistemology, for every necessary truth that we know, we know it a priori and for every contingent truth that we know, we know it a posteriori. Kripke attacks on both flanks, arguing that we know necessary a posteriori truths and that we probably know contingent a priori truths. In a reflection of Kripkes confidence in his own arguments, the first of these Kripkean claims is far more widely accepted than the second. Contrary to received opinion, the paper argues, the considerations Kripke adduces concerning truths purported to be necessary a posteriori do not disprove the logical positivist thesis that necessary truth and a priori truth are co-extensive.

Dummett and Frege on sense and Selbständigkeit

ABSTRACT As part of his attack on Frege’s ‘myth’ that senses reside in the third realm, Dummett alleges that Frege’s view that all objects are selbständig (‘self-subsistent’, ‘independent’) is an underlying mistake, since some objects depend upon others. Whatever the merits of Dummett’s other arguments against Frege’s conception of sense, this objection fails. First, Frege’s view that senses are third-realm entities is not traceable to his view that all objects are selbständig. Second, while Frege recognizes that there are objects that are dependent upon other objects, he does not take this to compromise the Selbständigkeit of any objects. Thus, Frege’s doctrine that objects are selbständig does not make the claim of absolute independence that Dummett appears to have taken it to make. Nevertheless, in order to make a good case against Frege based on the dependency of senses, Dummett need only establish his claim that senses depend upon expressions: appeal to an absolute conception of independence is unnecessary. However, Dummett’s arguments for the dependency of senses upon expressions are unsuccessful and they show that Dummett’s conception of what it is to be an expression also differs significantly from Frege’s.

On Truth-Functionality

Benjamin Schnieder has argued that several traditional definitions of truth-functionality fail to capture a central intuition informal characterizations of the notion often capture. The intuition is that the truth-value of a sentence that employs a truth-functional operator depends upon the truthvalues of the sentences upon which the operator operates. Schnieder proposes an alternative definition of truth-functionality that is designed to accommodate this intuition. We argue that one traditional definition of ‘truth-functionality’ is immune from the counterexamples that Schnieder proposes and is preferable to Schnieder’s alternative. §1. Schnieder on ‘standard’ accounts of truth-functionality. Quine (1982, p. 8), quoted by Schnieder (2008, p. 64), characterizes truth-functionality as follows: ‘a way of forming compound statements from component statements is truth-functional if the compounds thus formed always have matching truth-value as long as their components have matching truth-value’. Schnieder (2008, p. 65) writes that on ‘Quine’s characterisation . . . an operator ζ [is] truth-functional iff . . . the truth-value of a complex sentence formed by combining ζ with the appropriate number of sentences is the value of a function of the truth-values of those sentences’. According to Schnieder (2008, p. 65), the trouble with this ‘simple proposal’, is that it makes ‘the truth-functionality of some operators dependent upon arbitrary contingent facts’. Thus, assuming that ‘Jeanne d’Arc never uttered any English sentence’ (Schnieder, 2008, p. 65), the following counts as a truth-functional operator: 1 If Jeanne d’Arc ever said in English that . . . , then it is true that . . . . Schnieder (2008, pp. 66–67, 70) provides the following further examples of sentential operators that end up counting, by the lights of Quine’s simple proposal and some formal definitions developed from it, as truth-functional, but that do not count as truth-functional intuitively. 2 If France won the World Cup in 1978, then . . . .1 3 It is a proposition that . . . . 4 It is expressible in English that . . . . 5 If Jeanne d’Arc ever actually said in English that . . . , then it is true that . . . . Received: May 1, 2009 1 Schnieder (2008, pp. 66–67) discusses how, on one construal of the remark of Edgington (1995, p. 241) that it is a requirement on truth-functionality that ‘in any possible circumstance’ the truth-value of the output sentence is ‘fixed by the truth value(s)’ of the input sentence(s), 2 is debarrred from being a truth-functional operator. Even on that construal, however, the examples we list beneath 2 are not debarred. c