Monthly Archive

Megan has just written about a social network type site for graduate students: Graduate Junction. I think it might be useful if people use it.

Here is something I’ve been thinking about, probably 29 years too late. There’s a certain sort of argument for externalism that goes roughly as follows:

We look at subject S in context C1 and ascribe to them a content clause A. We then imagine S in C2. In that case it would be inappropriate to use A, for reasons to do with the wider social world of A in C2. So, it is the status of the wider social world that controls our ascriptions of content clauses.

There is, of course, an extra step or two needed. (i) We need to hold that when we ascribe distinct content-clauses we are ipso facto attributing distinct mental states. Then we get the result that social environment controls which mental contents we will attribute. (ii) I suppose we also need to hold that it does so legitimately, i.e. that we are inclined in these cases to say that As contents differ that’s because they do differ.

The above argument is Tyler Burge’s in his ‘Individualism and the Mental’ as I read it. I’m sure that people have made the points I’ve just made in the intervening years, but I’d be interested if anybody who happens to be reading this can point me to where.

I’ve been thinking about teleosemantics recently, and reading David Papineau’s 2001 paper ‘The Status of Teleosemantics, or How to Stop Worrying about Swampman’ (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 79(2):279–289). There was something in it I found odd:

“Wherever the normativity of content comes from, it can’t be from biology, since biology deals only in facts, not prescriptions. Nor is it plausible that biology offers the only way of discerning genuine truth and satisfaction conditions among the large disjunctions of possible causes for beliefs and possible effects of desires.”

To be entirely accurate, he is speaking of other peoples’ views at this point. Immediately afterwards he goes on to endorse these sentiments, though. My question would be, if he accepts this sort of thing is he still a teleosemanticist at all? It looks like the project has been abandoned. If teleology isn’t giving us normativity then why are we interested in it in philosophy of language?

I’m very much looking forward to the first workshop for the project at the end of May. I always like to see people speak who I’ve been reading, and several of the people coming to this fit the bill.

Thanks to Tom for posting this interesting video.