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The purpose of this paper is twofold: first we outline a version of non-descriptivism, ‘minimal expressivism’, leaving aside certain long-standing problems associated with conventional expressivist views. Second, we examine the way in which familiar expressivist results can be accommodated within this framework, through a particular interpretation that the expressive realm lends to a theory of meaning. Expressivist theories of meaning address only a portion of the classical problems attributed to this position when they seek to explain why the expressions they (...) deal with have a given meaning. A position can nevertheless be termed ‘expressivist’ – in the minimal sense that we favor – based simply on the following key features of the meaning of these expressions: they can be used as functions of propositions, and they are not used to describe the way the world is. (shrink)

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In this Interview, Professor Robert B. Brandom answered ten detailed questions about his philosophy of Rational Pragmatism and Semantic Expressivism, grouped into four topics. 1. Metaphysics and Anthropology, 2. Pragmatics and Semantics, 3. Epistemic Expressivism and 4. Philosophy of Logic. With his careful answers Professor Brandom offers many additional insights into his rigorously constructed account of the relationship “between what we say and think, and what we are saying and thinking about” around the human practice of asking for and giving (...) reasons. A final, additional question pointed at a principal motivation for putting together the present issue: how to reconcile Wittgenstein’s assertion that philosophy must not proffer any theories with the very explicit system of explanations Brandom has constructed. This same issue is addressed to some extent already in Professor Brandom’s new article contained in this issue, but his answer, asserting that he does not proffer a theory but only makes explicit what is already there, might be seen as an unambiguous statement of the continuous presence of a contested Wittgensteinian principle in Brandom’s work. (shrink)

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This monograph is a defence of the Fregean take on logic. The author argues that Frege ́s projects, in logic and philosophy of language, are essentially connected and that the formalist shift produced by the work of Peano, Boole and Schroeder and continued by Hilbert and Tarski is completely alien to Frege's approach in the Begriffsschrift. A central thesis of the book is that judgeable contents, i.e. propositions, are the primary bearers of logical properties, which makes logic embedded in our (...) conceptual system. This approach allows coherent and correct definitions of logical constants, logical consequence, and truth and connects their use to the practices of rational agents in science and everyday life. (shrink)

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Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903–30) made seminal contributions to philosophy, mathematics and economics. Whilst he was acknowledged as a genius by his contemporaries, some of his most important ideas were not appreciated until decades later; now better appreciated, they continue to bear an influence upon contemporary philosophy. His historic significance was to usher in a new phase of analytic philosophy, which initially built upon the logical atomist doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, raising their ideas to a new level of (...) sophistication, but ultimately he became their successor rather than remain a mere acolyte. (shrink)

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The purpose of this paper is to show that, pace (Field, 2009), MacFarlane’s assessment relativism and expressivism should be sharply distinguished. We do so by arguing that relativism and expressivism exemplify two very different approaches to context-dependence. Relativism, on the one hand, shares with other contemporary approaches a bottom–up, building block, model, while expressivism is part of a different tradition, one that might include Lewis’ epistemic contextualism and Frege’s content individuation, with which it shares an organic model to deal with (...) context-dependence. The building-block model and the organic model, and thus relativism and expressivism, are set apart with the aid of a particular test: only the building-block model is compatible with the idea that there might be analytically equivalent, and yet different, propositions. (shrink)

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This paper is an attempt to convince anti-realists that their correct intuitions against the metaphysical inflationism derived from some versions of mathematical realism do not force them to embrace non-standard, epistemic approaches to truth and existence. It is also an attempt to convince mathematical realists that they do not need to implement their perfectly sound and judicious intuitions with the anti-intuitive developments that render full-blown mathematical realism into a view which even Gödel considered objectionable. I will argue for the following (...) two theses: that realism, in its standard characterization, is our default position, a position in agreement with our pre-theoretical intuitions and with the results of our best semantic theories, and that most of the metaphysical qualms usually related to it depends on a poor understanding of truth and existence as higher-order concepts. (shrink)

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This monographic section contains the three papers delivered by Philip Kitcher as Raimundus Lullius Lectures during the VII Conference of the Spanish Society of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, that took place in Santiago de Compostela (July 18th-20th, 2012). It also includes three of the contributions presented to the Symposium on Kitcher’s work in the same Conference.

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In this paper, I use an extension of Russell’s theory of descriptions to give further support to an analysis of truth ascriptions that stems back to Ramsey and has been further developed by Dorothy Grover and Christopher J. F. Williams. It is the view that the truth predicate vanishes in the logical form of the sentences in which it occurs in favour of a combination of quantifiers and propositional variables. I argue that Russell’s theory of descriptions can be used as (...) a technical way of giving flesh to the sometimes-vague characterisation of truth terms as expressive. In my analysis, I assume the Fregean analysis of quantifiers, Frege’s context principle, and the Fregean distinction between grammatical structure and logical form. These three ground-breaking insights are crucial to the Russellian interpretation of denoting phrases and the analysis of truth ascriptions that I advocate. In section one, I explain the sense in which truth is a higher-level concept and which consequences follow from this claim, one of them being the linguistic flexibility of the concept of truth. In section two, I apply Russell’s insights to truth ascriptions and show that the truth predicate dissolves in their logical form in favour of propositional variables and quantifiers. The disappearance of the predicate in the logical form is the precise sense that I give to the claim that truth terms possess expressive meaning. As propositional quantification has been felt as a serious obstacle to the Ramseyian approach, I show in section three that the Quinean arguments usually addressed against higher-order quantification are weaker than the received view has taken them to be. I also address the objection that rests on the normative nature of truth. I argue in section four that the approach to truth ascriptions introduced by Ramsey provides an accurate and technically irreproachable account of the semantic expressivism associated with the concept of truth. (shrink)

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This volume comprises a lively and thorough discussion between philosophers and Tyler Burge about Burge's recent, and already widely accepted, position in the theory of meaning, mind, and knowledge. This position is embodied by an externalist theory of meaning and an anti-individualist theory of mind and approach to self-knowledge. The authors of the eleven papers here expound their versions of this position and go on to critique Burge's version. Together with Burge's replies, this volume offers a major contribution to contemporary (...) philosophy. (shrink)

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We propose a new approach to conditional donkey sentences that allows us to face successfully the often called proportion problem. The main ingredients of the proposal are van Benthem's generalized quantifier approach to conditionals, and Barwise's situation semantics. We present some experimental data supporting our proposal.

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This monographic section contains the three papers delivered by Philip Kitcher as Raimundus Lullius Lectures during the VII Conference of the Spanish Society of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, that took place in Santiago de Compostela (July 18th-20th, 2012). It also includes three of the contributions presented to the Symposium on Kitcher’s work in the same Conference.

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El propósito de este artículo es mostrar que las llamadas "teorías de la identidad psiconeural" no tienen la estructura lógica de una teoría genuina de la identidad. Un operador de identidad genuino es un operador de segundo orden, o de órdenes superiores, que convierte predicados n-ádicos en predicados n-1-ádicos. Si las teorias de la identidad psiconeural no son, en realidad, teorías de la identidad, entonces la críticas habituales que usan la Ley de Leibniz y otros rasgos que se relacionan con (...) la identidad no tienen ningún efecto. Así, dos serán las conclusiones: (i) que las llamadas "teorías de la identidad psiconeural" deben de reformularse, de manera que expresen claramente su contenido, y (ii) que las críticas utizadas hasta ahora contra ellas no consiguen su objetivo.The aim of this paper is to show that the so-called "theories of psichoneural identity" do not possess the logical structure of a genuine theory of identity. The identity operator is a second- or higher-order operator that converts n-adic predicates into n-1-ádic ones. If the so-called "theories of psichoneural identity" are not theories of identity at all, then two conclusions follow: (i) these theories of the mind-body relation should state their contents in a more appropiate way, and (ii) the usual criticisms against them, which bear on some features that all idetity theories must hold, as for instance Leibniz Law, leave them untouched. (shrink)

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