Paolo Bonardi - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Paolo Bonardi

Believing without modes of presentation

This paper addresses the scatter problem for foundational evidentialism. Reflection on the scatte... more This paper addresses the scatter problem for foundational evidentialism. Reflection on the scatter problem uncovers significant epistemological lessons. The scatter problem is evaluated in connection with Ernest Sosa's use of the problem as an argument against foundational evidentialism. Sosa's strategy is to consider a strong intuition in favor of internalism-the new evil demon problem, and then illustrate how a foundational evidentialist account of the new evil demon problem succumbs to the scatter problem. The goal in this paper is to evaluate the force of the scatter problem. The main argument of the paper is that the scatter problem has mixed success. On the one hand, scatter undermines objectual evidentialism, an evidentialist theory that formulates principles of basic perceptual justification in terms of the objects (or properties) of perceptual states. On the other hand, the problem of scatter does not undermine content evidentialism, an evidentialist view that formu...

Foundational Evidentialism and the Problem of Scatter …

... This argument originates with Adam Pautz. 3 Ibid., pp. 130-1. Page 79. ... 18 Paolo Bonardi U... more ... This argument originates with Adam Pautz. 3 Ibid., pp. 130-1. Page 79. ... 18 Paolo Bonardi University of Geneva pbonardi@ libero. it 18 Many thanks to Kevin Mulligan, Marco Santambrogio and Jennifer Saul for their help and encouragement. Page 90. ...

Philosophical Studies, 2012

In his monograph Semantic Relationism, Kit Fine proposes two characterizations of coordination be... more In his monograph Semantic Relationism, Kit Fine proposes two characterizations of coordination between proper names: an intuitive test and a technical definition. The intuitive characterization is grounded in a notion of understanding distinct from the familiar notion of linguistic competence. Three prima facie appealing proposals to characterize this notion of understanding are examined in the present chapter and then dismissed as intrinsically implausible or as incompatible with Fine’s semantics. Not even his technical characterization of coordination, involving the notion of semantic requirement, enable us to escape the impasse. Ultimately, the question of what exactly coordination between names is will remain open.

In my dissertation I devise a number of new puzzles about belief reports which, unlike Frege’s an... more In my dissertation I devise a number of new puzzles about belief reports which, unlike Frege’s and Kripke’s classical puzzles, cannot be solved by appealing to the notion of a mode of presentation. A solution to both classical and new puzzles can be achieved by adopting a new Russellian account of belief reports, which I present in this dissertation. The new account involves two psychological devices (which will be proved not to be modes of presentation): belief subsystems and cognitive coordination. The former device originates in Donald Davidson’s idea of explaining away cases of apparent irrationality of a subject by partitioning her mind into semi-autonomous compartments or subsystems. The latter device takes its cue from Kit Fine’s notion of coordination and deals with the ability (or inability) of a subject to recognize two occurrences of an object within Russellian propositions as occurrences of the same object.

Disputatio

This paper will critically examine two solutions to Frege’s puzzle: the Millian-Russellian soluti... more This paper will critically examine two solutions to Frege’s puzzle: the Millian-Russellian solution proposed by Salmon and Braun, which invokes non-semantic modes of presentation (guises, ways of believing or the like); and Fine’s relationalist solution, which appeals to semantic coordination. Special attention will be devoted to discussing the conception of modes of presentation as mental files and to elucidating the nature of coordination. A third solution to Frege’s puzzle will be explored which, like Salmon’s and Braun’s, adopts the Millian-Russellian semantics but, like Fine’s, involves coordination instead of modes of presentation; however, coordination will not be conceived as a semantic relation but as a cognitive and subjective relation, which provides no contribution to semantic content. This novel Millian-Russellian account involving cognitive coordination will be labelled cognitive relationism.

Intercultural Pragmatics

It is usually maintained that a subject with manifestly contradictory beliefs is irrational. How ... more It is usually maintained that a subject with manifestly contradictory beliefs is irrational. How can we account, then, for the intuitive rationality of dialetheists, who believe that some manifest contradictions are true? My paper aims to answer this question. Its ultimate goal is to determine a characterization of (or rather a constraint for) rational belief approvable by both the theorists of Dialetheism and its opponents. In order to achieve this goal, a two-step strategy will be adopted. First, a characterization of rational belief applicable to non-dialetheist believers will be determined; this characterization will involve the semantic apparatus of Nathan Salmon’s Millian Russellianism but will get rid of the problematic and obscure notion of mode of presentation (guise in his own terminology), replacing it with a couple of novel devices, belief subsystems and cognitive coordination. Second, using ideas from Graham Priest, the leading proponent of Dialetheism, such a character...

Grazer Philosophische Studien

In his article “Opacity” (1986), David Kaplan propounded a counterexample to the thesis, defended... more In his article “Opacity” (1986), David Kaplan propounded a counterexample to the thesis, defended by Quine and known as Quine’s Theorem, that establishes the illegitimacy of quantifying from outside into a position not open to substitution. He ingeniously built his counterexample using Quine’s own philosophical material and novel devices, arc quotes and $entences. The present article offers detailed analysis and critical discussion of Kaplan’s counterexample and proposes a reasonable reformulation of Quine’s Theorem that bypasses both this counterexample and another, in the author’s opinion, more persuasive counterexample, also discussed in this paper and somehow implicit in “Opacity”, which involves Russellian propositions instead of the Quinean apparatus.