Self-Location and Other-Location (original) (raw)
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Counterfactual Attitudes and Multi-Centered Worlds
Semantics and Pragmatics, 2012
Counterfactual attitudes like imagining, dreaming, and wishing create a problem for the standard formal semantic theory of de re attitude ascriptions. I show how the problem can be avoided if we represent an agent's attitudinal possibilities using multi-centered worlds, possible worlds with multiple distinguished individuals, each of which represents an individual with whom the agent is acquainted. I then present a compositional semantics for de re ascriptions according to which singular terms are assignmentsensitive expressions and attitude verbs are assignment shifters.
Constructing the World and Locating Oneself
Review of Philosophy and Psychology
In Our Knowledge of the Internal World, Robert Stalnaker describes two opposed perspectives on the relation between the internal and the external. According to one, the internal world is taken as given and the external world as problematic, and according to the other, the external world is taken as given and the internal world as problematic. Analytic philosophy moved from the former to the latter, from problems of world-construction to problems of self-locating beliefs. I argue in this paper that these problems are equivalent: both arise because experience and objective, external facts jointly underdetermine their relation. Both can be seen as a problem of expressive completeness; of the internal language in the former case, and of the non-indexical language in the second.
The Limits of Selflessness: Semantic Relativism and the Epistemology of De Se Thoughts
Synthese
It has recently been proposed that the framework of semantic relativism be put to use to describe mental content, as deployed in some of the fundamental operations of the mind. This programme has inspired in particular a novel strategy of accounting for the essential egocentricity of first-personal or de se thoughts in relativist terms, with the advantage of dispensing with a notion of self-representation. This paper is a critical discussion of this strategy.While it is based on a plausible appeal to cognitive economy, the relativist theory does not fully account for the epistemic profile that distinguishes de se thinking, as some of its proponents hope to do. A deeper worry concerns the reliance of the theory on a primitive notion of “centre” that hasn’t yet received enough critical attention, and is ambiguous between a thin and a rich reading. I argue that while the rich reading is required if the relativist analysis of the de se is to achieve its most ambitious aims, it also deprives the theory of much of its explanatory power. Keywords: De se thoughts · Semantic relativism · (Absence of) self-representation · Self-location · Immunity to error through misidentification · Subjective perspective · Centred worlds
1986
is one of the most influential philosophers of our age, and On the Plurality of Worlds is his magnum opus. OPW 1 offers an extended development and defense of the hypothesis that there are many universes, things of the same kind as the universe in which we all live, move, and have our being. Lewis calls these universes-worlds‖, deliberately recalling the notion of a-possible world‖ familiar from modal logic and the metaphysics of modality. The title invokes the thesis of the book: there are pluralities of worlds, things of the same kind as the world we inhabit, differing only with respect to what goes on in them. Lewis sought in earlier work (Lewis, 1973, pp. 84-86) to offer a direct argument from common sense modal commitments to the existence of a plurality of worlds. 2 OPW offers a less direct argument. Here, Lewis supports the hypothesis by arguing that, if we accept it, we have the material to offer a wide range of analyses of hitherto puzzling and problematic notions. We thereby effect a theoretical unification and simplification: with a small stock of primitives, we can analyze a number of important philosophical notions with a broad range of applications. But the analyses Lewis proposes are adequate only if we accept the thesis that there are a plurality of worlds. Lewis claims that this is a reason to accept the thesis. In his words, «the hypothesis is serviceable, and that is a reason to think that it is true» (p. 3). Thanks are due to Roberto Ciuni for comments on an earlier draft, and for Terence Cuneo and Mark Moyer for discussion.
A Better Place To Be…Representation and Verification
This is the third and final bit of writing on providing some introductory thoughts and comments to a conversation about representation and verification. The first ‘introduction’ was intended to suggest where we might take our cue from and there are already many conversations about that, but I presented an opinion to start another conversation. The universe as a whole can be represented as a spectrum of fundamental components and forces and at this level there is a usual (normal) distribution of all things in it, at any given point in space-time. Secondly, all our coming to know has had several source origins and currently more weight has been put on the substance of something, on the just being of something and its behaviour, than it has on the substance and behaviour to be seen in all the activity with all the other, on the belonging of something. There are already a lot of conversations about all that but I presented an opinion to start another conversation. The way to achieve a common understanding is a combined one with a correct representation that has verification. All the current models of our understandings have something missing. There is some unity and some separateness in what we all say, but there is also a lack of correctness. The notion of correctness can be assisted by representing everything as a spectrum, but only if we have first identified the fundamental components and forces of both our just being and our belonging. This third bit of writing builds on the expression of the correctness to be found in ethics. There are already many conversations about that, but ethics can be viewed as a combination of who or what we are, what we believe in, our ‘just being’; together with the resultant behaviour toward or with all the other, ‘the belonging’ of everything ….because of that.
Attitudes and Changing Contexts
Synthese Library, 2006
See chapters 2-4 for more on this. 9 See also the neighborhood semantics of Montague (1974), and the cluster models of Fagin & Halpern (1988). 10 Although they were, in the first place, directed against individualistic accounts of intentionality. 12 See especially Stalnaker (1993). 13 But then, why is it that when water is H 2 O, it is also necessarily H 2 O? The reason is that the notion 14 Stampe (1977), Dretske (1981) and Evans (1982) come to basically the same conclusion. 15 Although I believe that actual cause in general need not be relevant for the analysis of aboutness, I do believe it is for the aboutness relation between a belief state and a particular individual. This causal relation, however, need not be such a strong notion of acquaintance that Kaplan (1969) appealed to. 20 But we have to be careful here. If a, t, p, l, w is now a context, at first sight it seems that l is the distinguished language of the context. Now suppose that l is English, w the actual world, and w Twin Earth in Putnam's story. Then the intension of water is H 2 O in a, t, p, l, w , and XY Z in a , t , p , l, w , just as desired. But, as we have seen in section 1.4, even if Oscar's twin utters Water is the best drink for quenching thirst on Earth, he is intuitively not talking about H 2 O, but about XY Z. To account for this, Haas Spohn (1994) proposes that Oscar and his twin do not really speak the same language, in particular, that Oscar's twin does not speak English. 53 See also Stalnaker (1988), and section 1.13 for a similar point about de re belief attributions. 54 Of course, there will be trivial properties that objects have by necessity, such as being self-identical. 4 Note that by trichotomy, the equivalence classes induced by ≤ w turn out to be singleton sets. 5 I will always make the limit assumption. 6 Or we define the selection function in terms of the similarity relation as follows: f w (A) = {w ∈ A| ∀w ∈ A : w ≤ w w ⇒ w = w }. 7 The principle behind this reformulation is simple, of course. Just say that v ∈ f w ({v, u}) iff v ≤ w u.
Unconceptualized Internal Promptings: Methodological Pluralism and the New Cartography of the Mind
Philosophia
Pluralism about Self-Knowledge and Pluralism about the Mind Coliva's position stems from the conviction that there should be pluralism about selfknowledge. Coliva seems to be drawn to explore varieties of self-knowledge in virtue of her acknowledgment of a wide variety of mental states, most of which are not properly covered by monistic accounts of self-knowledge, that is, accounts that purport to tell us how we know our own mind by applying just one general theory of selfknowledge to all kinds of mental states. The long-leveled objection that no monistic accounts of self-knowledge can apply to all kinds of mental states is taken seriously in this book, and elsewhere in Coliva and Pedersen's work (2017), and the author is now ready to offer us a credible, fully worked-out way out of the threat of any such objection: it is simply the case that different mental states are known by different methods of self-knowledge, so that no single account can be applied across the board. This also offers us a diagnosis of why what we might call the Brestricted scope objection^has been raised at all. The reason is our more or less overt bias in favor of epistemological monism. Once we open up the conceptual space to consider pluralism in the epistemology of self-knowledge (and supposedly elsewhere), then such bias is naturally dispelled, and we acquire an important meta-philosophical reason for favoring it, namely its advantage in circumventing unnecessary competition among monistic theories. 1 Coliva is thus led to catalog mental states more accurately than philosophers of mind have done before. In addition, this strategy gives her the chance to systematize quite accurately our map of methods of self-knowledge vis-à-vis the ample variety of mental states recognized. Given this specific advantage of epistemological pluralism as a primary means of further clearing up our cartography of the mental, I believe it may be reasonable to think that once one removes one's prejudice in favor of monism, as Coliva invites us to do, the intellectual move concerned may naturally lead us to explore further whether