Philosophy

Chomsky thinks that Plato's problem is especially visible in language. Plato's problem -which is also called by him "Russell's Problem" -is "how can we know so much when the evidence for what we know is so vanishingly small". Plato's problem is brought out in the dialogue Meno. This is also called the Poverty of Stimulus or the Poverty of Evidence problem. The problem is that it is clear that we have certain kinds of knowledge, but it is not clear how we came by this knowledge. Plato thought that the solution was that we recollected the knowledge from the time the soul saw the Forms (the theory of Anamnesis, or Recollection).

This article introduces a dilemma, argues for it, and suggests a solution.  The dilemma is about whether there are conceptual schemes or not.  There are good reasons for maintaining either position. There must be conceptual schemes because theory is underdetermined by data. And there cannot be conceptual schemes because Davidson has given an almost unassailable argument against it. I resolve the dilemma by arguing that Davidson’s argument is based on a false choice generated by too strong a principle of charity. This makes space for conceptual schemes without sacrificing the intelligibility of any.

This handout covers the entire book of Austin and brings out the arguments given. Indeed, in some sense the book should have been arranged differently than the way it was arranged later.  The way Austin's book came out tends to blunt the force of some of what he was trying to establish.

There is a universal sense of goodwill that appears to the attach to the word "corporate" as opposed to the word "government".  One breathes more free almost as one hears the former word and one feels stifled as one hears the latter.  Are these sentiments that we have regarding these words based on any facts? I have tried to show that there are no reasons for this common perception we have regarding the dove like and freedom loving nature of corporations as is the impression that the media wants to give us.

The paper explores the question “What makes a philosophical question “philosophical”?” There are many candidates: being useless, being meaningless, being important to the value of our lives, being questions where language has gone on holiday, being more foundational than anything else, having the most ramifications, being paradoxical and perplexing. These candidates are examined and are found wanting. None of them seem to be such that they cut the pie satisfactorily. Nothing tells us what makes a philosophical question philosophical. There is a corollary to this: Philosophical questions turn out to be neither more important/foundational nor less important/foundational than questions of science or sociology or literature.

This paper argues for a different logical form for complex demonstratives, taking it to be true that complex demonstratives are quantificational.  The proposed logical forms that are prevalent do not respect a fundamental property of quantifiers: permutation invariance. The paper also suggests that the directly referential intuitions surrounding complex demonstratives cannot be taken to be part of the semantics of the expression. There appears to be no need to do so, either. The paper defends the new logical form against various objections.

Definite descriptions in the singular (The F is G) admit of unique readings and in the plural (The Fs are G) admit of universal readings. This view has been challenged by Szabo (2000, 2003, 2005), and Ludlow and Segal (2004). On their view, uniqueness or universal readings are really pragmatic and not semantic. Brogaard (2007b) offers a new theory of Plural Definite Descriptions, comparing them to partitive expressions. This view supports the idea that plural definite descriptions admit of universal readings semantically. This paper argues the new theory of plural descriptions does not establish that they admit of plural readings semantically.