- Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM),
School of Analytic Philosophy,
Niavaran, P.O. Box 19395-5746, Tehran, IRAN
Ali Hossein Khani
Iranian Institute of Philosophy, Science Studies, Department Member
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Allameh Tabataba'i University, Philosophy, Department MemberInstitute for Research in Fundamental Sciences, Analytic Philosophy, Post-DocUniversity of Otago, Philosophy, Alumnus add
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Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy of Language (Humanities), Philosophy Of Language, Epistemology, Donald Davidson, Saul Kripke, and 16 moreWittgenstein, Realism vs Anti-Realism, Theories of Meaning, Gottlob Frege, Crispin Wright, Philosophy of Science, History of Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy of Logic, Logic, Metaethics, Relativism, Philosophy of Mind, Self-Knowledge, Semantic Externalism, Philosophy of Action, and Language Games edit
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+ Assistant Professor (Faculty Member) at Iranian Institute for Philosophy (IRIP), Science Studies. Tehran. (2022-Pre... more+ Assistant Professor (Faculty Member) at Iranian Institute for Philosophy (IRIP), Science Studies. Tehran. (2022-Present)
+PhD in Philosophy, the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand (2013-2017).
+ Research Fellow, at Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), School of Analytic Philosophy, Tehran. (2017-present).
+ Former Postdoc Research Fellow at Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), School of Analytic Philosophy, Tehran. (2020-2022).
+Guest Lecturer at Allameh Tabatabaei University, Tehran, Iran. (2019-Present)
+Research Fellow at Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), School of Analytic Philosophy, Tehran, Iran. (2017-2020).
+PhD in Philosophy, the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand (2013-2017).
+PhD Thesis: Kripke's Wittgenstein's Sceptical Paradox and Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language. (2017)
+COP, Postgraduate in Philosophy. University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. (2012 - 2013)
+Researcher at IRIP (Iranian Institute of Philosophy), Science Studies. Tehran, Iran.(2009 - 2012).
+MA in Philosophy of Logic. Allameh Tabatabaei University, Tehran, Iran. (2006 - 2009).
+Master's Dissertation: John McDowell on Theory of Sense and Reference. (2009).
+Bsc in Mechanical Engineering, Solid Design. (2004 - 2008) edit -
Alex Milleredit
Research Interests:
In this short paper, I am going to discuss an often neglected aspect of Davidson's philosophy, his metaphilosophy. Metaphilosophy is traditionally defined as the philosophy of philosophy. This definition, however, is not illuminating.... more
In this short paper, I am going to discuss an often neglected aspect of Davidson's philosophy, his metaphilosophy. Metaphilosophy is traditionally defined as the philosophy of philosophy. This definition, however, is not illuminating. I think metaphilosophy aims at a disclosure of the nature of philosophical questions, what they are and how to approach them. ..
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Blackburn and Searle have argued that Quine‘s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation results in a denial of the sort of first-person authority that we commonly concede we have over our mental and semantical content. For, the... more
Blackburn and Searle have argued that Quine‘s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation results in a denial of the sort of first-person authority that we commonly concede we have over our mental and semantical content. For, the indeterminacy thesis implies that there is no determinate meaning to know at all. And, according to Quine, the indeterminacy holds at home too. For Blackburn, Quine must constrain the domain of indeterminacy to the case of translation only. Searle believes that Quine has no other choice but to give up on his behaviorism. Hylton, however, has attempted to defend Quine against these objections, by arguing that Quine‘s naturalistic claim that speaking a language is nothing but possessing certain dispositions to act in specific ways would enable him to accommodate first-person authority. I will argue that the objections from Blackburn and Searle, as well as Hylton‘s solution, are all problematic when seen from within Quine‘s philosophy. I will introduce a sort of Strawsonian-Wittgensteinian conception of first-person authority and offer that it would be more than compatible with Quine‘s naturalistic philosophy.
Research Interests:
Philosophy, Philosophy Of Language, Epistemology, Donald Davidson, Naturalism, and 13 moreWillard Van Orman Quine, John R. Searle, Peter Strawson, Naturalized Epistemology, Underdetermination, Self Knowledge, First Person Authority, Indeterminacy of Translation, Quine, nothing, Peter Hylton, Simon Blackburn, and Ludwig Wittgenstein
بررسی اصلیترین چالشهای میان دامت و مک داول در باب نظریة معنا و توصیف مناسب رفتار زبانی
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واکاوی ضدواقعگرایی و رهیافت تحقیقگرایانة مایکل دام
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بررسی استدلال و پاسخ شکگرایانة کریپکی و برخی از واکنشها به آ
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McTaggart, in his famous paper, “The Unreality of Time” (1908), argues in favor of the sceptical claim that time is unreal. His main argument is based on detecting a paradox in our ordinary descriptions of time or events occurring in... more
McTaggart, in his famous paper, “The Unreality of Time” (1908), argues in favor of the sceptical claim that time is unreal. His main argument is based on detecting a paradox in our ordinary descriptions of time or events occurring in time. Based on our common sense conception of time, time and the events happening in it can be described in two ways: either as having the properties of “being past”, “being present” and “being future”, or as having the properties of “being earlier than”, “being later than”, or “being simultaneous with”. McTaggart argues that employing the second sort of properties fails to properly explain “change” in time. However, having assumed the essentiality of the first type of properties to time, McTaggart argues that these properties will themselves lead to a paradox, according to which all events are at the same time in the past, present, and future. In this essay, we are going to provide a clear exposition of McTaggart’s argument and briefly review some of the main responses to it. We will then show that McTaggart’s argument will amount to error-theory about the content of our utterances about time. We will then employ Boghossian’s argument against error-theory (1990) to show why McTaggart’s argument leads to paradoxical conclusions
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Philosophy, Philosophy Of Language, Epistemology, Donald Davidson, Internalism/Externalism, and 10 moreTranslation and Interpretation, Peter Strawson, Triangulation, Self Knowledge, Crispin Wright, First Person Authority, William Child, Transcendental Explanation, Externalist Explanation, and Disquotational Explanation
Although the later Wittgenstein appears as one of the most influential figures in Davidson’s later works on meaning, it is not, for the most part, clear how Davidson interprets and employs Wittgenstein’s ideas. In this paper, I will argue... more
Although the later Wittgenstein appears as one of the most influential figures in Davidson’s later works on meaning, it is not, for the most part, clear how Davidson interprets and employs Wittgenstein’s ideas. In this paper, I will argue that Davidson’s later works on meaning can be seen as mainly a manifestation of his attempt to accommodate the later Wittgenstein’s basic ideas about meaning and understanding, especially the requirement of drawing the seems right/is right distinction and the way this requirement must be met. These ideas, however, are interpreted by Davidson in his own way. I will then argue that Davidson even attempts to respect Wittgenstein’s quietism, provided that we understand this view in the way Davidson does. Having argued for that, I will finally investigate whether, for Davidson at least, his more theoretical and supposedly explanatory projects, such as that of constructing a formal theory of meaning and his use of the notion of triangulation, are in conflict with this Wittgensteinian quietist view.
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The indeterminacy of translation is the thesis that translation, meaning, and reference are all indeterminate: there are always alternative translations of a sentence and a term, and nothing objective in the world can decide which... more
The indeterminacy of translation is the thesis that translation, meaning, and reference are all indeterminate: there are always alternative translations of a sentence and a term, and nothing objective in the world can decide which translation is the right one. This is a skeptical conclusion because what it really implies is that there is no fact of the matter about the correct translation of a sentence and a term. It would be an illusion to think that there is a unique meaning which each sentence possesses and a determinate object to which each term refers. Arguments in favor of the indeterminacy thesis first appear in the influential works of W. V. O. Quine, especially in his discussion of radical translation. Radical translation focuses on a translator who has been assigned to translate the utterances of a speaker speaking a radically unknown language. She is required to accomplish this task solely by observing the behavior of the speaker and the happenings in the environment. Quine claims that a careful study of such a process reveals that there can be no determinate and uniquely correct translation, meaning, and reference for any linguistic expression. As a result, our traditional understanding of meaning and reference is to be thrown away. Quine’s most famous student, Donald Davidson, develops this scenario under the title of “radical interpretation.” Among other differences, radical interpretation is distinguished from Quine’s radical translation with regard to its concentration on an interpreter constructing a theory of meaning for the speaker’s language. Such a theory is supposed to systematically entail the meaning of the speaker’s sentences. Nonetheless, radical interpretation too cannot resist the emergence of indeterminacy. According to the thesis of the indeterminacy of interpretation, there always will be rival interpretations of the speaker’s language, and no objective criterion can decide which interpretation is to be chosen as the right one. These views of Quine and Davidson have been well received by analytic philosophers particularly because of their anti-Cartesian approach to knowledge. This approach says knowledge of what we mean by our sentences and what we believe about the external world, other minds, and even ourselves cannot be grounded in any infallible a priori knowledge; instead, we are rather bound to study this knowledge from a third-person point of view, that is, from the standpoint of others who are attempting to understand what we mean and believe. What the indeterminacy of translation/interpretation adds to this picture is that there can never be one unique, correct way of determining what these meanings and beliefs are. The article begins with Quine’s arguments for the indeterminacy of translation, then introduces Davidson’s treatment of indeterminacy by focusing on his semantic project and the scenario of radical interpretation. Then the discussion turns to David Lewis’s version of radical interpretation, Daniel Dennett’s intentional stance, and the way Lewis and Dennett treat the indeterminacy of interpretation. https://iep.utm.edu/indeterm/
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Epistemology, Reference, Hilary Putnam, David K Lewis, Donald Davidson, and 11 moreDaniel Dennett, Willard Van Orman Quine, Alfred Tarski, Intentional Stance, Theory of Meaning, Indeterminacy of Translation, Radical Interpretation, Radical Translation, Reference Magnetism, Inscrutability of Reference, and Indeterminacy of Interpretation
«بررسی استدلال دیویدسون در باب ترکیبی بودن زبانهای طبیعی و «استدلال قلاب سنگ
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According to many commentators, Davidson’s earlier work on philosophy of action and truth-theoretic semantics is the basis for his reputation, and his later forays into broader metaphysical and epistemological issues, and eventually into... more
According to many commentators, Davidson’s earlier work on philosophy of action and truth-theoretic semantics is the basis for his reputation, and his later forays into broader metaphysical and epistemological issues, and eventually into what became known as the triangulation argument, are much less successful. This book by two of his former students aims to change that perception. In Part One, Verheggen begins by providing an explanation and defense of the triangulation argument, then explores its implications for questions concerning semantic normativity and reductionism, the social character of language and thought, and skepticism about the external world. In Part Two, Myers considers what the argument can tell us about reasons for action, and whether it can overcome skeptical worries based on claims about the nature of motivation, the sources of normativity and the demands of morality. The book reveals Davidson’s later writings to be full of innovative and important ideas that deserve much more attention than they are currently receiving.
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Davidson’s later philosophy of language has been inspired by Wittgenstein’s Investigations, but Davidson by no means sympathizes with the sceptical problem and solution Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein. Davidson criticizes the sceptical... more
Davidson’s later philosophy of language has been inspired by Wittgenstein’s Investigations, but Davidson by no means sympathizes with the sceptical problem and solution Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein. Davidson criticizes the sceptical argument for relying on the rule-following conception of meaning, which is, for him, a highly problematic view. He also casts doubt on the plausibility of the sceptical solution as unjustifiably bringing in shared practices of a speech community. According to Davidson, it is rather success in mutual interpretation that explains success in the practice of meaning something by an utterance. I will argue that Davidson’s objections to the sceptical problem and solution are misplaced as they rely on a misconstrual of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s view. I will also argue that Davidson’s alternative solution to the sceptical problem is implausible, since it fails to block the route to the sceptical problem. I will then offer a problematic trilemma for Davidson.
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Davidson has always been explicit in his faithful adherence to the main doctrines of Quine’s philosophy of language, among which the indeterminacy of translation thesis is significant. For Quine, the indeterminacy of translation has... more
Davidson has always been explicit in his faithful adherence to the main doctrines of Quine’s philosophy of language, among which the indeterminacy of translation thesis is significant. For Quine, the indeterminacy of translation has considerable ontological consequences, construed as leading to a sceptical conclusion regarding the existence of fine-grained meaning facts. Davidson’s suggested reading of Quine’s indeterminacy arguments seems to be intended to block any such sceptical consequences. According to this reading, Quine’s arguments at most yield the conclusion that there are always different ways of representing the facts about meaning, rather than the sceptical conclusion that there are no such facts. It is, however, puzzling how Davidson can endorse the main premises of Quine’s arguments, i.e. his general physicalistic view and his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, and yet resist the arguments’ sceptical outcome. I will argue that Davidson’s construal of Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation is unjustified and faces a problematic dilemma.
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I will argue that Davidson's account of pure intending can be construed as a first-person-based judgement-dependent account of intention. For Davidson, pure intending to do φ is to make an all-out judgement that φing is desirable. On... more
I will argue that Davidson's account of pure intending can be construed as a first-person-based judgement-dependent account of intention. For Davidson, pure intending to do φ is to make an all-out judgement that φing is desirable. On this anti-reductionist account, intention is treated as an irreducible state of the subject. I will draw a comparison between this account and Wright's and I will show that Davidson's account can be viewed as a non-reductionist judgement-dependent account along the lines suggested by Wright. I then explain how this account can help deal with various perplexities in Davidson's later view of meaning and mental content.
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A Third-Person-Based or Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account of mental content implies that, as an a priori matter, facts about a subject’s mental content are precisely captured by the judgments of a second-person or an interpreter.... more
A Third-Person-Based or Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account of mental content implies that, as an a priori matter, facts about a subject’s mental content are precisely captured by the judgments of a second-person or an interpreter. Alex Byrne, Bill Child, and others have discussed attributing such a view to Donald Davidson. This account significantly departs from a First-Person-Based or First-Personal Judgment-Dependent account, such as Crispin Wright’s, according to which, as an a priori matter, facts about intentional content are constituted by the judgments of the subject herself, formed under certain optimal or cognitively ideal conditions. I will argue for two claims: (1) Attributing a Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account to Davidson is unjustified; Davidson’s view is much closer to a non-reductionist First-Personal Judgment-Dependent account. (2) Third-Personal accounts rest on a misconstrual of the role of an interpreter in the First-Personal accounts; the notion of an interpreter still plays an essential role in the latter ones.
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نگاهی بر استدلالهای دونالد دیویدسون در باب ضرورت زبان برای اندیشه
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روششناسی دیویدسون در باب معنا و تعبیر رادیکال و انتقادات دامت به آ
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In this paper, we will discuss what is called “Manifestation Challenge” to semantic realism, which was originally developed by Michael Dummett and has been further refined by Crispin Wright. According to this challenge, semantic realism... more
In this paper, we will discuss what is called “Manifestation Challenge” to semantic realism, which was originally developed by Michael Dummett and has been further refined by Crispin Wright. According to this challenge, semantic realism has to meet the requirement that knowledge of meaning must be publically manifested in linguistic behaviour. In this regard, we will introduce and evaluate John McDowell’s response to this anti-realistic challenge, which was put forward to show that the challenge cannot undermine realism. According to McDowell, knowledge of undecidable sentences’ truth-conditions can be properly manifested in our ordinary practice of asserting such sentences under certain circumstances, and any further requirement will be redundant. Wright’s further objection to McDowell’s response will be also discussed and it will be argued that this objection fails to raise any serious problem for McDowell’s response and that it is an implausible objection in general.
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Anti-realism was first introduced by Michael Dummett, the contemporary analytic philosopher. He has always preferred to discuss about statements and assertions (instead of entities), such as statements in the past tense, statements about... more
Anti-realism was first introduced by Michael Dummett, the contemporary analytic philosopher. He has always preferred to discuss about statements and assertions (instead of entities), such as statements in the past tense, statements about the physical world, and so on. Based on his approach to metaphysical problems, we should initially choose an appropriate model of meaning and a proper conception of the notion of truth applicable to the statements. By doing so, the dispute between realism and anti-realism can be rendered to a disagreement on the kind of meaning the statements may have. After criticizing the realist approach, he goes on to claim that without having proper evidence, we cannot judge on meaning and truth or falsity of linguistic statements. To understand a sentence, Dummett says, is to have the capacity of recognizing what would be counted as evidence for or against it. Therefore, an anti-realist believes that there is no guarantee for every sentence to be certainly true (or false). Or, it cannot be approved for each statement to be necessarily true or false, independently of our knowledge and relevant abilities. An adherent of realism, by contrast, admits the principle of bivalence and acknowledges that sentences are true or false because of the reality existing independently of us. In this essay, after introducing Dummett's anti-realist approach and his criticisms on realism, I am going to discuss about and explain the correlation between his desired theory of meaning and anti-realism.
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Research Interests:
A Third-Person-Based or Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account of mental content implies that, as an a priori matter, facts about a subject’s mental content are precisely captured by the judgments of a second-person or an interpreter.... more
A Third-Person-Based or Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account of mental content implies that, as an a priori matter, facts about a subject’s mental content are precisely captured by the judgments of a second-person or an interpreter. Alex Byrne, Bill Child, and others have discussed attributing such a view to Donald Davidson. This account significantly departs from a First-Person-Based or First-Personal Judgment-Dependent account, such as Crispin Wright’s, according to which, as an a priori matter, facts about intentional content are constituted by the judgments of the subject herself, formed under certain optimal or cognitively ideal conditions. I will argue for two claims: (1) Attributing a Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account to Davidson is unjustified; Davidson’s view is much closer to a non-reductionist First-Personal Judgment-Dependent account. (2) Third-Personal accounts rest on a misconstrual of the role of an interpreter in the First-Personal accounts; the notion of an interpreter still plays an essential role in the latter ones.
Research Interests:
Blackburn and Searle have argued that Quine‘s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation results in a denial of the sort of first-person authority that we commonly concede we have over our mental and semantical content. For, the... more
Blackburn and Searle have argued that Quine‘s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation results in a denial of the sort of first-person authority that we commonly concede we have over our mental and semantical content. For, the indeterminacy thesis implies that there is no determinate meaning to know at all. And, according to Quine, the indeterminacy holds at home too. For Blackburn, Quine must constrain the domain of indeterminacy to the case of translation only. Searle believes that Quine has no other choice but to give up on his behaviorism. Hylton, however, has attempted to defend Quine against these objections, by arguing that Quine‘s naturalistic claim that speaking a language is nothing but possessing certain dispositions to act in specific ways would enable him to accommodate first-person authority. I will argue that the objections from Blackburn and Searle, as well as Hylton‘s solution, are all problematic when seen from within Quine‘s philosophy. I will introduce a sort o...
Research Interests:
Philosophy, Philosophy Of Language, Epistemology, Donald Davidson, Naturalism, and 13 moreWillard Van Orman Quine, John R. Searle, Peter Strawson, Naturalized Epistemology, Underdetermination, Self Knowledge, First Person Authority, Indeterminacy of Translation, Quine, nothing, Peter Hylton, Simon Blackburn, and Ludwig Wittgenstein
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بررسی استدلال و پاسخ شکگرایانة کریپکی و برخی از واکنشها به آ
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واکاوی ضدواقعگرایی و رهیافت تحقیقگرایانة مایکل دام
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In this paper, my aim is to clarify McDowell’s objections to Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein and then to explain McDowell’s own interpretation of Wittgenstein’s main remarks on meaning and rule-following. For McDowell, Kripke has failed... more
In this paper, my aim is to clarify McDowell’s objections to Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein and then to explain McDowell’s own interpretation of Wittgenstein’s main remarks on meaning and rule-following. For McDowell, Kripke has failed to successfully capture the main point of Wittgenstein’s remarks offered in section 201 of the Philosophical Investigations, according to which there is a way in which a grasp of meaning is not an interpretation. He then proposes his own take on such remarks and argues that once we can see rule-following as an activity which is already rule-governed, we can with no harm take it to form a (normative) fact about what the speaker means by her words. I will show that McDowell’s reading of Wittgenstein, contrary to what he claims, does not significantly depart from Kripke’s.
Research Interests:
A Third-Person-Based or Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account of mental content implies that, as an a priori matter, facts about a subject’s mental content are precisely captured by the judgments of a second-person or an interpreter.... more
A Third-Person-Based or Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account of mental content implies that, as an a priori matter, facts about a subject’s mental content are precisely captured by the judgments of a second-person or an interpreter. Alex Byrne, Bill Child, and others have discussed attributing such a view to Donald Davidson. This account significantly departs from a First-Person-Based or First-Personal Judgment-Dependent account, such as Crispin Wright’s, according to which, as an a priori matter, facts about intentional content are constituted by the judgments of the subject herself, formed under certain optimal or cognitively ideal conditions. I will argue for two claims: (1) Attributing a Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account to Davidson is unjustified; Davidson’s view is much closer to a non-reductionist First-Personal Judgment-Dependent account. (2) Third-Personal accounts rest on a misconstrual of the role of an interpreter in the First-Personal accounts; the notion of an interpreter still plays an essential role in the latter ones.
Research Interests:
Blackburn and Searle have argued that Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation results in a denial of the sort of first-person authority that we commonly concede we have over our mental and semantical content. For, the... more
Blackburn and Searle have argued that Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation results in a denial of the sort of first-person authority that we commonly concede we have over our mental and semantical content. For, the indeterminacy thesis implies that there is no determinate meaning to know at all. And, according to Quine, the indeterminacy holds at home too. For Blackburn, Quine must constrain the domain of indeterminacy to the case of translation only. Searle believes that Quine has no other choice but to give up on his behaviorism. Hylton, however, has attempted to defend Quine against these objections, by arguing that Quine’s naturalistic claim that speaking a language is nothing but possessing certain dispositions to act in specific ways would enable him to accommodate first-person authority. I will argue that the objections from Blackburn and Searle, as well as Hylton’s solution, are all problematic when seen from within Quine’s philosophy. I will introduce a sort of Strawsonian-Wittgensteinian conception of first-person authority and offer that it would be more than compatible with Quine’s naturalistic philosophy.
Research Interests:
Philosophy Of Language, Epistemology, Self-Knowledge, Donald Davidson, Naturalism, and 10 moreWillard Van Orman Quine, John R. Searle, Peter Strawson, Naturalized Epistemology, Underdetermination, First Person Authority, Indeterminacy of Translation, Peter Hylton, Simon Blackburn, and Ludwig Wittgenstein
In this paper, I will argue against certain criticisms of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument and sceptical solution, made especially by Baker and Hacker, McGinn, and McDowell. I will show that their interpretation of Kripke’s... more
In this paper, I will argue against certain criticisms of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument and sceptical solution, made especially by Baker and Hacker, McGinn, and McDowell. I will show that their interpretation of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s view is misplaced. According to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument, there is no fact as to what someone means by her words. For Kripke, this conclusion, combined with Classical Realist view of meaning, leads to the Wittgensteinian paradox, according to which there is no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Wittgenstein presents this paradox in paragraph 201 of the Philosophical Investigations. As Kripke reads Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein is in agreement with his sceptic on the sceptical conclusion of the sceptical argument, that is, that there is no fact about meaning, and builds his sceptical solution on an endorsement of that. McDowell, McGinn, and others have objected that Kripke has failed to properly understand Wittgenstein’s main remarks in 201, that is, that the paradox is the result of a misunderstanding of the ordinary notion of meaning. Wittgenstein does not accept such a sceptical conclusion. I will use the distinction George Wilson draws between two different conclusions of the sceptical argument and show that Kripke has respected all of the remarks that Wittgenstein has put in section 201.
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Wittgenstein, John McDowell, Rule-Following, Saul Kripke, Realism, and 13 moreCrispin Wright, Kripke-Wittgenstein paradox, Meaning Scepticism, Gordon Baker, Colin McGinn, Factualism, Peter Hacker, Kripkenstein, Sceptical Solution, Paul Boghossian, Simon Blackburn, Dispositionalism, and George Wilson
Kripke in his famous book on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy argues, on behalf of Wittgenstein, that there can be no fact of the matter as to what a speaker means by her words, that is, no fact that can meet the Constitution Demand and... more
Kripke in his famous book on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy argues, on behalf of Wittgenstein, that there can be no fact of the matter as to what a speaker means by her words, that is, no fact that can meet the Constitution Demand and the Normativity Demand. He particularly argues against the dispositional view, according to which meaning facts are constituted by facts about the speaker's dispositions to respond in a certain way on certain occasions. He argues that facts about dispositions are finite and are incapable of constituting facts about what speakers mean by their words; they are also essentially descriptive, not prescriptive and thus, cannot meet the Normativity Demand. Hannah Ginsborg, one of the most important contemporary philosophers of language, has recently attempted to resist Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s arguments against by defending a new sort of reductive dispositionalism which can meet both demands at the same time. In this paper, I will argue that she would not be successful in her project.
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Wright’s judgement-dependent account of intention is an attempt to show that truths about a subject’s intentions can be viewed as constituted by the subject’s own best judgements about those intentions. The judgements are considered to be... more
Wright’s judgement-dependent account of intention is an attempt to show that truths about a subject’s intentions can be viewed as constituted by the subject’s own best judgements about those intentions. The judgements are considered to be best if they are formed under certain cognitively optimal conditions, which mainly include the subject’s conceptual competence, attentiveness to the questions about what the intentions are, and lack of any material self-deception. Offering a substantive, non-trivial specification of the no-self-deception condition is one of the main problems for Wright. His solution is to view it as a positive presumption, which is violated only if there is strong evidence to the effect that the subject is self-deceived. In this paper, I will argue that the concern about self-deception in Wright’s account is misplaced and generally unmotivated.
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To appear in Ali Hossein-Khani and Gary N. Kemp (eds.), Wittgenstein and Other Philosophers, Volume I. London: Routledge.
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Full paper available at the following link: https://iep.utm.edu/kripkes-wittgenstein/ Abstract: Saul Kripke, in his celebrated book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), offers a novel reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s... more
Full paper available at the following link:
https://iep.utm.edu/kripkes-wittgenstein/
Abstract:
Saul Kripke, in his celebrated book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), offers a novel reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s main remarks in his later works, especially in Philosophical Investigations (1953) and, to some extent, in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956). Kripke presents Wittgenstein as proposing a skeptical argument against a certain conception of meaning and linguistic understanding, as well as a skeptical solution to such a problem. Many philosophers have called this interpretation of Wittgenstein Kripke’s Wittgenstein or Kripkenstein because, as Kripke himself emphasizes, it is “Wittgenstein’s argument as it struck Kripke, as it presented a problem for him” (Kripke 1982, 5) and “probably many of my formulations and re-castings of the argument are done in a way Wittgenstein would not himself approve” (Kripke 1982, 5). Such an interpretation has been the subject of tremendous discussions since its publication, and this has formed a huge literature on the topic of meaning skepticism in general and Wittgenstein’s later view in particular.
According to the skeptical argument that Kripke extracts from Wittgenstein’s later remarks on meaning and rule-following, there is no fact about a speaker’s behavioral, mental or social life that can metaphysically determine, or constitute, what she means by her words and also fix a determinate connection between those meanings and the correctness of her use of these words. Such a skeptical conclusion has a disastrous consequence for the classical realist view of meaning: if we insist on the idea that meaning is essentially a factual matter, we face the bizarre conclusion that there is thereby “no such thing as meaning anything by any word” (Kripke 1982, 55).
According to the skeptical solution that Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein, such a radical conclusion is intolerable because we certainly do very often mean certain things by our words. The skeptical solution begins by rejecting the view that results in such a paradoxical conclusion, that is, the classical realist conception of meaning. The skeptical solution offers then a new picture of the practice of meaning-attribution, according to which we can legitimately assert that a speaker means something specific by her words if we, as members of a speech-community, can observe, in enough cases, that her use agrees with ours. We can judge, for instance, that she means by “green” what we mean by this word, namely, green, if we observe that her use of “green” agrees with our way of using it. Attributing meanings to others’ words, therefore, brings in the notion of a speech-community, whose members are uniform in their responses. As a result, there can be no private language.
This article begins by introducing Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s skeptical problem presented in Chapter 2 of Kripke’s book. It then explicates Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s skeptical solution to the skeptical problem, which is offered in Chapter 3 of the book. The article ends by reviewing some of the most important responses to the skeptical problem and the skeptical solution.
https://iep.utm.edu/kripkes-wittgenstein/
Abstract:
Saul Kripke, in his celebrated book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), offers a novel reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s main remarks in his later works, especially in Philosophical Investigations (1953) and, to some extent, in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956). Kripke presents Wittgenstein as proposing a skeptical argument against a certain conception of meaning and linguistic understanding, as well as a skeptical solution to such a problem. Many philosophers have called this interpretation of Wittgenstein Kripke’s Wittgenstein or Kripkenstein because, as Kripke himself emphasizes, it is “Wittgenstein’s argument as it struck Kripke, as it presented a problem for him” (Kripke 1982, 5) and “probably many of my formulations and re-castings of the argument are done in a way Wittgenstein would not himself approve” (Kripke 1982, 5). Such an interpretation has been the subject of tremendous discussions since its publication, and this has formed a huge literature on the topic of meaning skepticism in general and Wittgenstein’s later view in particular.
According to the skeptical argument that Kripke extracts from Wittgenstein’s later remarks on meaning and rule-following, there is no fact about a speaker’s behavioral, mental or social life that can metaphysically determine, or constitute, what she means by her words and also fix a determinate connection between those meanings and the correctness of her use of these words. Such a skeptical conclusion has a disastrous consequence for the classical realist view of meaning: if we insist on the idea that meaning is essentially a factual matter, we face the bizarre conclusion that there is thereby “no such thing as meaning anything by any word” (Kripke 1982, 55).
According to the skeptical solution that Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein, such a radical conclusion is intolerable because we certainly do very often mean certain things by our words. The skeptical solution begins by rejecting the view that results in such a paradoxical conclusion, that is, the classical realist conception of meaning. The skeptical solution offers then a new picture of the practice of meaning-attribution, according to which we can legitimately assert that a speaker means something specific by her words if we, as members of a speech-community, can observe, in enough cases, that her use agrees with ours. We can judge, for instance, that she means by “green” what we mean by this word, namely, green, if we observe that her use of “green” agrees with our way of using it. Attributing meanings to others’ words, therefore, brings in the notion of a speech-community, whose members are uniform in their responses. As a result, there can be no private language.
This article begins by introducing Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s skeptical problem presented in Chapter 2 of Kripke’s book. It then explicates Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s skeptical solution to the skeptical problem, which is offered in Chapter 3 of the book. The article ends by reviewing some of the most important responses to the skeptical problem and the skeptical solution.
Research Interests:
Philosophical Scepticism, Meaning, Wittgenstein, Later Wittgenstein, Communitarianism, and 15 moreIndividualism, Language Games, John McDowell, Rule-Following, Saul Kripke, Crispin Wright, Kripke-Wittgenstein paradox, Private Language Argument, Meaning Scepticism, Forms of life, Truth-Conditions, Kripkenstein, Simon Blackburn, Dispositionalism, and George Wilson
To appear in Ali Hossein-Khani and Gary N. Kemp (eds.), Wittgenstein and Other Philosophers, Volume I. London: Routledge.
Research Interests:
Meta-Ethics, Deflationism, Minimalism, Dispositions, Non-cognitivism, and 15 moreRule-Following, Saul Kripke, Expressivism, Quasi-Realism, Cognitivism, Robinson Crusoe, Kripke-Wittgenstein paradox, Private Language Argument, Quietism, Moral Error Theory, Projectivism, Kripkenstein, Simon Blackburn, Dispositionalism, and Ludwig Wittgenstein
Davidson has famously argued that conceptual relativism, which, for him, is based on the content-scheme dualism, or the "third dogma" of empiricism, is either unintelligible or philosophically uninteresting and has accused Quine of... more
Davidson has famously argued that conceptual relativism, which, for him, is based on the content-scheme dualism, or the "third dogma" of empiricism, is either unintelligible or philosophically uninteresting and has accused Quine of holding onto such a dogma. For Davidson, there can be found no intelligible ground for the claim that there may exist untranslatable languages: all languages, if they are languages, are in principle inter-translatable and uttered sentences, if identifiable as utterances, are interpretable. Davidson has also endorsed the Quinean indeterminacy-underdetermination distinction. The early Quine, as well as the later Quine, believe that the indeterminacy of translation casts serious doubt on the existence of facts of the matter about correct translation between languages. In this paper, I will argue that Quine cannot be the target of Davidson's argument against conceptual relativism, and that Davidson's argument is in conflict, among others, with his endorsement of the Quinean indeterminacy-underdetermination distinction. I will show how this conflict results in a radical departure from Quine with respect to the matter of factualism about fine-grained meanings.
Research Interests:
I will argue that Davidson's account of pure intending can be construed as a first-person-based judgement-dependent account of intention. For Davidson, pure intending to do φ is to make an all-out judgement that φing is desirable. On this... more
I will argue that Davidson's account of pure intending can be construed as a first-person-based judgement-dependent account of intention. For Davidson, pure intending to do φ is to make an all-out judgement that φing is desirable. On this anti-reductionist account, intention is treated as an irreducible state of the subject. I will draw a comparison between this account and Wright's and I will show that Davidson's account can be viewed as a non-reductionist judgement-dependent account along the lines suggested by Wright. I then explain how this account can help deal with various perplexities in Davidson's later view of meaning and mental content.
Research Interests:
The indeterminacy of translation is the thesis that translation, meaning, and reference are all indeterminate: there are always alternative translations of a sentence and a term, and nothing objective in the world can decide which... more
The indeterminacy of translation is the thesis that translation, meaning, and reference are all indeterminate: there are always alternative translations of a sentence and a term, and nothing objective in the world can decide which translation is the right one. This is a skeptical conclusion because what it really implies is that there is no fact of the matter about the correct translation of a sentence and a term. It would be an illusion to think that there is a unique meaning which each sentence possesses and a determinate object to which each term refers.
Arguments in favor of the indeterminacy thesis first appear in the influential works of W. V. O. Quine, especially in his discussion of radical translation. Radical translation focuses on a translator who has been assigned to translate the utterances of a speaker speaking a radically unknown language. She is required to accomplish this task solely by observing the behavior of the speaker and the happenings in the environment. Quine claims that a careful study of such a process reveals that there can be no determinate and uniquely correct translation, meaning, and reference for any linguistic expression. As a result, our traditional understanding of meaning and reference is to be thrown away. Quine’s most famous student, Donald Davidson, develops this scenario under the title of “radical interpretation.” Among other differences, radical interpretation is distinguished from Quine’s radical translation with regard to its concentration on an interpreter constructing a theory of meaning for the speaker’s language. Such a theory is supposed to systematically entail the meaning of the speaker’s sentences. Nonetheless, radical interpretation too cannot resist the emergence of indeterminacy. According to the thesis of the indeterminacy of interpretation, there always will be rival interpretations of the speaker’s language, and no objective criterion can decide which interpretation is to be chosen as the right one.
These views of Quine and Davidson have been well received by analytic philosophers particularly because of their anti-Cartesian approach to knowledge. This approach says knowledge of what we mean by our sentences and what we believe about the external world, other minds, and even ourselves cannot be grounded in any infallible a priori knowledge; instead, we are rather bound to study this knowledge from a third-person point of view, that is, from the standpoint of others who are attempting to understand what we mean and believe. What the indeterminacy of translation/interpretation adds to this picture is that there can never be one unique, correct way of determining what these meanings and beliefs are.
The article begins with Quine’s arguments for the indeterminacy of translation, then introduces Davidson’s treatment of indeterminacy by focusing on his semantic project and the scenario of radical interpretation. Then the discussion turns to David Lewis’s version of radical interpretation, Daniel Dennett’s intentional stance, and the way Lewis and Dennett treat the indeterminacy of interpretation.
https://iep.utm.edu/indeterm/
Arguments in favor of the indeterminacy thesis first appear in the influential works of W. V. O. Quine, especially in his discussion of radical translation. Radical translation focuses on a translator who has been assigned to translate the utterances of a speaker speaking a radically unknown language. She is required to accomplish this task solely by observing the behavior of the speaker and the happenings in the environment. Quine claims that a careful study of such a process reveals that there can be no determinate and uniquely correct translation, meaning, and reference for any linguistic expression. As a result, our traditional understanding of meaning and reference is to be thrown away. Quine’s most famous student, Donald Davidson, develops this scenario under the title of “radical interpretation.” Among other differences, radical interpretation is distinguished from Quine’s radical translation with regard to its concentration on an interpreter constructing a theory of meaning for the speaker’s language. Such a theory is supposed to systematically entail the meaning of the speaker’s sentences. Nonetheless, radical interpretation too cannot resist the emergence of indeterminacy. According to the thesis of the indeterminacy of interpretation, there always will be rival interpretations of the speaker’s language, and no objective criterion can decide which interpretation is to be chosen as the right one.
These views of Quine and Davidson have been well received by analytic philosophers particularly because of their anti-Cartesian approach to knowledge. This approach says knowledge of what we mean by our sentences and what we believe about the external world, other minds, and even ourselves cannot be grounded in any infallible a priori knowledge; instead, we are rather bound to study this knowledge from a third-person point of view, that is, from the standpoint of others who are attempting to understand what we mean and believe. What the indeterminacy of translation/interpretation adds to this picture is that there can never be one unique, correct way of determining what these meanings and beliefs are.
The article begins with Quine’s arguments for the indeterminacy of translation, then introduces Davidson’s treatment of indeterminacy by focusing on his semantic project and the scenario of radical interpretation. Then the discussion turns to David Lewis’s version of radical interpretation, Daniel Dennett’s intentional stance, and the way Lewis and Dennett treat the indeterminacy of interpretation.
https://iep.utm.edu/indeterm/
Research Interests:
Reference, Hilary Putnam, David K Lewis, Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, and 10 moreWillard Van Orman Quine, Alfred Tarski, Intentional Stance, Theory of Meaning, Indeterminacy of Translation, Radical Interpretation, Radical Translation, Reference Magnetism, Inscrutability of Reference, and Indeterminacy of Interpretation
Research Interests:
Davidson has attempted to offer his own solution to the problem of self‐knowledge, but there has been no consensus between his commentators on what this solution is. Many have claimed that Davidson's account stems from his remarks on... more
Davidson has attempted to offer his own solution to the problem of self‐knowledge, but there has been no consensus between his commentators on what this solution is. Many have claimed that Davidson's account stems from his remarks on disquotational specifications of self‐ascriptions of meaning and mental content, the account which I will call the “Disquotational Explanation.” It has also been claimed that Davidson's account rather rests on his version of content externalism, which I will call the “Externalist Explanation.” I will argue that not only are these explanations of self‐knowledge implausible, but Davidson himself has already rejected them. Thus, neither can be attributed to Davidson as his suggested account of self‐knowledge. I will then introduce and support what I take to be Davidson's official and independent account of self‐knowledge, that is, his “Transcendental Explanation.” I will defend this view against certain potential objections and finally against the objections made by William Child.
Research Interests:
Philosophy Of Language, Epistemology, Self-Knowledge, Donald Davidson, Internalism/Externalism, and 9 moreTranslation and Interpretation, Peter Strawson, Triangulation, Crispin Wright, First Person Authority, William Child, Transcendental Explanation, Externalist Explanation, and Disquotational Explanation
According to Wright’s Judgement-Dependent account of intention, facts about a subject’s intentions can be taken to be constituted by facts about the subject’s best opinions about them formed under certain optimal conditions. This paper... more
According to Wright’s Judgement-Dependent account of intention, facts about a subject’s intentions can be taken to be constituted by facts about the subject’s best opinions about them formed under certain optimal conditions. This paper aims to defend this account against three main objections which have been made to it by Boghossian, Miller and implicitly by Wright himself. It will be argued that Miller’s objection is implausible because it fails to take into account the partial-determination claim in this account. Boghossian’s objection also fails because it is based on an unjustified reductionist reading of Wright’s account. However, Wright’s own attempt to resist Boghossian’s objection seems to display a shift from his Judgement-Dependent account to an Interpretationist account of self-knowledge, in which case Wright’s new account would face the same problem which he himself has previously put forward in the case of Davidson’s Interpretationist account of self-knowledge. Nonetheless, I will argue that Wright does not need to make such a move because Boghossian’s objection is not applicable to his account.
Research Interests:
What does it take for Islam and science to engage in a genuine conversation with each other? This essay is an attempt to answer this question by clarifying the conditions which make having such a conversation possible and plausible. I... more
What does it take for Islam and science to engage in a genuine conversation with each other? This essay is an attempt to answer this question by clarifying the conditions which make having such a conversation possible and plausible. I will first distinguish between three notions of conversation: the trivial conversation (which requires sharing a common language and the meaning of its ordinary expressions), superficial conversation (in which although the language is shared, the communicators fail to share the meaning of their theoretical terms), and genuine conversation (which implies sharing the language and the meaning of ordinary as well as theoretical terms). I will then argue that our real concern with regard to the exchange between Islam and science is to be to specify the conditions under which their proponents can engage in a genuine conversation with each other and that such a conversation to take place essentially requires sharing a common ontology. Following Quine, I will argue that Muslims, like the followers of any religion, would have no other choice but to work from within science. Doing so, however, would not prevent Muslims from having a genuine conversation with the proponents of other worldviews because when the shared ontology fails to offer any potentially testable answer to our remaining questions about the world, the Islamic viewpoint can appear as a genuine alternative among other underdetermined ones, deciding between which would be a matter of pragmatic criteria.
Research Interests:
Although the later Wittgenstein appears as one of the most influential figures in Davidson’s later works on meaning, it is not, for the most part, clear how Davidson interprets and employs Wittgenstein’s ideas. In this paper, I will argue... more
Although the later Wittgenstein appears as one of the most influential figures in Davidson’s later works on meaning, it is not, for the most part, clear how Davidson interprets and employs Wittgenstein’s ideas. In this paper, I will argue that Davidson’s later works on meaning can be seen as mainly a manifestation of his attempt to accommodate the later Wittgenstein’s basic ideas about meaning and understanding, especially the requirement of drawing the seems right/is right distinction and the way this requirement must be met. These ideas, however, are interpreted by Davidson in his own way. I will then argue that Davidson even attempts to respect Wittgenstein’s quietism, provided that we understand this view in the way Davidson does. Having argued for that, I will finally investigate whether, for Davidson at least, his more theoretical and supposedly explanatory projects, such as that of constructing a formal theory of meaning and his use of the notion of triangulation, are in conflict with this Wittgensteinian quietist view.
Research Interests:
McTaggart, in his famous paper, “The Unreality of Time” (1908), argues in favor of the sceptical claim that time is unreal. His main argument is based on detecting a paradox in our ordinary descriptions of time, or events occurring in... more
McTaggart, in his famous paper, “The Unreality of Time” (1908), argues in favor of the sceptical claim that time is unreal. His main argument is based on detecting a paradox in our ordinary descriptions of time, or events occurring in time. Based on our common sense conception of time, time and the events happening in it can be described in two ways: either as having the properties of “being past”, “being present” and “being future”, or as having the properties of “being earlier than”, “being later than”, or “being simultaneous with”. McTaggart argues that employing the second sort of properties fails to properly explain “change” in time. However, having assumed the essentiality of the first type of properties to time, McTaggart argues that these properties themselves will lead to a paradox, according to which all events are at the same time in the past, present, and future. In this essay, we are going to provide a clear exposition of McTaggart’s argument and briefly review some of the main responses to it. We will then show that McTaggart’s argument will amount to error-theory about the content of our utterances about time. We will then employ Boghossian’s argument against error-theory (1990) to show why McTaggart’s argument leads to paradoxical conclusions.
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مکتاگارت، در مقالة معروف خود به نام «غیر واقعی بودن زمان» (1908)، درباب عدم وجود زمان استدلال میکند.
استدلال اصلی او مبتنی است بر استدلالی دیگر مبنی بر اینکه توصیف ما از زمان به تناقض منجر میشود. به اعتقاد او، ما زمان و رویدادهایی را که در زمان رخ میدهند به دو صورت مختلف صورتبندی میکنیم: بر اساس صورتبندی نخست، یک رویداد یا در گذشته رخ داده است، یا در زمان حال در حال رخ دادن است، و یا در آینده رخ خواهد داد؛ بر اساس صورتبندی دوم، میگوییم که رویداد الف همزمان، زودتر، و یا دیرتر از رویداد ب رخ داده است. مکتاگارت ابتدا استدلال میکند که توصیف دوم از زمان برای تبیین «تغییر» در زمان ضروری نیست و اساساً نمیتواند تغییر را تبیین کند؛ بنابراین، تنها توصیف نخست است که برای تبیین مفهوم «تغییر» ضروری است. وی سپس استدلال میکند که پیشفرض گرفتن توصیف نخست، منجر به تناقض خواهد شد. به این معنا، چون پیشفرض گرفتن نحوة نخست از توصیف زمان برای واقعی بودن زمان ضروری است و از آنجاییکه این پیشفرض به تناقض می¬انجامد، نتیجه میگیریم که زمان غیرواقعی است. در این نوشتار، تلاش خواهد شد که ابتدا صورتبندی کاملی از استدلال مکتاگارت ارائه شود و سپس، به برخی از اصلیترین واکنشها به این استدلال اشاره گردد. در انتها، تلاش خواهیم کرد که انتقادی متفاوت را درباره استدلال مکتاگارت معرفیکنیم که بر اساس آن، استدلال مکتاگارت به تأیید نظریة غیر-واقع¬گرایی (Irrealism)، و بطور خاص نظریه خطا (Error Theory) خواهد انجامید. سپس، با استفاده از استدلال پاول بقوسیان (Boghossian, 1990) علیه این نظریه، استدلال خواهد شد که چنین دیدگاهی در مورد تبیین محتوای اظهارات ما درباب زمان به تناقض منتهی خواهد شد.
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مکتاگارت، در مقالة معروف خود به نام «غیر واقعی بودن زمان» (1908)، درباب عدم وجود زمان استدلال میکند.
استدلال اصلی او مبتنی است بر استدلالی دیگر مبنی بر اینکه توصیف ما از زمان به تناقض منجر میشود. به اعتقاد او، ما زمان و رویدادهایی را که در زمان رخ میدهند به دو صورت مختلف صورتبندی میکنیم: بر اساس صورتبندی نخست، یک رویداد یا در گذشته رخ داده است، یا در زمان حال در حال رخ دادن است، و یا در آینده رخ خواهد داد؛ بر اساس صورتبندی دوم، میگوییم که رویداد الف همزمان، زودتر، و یا دیرتر از رویداد ب رخ داده است. مکتاگارت ابتدا استدلال میکند که توصیف دوم از زمان برای تبیین «تغییر» در زمان ضروری نیست و اساساً نمیتواند تغییر را تبیین کند؛ بنابراین، تنها توصیف نخست است که برای تبیین مفهوم «تغییر» ضروری است. وی سپس استدلال میکند که پیشفرض گرفتن توصیف نخست، منجر به تناقض خواهد شد. به این معنا، چون پیشفرض گرفتن نحوة نخست از توصیف زمان برای واقعی بودن زمان ضروری است و از آنجاییکه این پیشفرض به تناقض می¬انجامد، نتیجه میگیریم که زمان غیرواقعی است. در این نوشتار، تلاش خواهد شد که ابتدا صورتبندی کاملی از استدلال مکتاگارت ارائه شود و سپس، به برخی از اصلیترین واکنشها به این استدلال اشاره گردد. در انتها، تلاش خواهیم کرد که انتقادی متفاوت را درباره استدلال مکتاگارت معرفیکنیم که بر اساس آن، استدلال مکتاگارت به تأیید نظریة غیر-واقع¬گرایی (Irrealism)، و بطور خاص نظریه خطا (Error Theory) خواهد انجامید. سپس، با استفاده از استدلال پاول بقوسیان (Boghossian, 1990) علیه این نظریه، استدلال خواهد شد که چنین دیدگاهی در مورد تبیین محتوای اظهارات ما درباب زمان به تناقض منتهی خواهد شد.
Research Interests:
McTaggart, in his famous paper, “The Unreality of Time” (1908), argues in favor of the sceptical claim that time is unreal. His main argument is based on detecting a paradox in our ordinary descriptions of time or events occurring in... more
McTaggart, in his famous paper, “The Unreality of Time” (1908), argues in favor of the sceptical claim that time is unreal. His main argument is based on detecting a paradox in our ordinary descriptions of time or events occurring in time. Based on our common sense conception of time, time and the events happening in it can be described in two ways: either as having the properties of “being past”, “being present” and “being future”, or as having the properties of “being earlier than”, “being later than”, or “being simultaneous with”. McTaggart argues that employing the second sort of properties fails to properly explain “change” in time. However, having assumed the essentiality of the first type of properties to time, McTaggart argues that these properties will themselves lead to a paradox, according to which all events are at the same time in the past, present, and future. In this essay, we are going to provide a clear exposition of McTaggart’s argument and briefly review some of the main responses to it. We will then show that McTaggart’s argument will amount to error-theory about the content of our utterances about time. We will then employ Boghossian’s argument against error-theory (1990) to show why McTaggart’s argument leads to paradoxical conclusions.
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The book will discuss and criticize the objections from Blackburn, Searle and Glock to Quine's arguments for the indeterminacy of translation, i.e., that these arguments result in a denial of first-person authority, as well as Hylton’s... more
The book will discuss and criticize the objections from Blackburn, Searle and Glock to Quine's arguments for the indeterminacy of translation, i.e., that these arguments result in a denial of first-person authority, as well as Hylton’s solution to these objections. The book argues that these objections, as well as Hylton's solution, all rely on a misconstrual of Quine, among other things, that there can be a distinction between meaning and translation for Quine. I will then offer a Strawsonian-Wittgensteinian account of first-person authority and show that this account can work within Quine’s naturalism.
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This edited volume includes 49 Chapters, each of which discusses the influence of a philosopher's reading of Wittgenstein in his/her philosophical works and the way such Wittgensteinian ideas have manifested themselves in those works.
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This edited volume includes 40 Chapters, each of which discusses the influence of a philosopher's reading of Wittgenstein in his/her philosophical works and the way such Wittgensteinian ideas have manifested themselves in those works.
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A talk on meaning scepticism and reductive dispositionalism at IRIP, 27-Februrary-2023.
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Talk delivered in Tardid School's memorial event for Saul Kripke and his legacy.
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The reception of Wittgenstein’s argument against Private Language is plainly extensive in the contemporary analytical philosophy. Many prominent philosophers in the analytic tradition have conceded in one way or another the publicity of... more
The reception of Wittgenstein’s argument against Private Language is plainly extensive in the contemporary analytical philosophy. Many prominent philosophers in the analytic tradition have conceded in one way or another the publicity of language thesis, such as Paul Grice, W. V. Quine, David Lewis, Hilary Putnam, Michael Dummett, Saul Kripke and Donald Davidson, though they have had their own interpretation of Wittgenstein’s doctrines. According to Wittgenstein, a private language is impossible because it leads to a paradox: For a solitary speaker, whatever that seems right to her is right and there is thereby no objective, or at least intersubjective, criterion on the basis of which it can be determined whether the use the speaker makes of her words accords with what she meant in the past. Any use she makes of her words is both correct and incorrect at the same time. Thus the paradox. Davidson’s reading of this argument is different. He is an externalist about meaning and mental content, according to which the typical causes of a person’s verbal responses contribute to the determination of the content of those responses. However, for a solitaire, as Davidson argues, the cause of her responses would remain doubly indeterminate. This means that the words she uses would have no meaning whatsoever. Wittgenstein’s general solution was to bring in the notion of a community of speakers, that is, that the speaker’s use of words can be assessed, as correct or incorrect, only when the speaker can be treated as a member of a speech community, the members of which agree in their responses to the world. Others would then be able to judge if the speaker’s responses agree with theirs and thus to treat them as correct. As Davidson interprets this solution, in order for thoughts and language to emerge at all it is both necessary and sufficient that the speaker can linguistically interact with at least another person, though she does not need to mean the same thing by the same words as others do. This argument is also called the “Triangulation Argument”. In this talk, I will explain this argument and Davidson’s unique reading of Wittgenstein’s argument.
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In a number of papers, Holton has argued that those response-dependent concepts that are judgement-dependent, users’, and echo concepts automatically confer infallibility on those using them and that only these concepts with this... more
In a number of papers, Holton has argued that those response-dependent concepts that are judgement-dependent, users’, and echo concepts automatically confer infallibility on those using them and that only these concepts with this combination of features can do so. He argues for this claim by giving examples and by showing how the users of a concept, which does not have all these three features at the same time, can be in error. I will argue that Holton’s claim is implausible since he fails to distinguish between infallibility per se and infallibility-in-optimal-conditions. The legitimate conception of infallibility is obviously infallibility-in-optimal-conditions. If so, I will argue that even those concepts that Holton views as lacking one or more of these features and thus as conferring no infallibility on their users may be taken to be conferring infallibility-in-optimal-conditions on their users.
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According to Wright’s Judgement-Dependent account of intention, facts about a subject’s intentions are viewed as constituted by the subject’s best opinions, or judgements, about them formed under certain optimal conditions. If such... more
According to Wright’s Judgement-Dependent account of intention, facts about a subject’s intentions are viewed as constituted by the subject’s best opinions, or judgements, about them formed under certain optimal conditions. If such conditions hold, the subject has an intention if and only if she judges that she has that intention. Boghossian, however, has objected that this account faces a problem: How can the content of such fact-constituting judgements get determined? Wright’s account, thus, has to deal with a dilemma: either it would be trapped in a vicious regress of appealing to higher-order judgements or it should treat such a content-determining process as a mysterious process. In order to respond to Boghossian, Wright invites a Davidsonian Interpretationist Proposal, according to which the content of the subject’s judgements gets fixed by the judgements of an interpreter. In this talk, I will argue that Wright’s manoeuvre is hopeless as it either fails to resist Boghossian’s objection or results in a collapse in the account as a First-Person-Based Judgement-Dependent account of intention.
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IPM's Summer School: Meaning Skepticism In the last session, I introduced Kripke's Wittgenstein's Sceptical Argument. After introducing the sceptical problem and the sceptic's claims, we went on and looked at KW's responses to... more
IPM's Summer School: Meaning Skepticism
In the last session, I introduced Kripke's Wittgenstein's Sceptical Argument. After introducing the sceptical problem and the sceptic's claims, we went on and looked at KW's responses to Dispositionalism and Non-Reductionism. The session ended with remarks from Boghossian and Wright on the plausibility of KW's responses to Non-Reductionism.
In the last session, I introduced Kripke's Wittgenstein's Sceptical Argument. After introducing the sceptical problem and the sceptic's claims, we went on and looked at KW's responses to Dispositionalism and Non-Reductionism. The session ended with remarks from Boghossian and Wright on the plausibility of KW's responses to Non-Reductionism.
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IMP's Summer School: Meaning Scepticism In the second session, I introduced Quine's Argument from Above or the Indeterminacy of Translation. We looked at Chomsky's response as well. The session ended with reviewing Kirk's response to... more
IMP's Summer School: Meaning Scepticism
In the second session, I introduced Quine's Argument from Above or the Indeterminacy of Translation. We looked at Chomsky's response as well. The session ended with reviewing Kirk's response to Quine and Miller's reply to Kirk.
In the second session, I introduced Quine's Argument from Above or the Indeterminacy of Translation. We looked at Chomsky's response as well. The session ended with reviewing Kirk's response to Quine and Miller's reply to Kirk.
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IPM's Summer School: Meaning Scepticism In the first session, I talked about Quine's Argument from Below (or the Inscrutability of Reference). The talk covered general remarks on Quine's Physicalism, Behaviourism, Naturalism, Radical... more
IPM's Summer School: Meaning Scepticism
In the first session, I talked about Quine's Argument from Below (or the Inscrutability of Reference). The talk covered general remarks on Quine's Physicalism, Behaviourism, Naturalism, Radical Translation, and Gavagai example. It ended with introducing the responses from Evans and Hookway.
In the first session, I talked about Quine's Argument from Below (or the Inscrutability of Reference). The talk covered general remarks on Quine's Physicalism, Behaviourism, Naturalism, Radical Translation, and Gavagai example. It ended with introducing the responses from Evans and Hookway.
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IRIP's Summer School: Relativism Conceptual relativism rests on a form of dualism between concept and content, according to which there is a theory-neutral, independent something that the mind organizes, divides up, predicts, or fits via... more
IRIP's Summer School: Relativism
Conceptual relativism rests on a form of dualism between concept and content, according to which there is a theory-neutral, independent something that the mind organizes, divides up, predicts, or fits via deploying its different sets of concepts, or conceptual schemes. Conceptual relativists believe that the world, reality, nature, our experiences, sense data, etc. do not present themselves to us ready-made or ready-carved, rather there can always be different ways of conceptualizing them and such ways may be radically different from each other. Donald Davidson, however, argues that conceptual relativism is either unintelligible or philosophically uninteresting. He associates having a language with having a conceptual scheme and understanding a language with being capable of translating or interpreting it. Conceptual relativism then turns into the claim that there can be languages which are not translatable into each other, or into our own language. Davidson argues that such an idea would be absurd: We cannot consider something as a “language” but believe that it is not translatable into our own language. In this talk, after some preliminary remarks, I will introduce Davidson’s argument against conceptual relativism. I will then try to briefly look at some objections to the argument made by Baghramian, Bar-On, and Hacker.
Conceptual relativism rests on a form of dualism between concept and content, according to which there is a theory-neutral, independent something that the mind organizes, divides up, predicts, or fits via deploying its different sets of concepts, or conceptual schemes. Conceptual relativists believe that the world, reality, nature, our experiences, sense data, etc. do not present themselves to us ready-made or ready-carved, rather there can always be different ways of conceptualizing them and such ways may be radically different from each other. Donald Davidson, however, argues that conceptual relativism is either unintelligible or philosophically uninteresting. He associates having a language with having a conceptual scheme and understanding a language with being capable of translating or interpreting it. Conceptual relativism then turns into the claim that there can be languages which are not translatable into each other, or into our own language. Davidson argues that such an idea would be absurd: We cannot consider something as a “language” but believe that it is not translatable into our own language. In this talk, after some preliminary remarks, I will introduce Davidson’s argument against conceptual relativism. I will then try to briefly look at some objections to the argument made by Baghramian, Bar-On, and Hacker.
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The problem of self-knowledge concerns explaining the fact that we know ourselves directly and non-inferentially, while others’ knowledge of our attitudes is indirect and inferential. Davidson attempts to explain this... more
The problem of self-knowledge concerns explaining the fact that we know ourselves directly and non-inferentially, while others’ knowledge of our attitudes is indirect and inferential. Davidson attempts to explain this “asymmetry” in knowledge by arguing that the asymmetry must exist if interpretation is to be possible at all. Let’s call this argument Davidson’s “Transcendental Argument”. Many commentators on Davidson’s account, including Crispin Wright, however, has taken Davidson to be offering a different sort of account, according to which the asymmetry is explained in terms of the fact that speakers’ ascriptions of meaning to themselves (self-ascriptions) are bound to be only disquotationally specifiable, as the consequence of which it is guaranteed that they directly know what they mean by their utterances, while others’ ascriptions of meaning to the speakers are not necessarily best specifiable disquotationally, and hence there is no guarantee that they are always right about what the speakers mean and believe. Let’s call this the “Disquotational Argument”. In this talk, I will discuss these two readings of Davidson’s account and will argue that the Disquotational Argument is not Davidson’s actual account of self-knowledge: he seems to have already rejected such explanations. Finally, I will discuss whether the Disquotational Argument, as an explanation of self-knowledge, is generally defensible
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Intuitively, there seems to be an important difference between a subject’s attributing beliefs and meanings to himself and others’ attributing beliefs and meanings to him. The problem of self-knowledge points to the question: Why and how... more
Intuitively, there seems to be an important difference between a subject’s attributing beliefs and meanings to himself and others’ attributing beliefs and meanings to him. The problem of self-knowledge points to the question: Why and how do we know ourselves in a non-inferential way? In his paper, “First Person Authority” (1984), Davidson attempts to provide an explanation of the phenomenon of self-knowledge (or first-person authority). His explanation is based on the requirements for the possibility of interpretation. According to this account, if interpretation is to be possible at all, speakers must have non-inferential knowledge of what they mean and believe. Crispin Wright (2001) has argued that Davidson’s explanation is a failure: it either presupposes self-knowledge or provides no explanation of it. In this talk, I critically discussed Wright’s reading of, and his objection to, Davidson’s account. I argued that Wright misses the actual explanation Davidson proposes of first-person authority.
References
Davidson, D. (1984). First Person Authority. Dialectica, 38, 101–12.
Wright, C. (2001). The Problem of Self-Knowledge (II). In C. Wright, Rails to Infinity: Essays on Themes from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, (pp. 345-374). Cambridge, US: Harvard University Press.
References
Davidson, D. (1984). First Person Authority. Dialectica, 38, 101–12.
Wright, C. (2001). The Problem of Self-Knowledge (II). In C. Wright, Rails to Infinity: Essays on Themes from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, (pp. 345-374). Cambridge, US: Harvard University Press.
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Wittgenstein, as presented by Kripke, proposes a sceptical argument against traditional realism about meaning, as well as a sceptical solution in favor of a (non-factualist) communitarian view. Davidson, in a variety of papers, puts... more
Wittgenstein, as presented by Kripke, proposes a sceptical argument against traditional realism about meaning, as well as a sceptical solution in favor of a (non-factualist) communitarian view. Davidson, in a variety of papers, puts forward an argument against a certain view about meaning, which treats knowledge of shared rules or conventions, considered as fixed in advance of a particular conversation and occasion, as necessary and sufficient for success in communication, a view which we may call the “Common View” (as he takes it as the view that many philosophers commonly endorse ), or “Conventionalism”. Having rejected this view, Davidson goes on and offers an alternative account of meaning, which explains success in communication on the basis of success in mutual understanding. In this talk, I tried to characterize Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s and Davidson’s negative and positive arguments, and end with some questions about a potential comparison between them.
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This thesis is an attempt to investigate the relation between the views of Wittgenstein as presented by Kripke (Kripke’s Wittgenstein) and Donald Davidson on meaning and linguistic understanding. Kripke’s Wittgenstein, via his sceptical... more
This thesis is an attempt to investigate the relation between the views of Wittgenstein as presented by Kripke (Kripke’s Wittgenstein) and Donald Davidson on meaning and linguistic understanding. Kripke’s Wittgenstein, via his sceptical argument, argues that there is no fact about which rule a speaker is following in using a linguistic expression. Now, if one urges that meaning something by a word is essentially a matter of following one rule rather than another, the sceptical argument leads to the radical sceptical conclusion that there is no such thing as meaning anything by any word. According to the solution Kripke’s Wittgenstein proposes, we must instead concentrate on the ordinary practice of meaning-attribution, that is, on the conditions under which we can justifiably ascribe meaning to each other and the utility such a practice has in our life. Davidson has also argued that following rules is neither necessary nor sufficient for explaining success in the practice of meaning something by an utterance. According to his alternative view of meaning, a speaker’s success in this practice is fundamentally a matter of his utterance being successfully interpreted by an interpreter in the way the speaker intended. On the basis of these remarks, Davidson raises objections to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument and solution.
In this thesis, I will argue that Davidson has failed to fully grasp the essentially sceptical nature of the argument and solution proposed by Kripke’s Wittgenstein. I will argue that as a result of this Davidson’s objections and his alternative solution to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument are mistaken. These criticisms are pursued via an investigation of Davidson’s problematic reading of Quine’s sceptical arguments for the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. Having criticized Davidson’s actual response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein, I will claim that Davidson’s best option for resisting the sceptical problem is to adopt a form of non-reductionism about meaning. Claudine Verheggen’s recent claim that Davidson’s use of the notion of triangulation will help to establish non-reductionism will be argued to be a failure. I will urge that the main obstacle in defending a non-reductionist view is the problem of accounting for the nature of self-knowledge of meaning and understanding. After discussing Davidson’s account of self-knowledge and Crispin Wright’s objection to this account, I will argue that, although Wright’s objection is ultimately unsuccessful, Davidson’s account fails for other reasons. Finally, I tentatively suggest that the resources for an alternative response to the sceptical problem can possibly be extracted from Davidson’s account of intending, which has some features suggestive of a judgement-dependent account of meaning and intention.
In this thesis, I will argue that Davidson has failed to fully grasp the essentially sceptical nature of the argument and solution proposed by Kripke’s Wittgenstein. I will argue that as a result of this Davidson’s objections and his alternative solution to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument are mistaken. These criticisms are pursued via an investigation of Davidson’s problematic reading of Quine’s sceptical arguments for the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. Having criticized Davidson’s actual response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein, I will claim that Davidson’s best option for resisting the sceptical problem is to adopt a form of non-reductionism about meaning. Claudine Verheggen’s recent claim that Davidson’s use of the notion of triangulation will help to establish non-reductionism will be argued to be a failure. I will urge that the main obstacle in defending a non-reductionist view is the problem of accounting for the nature of self-knowledge of meaning and understanding. After discussing Davidson’s account of self-knowledge and Crispin Wright’s objection to this account, I will argue that, although Wright’s objection is ultimately unsuccessful, Davidson’s account fails for other reasons. Finally, I tentatively suggest that the resources for an alternative response to the sceptical problem can possibly be extracted from Davidson’s account of intending, which has some features suggestive of a judgement-dependent account of meaning and intention.