bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Epiphenomenalism
Authors: Campbell Keith , Smith Nicholas J.J.
Published: September 2018

Epiphenomenalism is a theory concerning the relation between the mental and physical realms, regarded as radically different in nature. The theory holds that only physical states have causal power, and that mental states are completely dependent on them. The mental realm, for epiphenomenalists, is nothing more than a series of conscious states which signify the occurrence of states of the nervous system, but which play no causal role. For example, my feeling sleepy does not cause my yawning – rather, both the feeling and the yawning are effects of an underlying neural state.

Mental states are real, and in being conscious we are more than merely physical organisms. Nevertheless, all our experiences, thoughts and actions are determined by our physical natures. Mental states are actually as smoke from a machine seems to be, mere side effects making no difference to the course of Nature.
Imagination
Authors: Kind Amy
Published: September 2018

Imagination is a speculative mental state that allows us to consider situations apart from the here and now. Historically, imagination played an important role in the works of many of the major philosophical figures in the Western tradition – from Aristotle to Descartes to Hume to Kant. By the middle of the twentieth century, in the wake of the behavioristic mindset that had dominated both psychology and philosophy in the early part of the century, imagination had largely faded from philosophical view and received scant attention from the 1960s through the 1980s. But imagination returned to the limelight in the late twentieth century, as it was given increasing prominence in both aesthetics and philosophy of mind.

In aesthetics, interest in imagination derives in large part from its role in our engagement with works of art, music, and literature. For example, some philosophers have called upon imagination to capture the essence of fiction, while others have called upon it to explain how listeners understand the expressive nature of musical works. Yet others have seen imagination as centrally involved in ontological questions about art; in particular, they take works of art to be best understood as in some sense imaginary objects.

In philosophy of mind, imagination plays an especially important role in discussions of mindreading, that is, our ability to understand the mental states of others. While theory theorists claim that we do this by calling upon a folk theory of mind, simulation theorists claim that we mindread by simulating the mental states of others – with simulation typically cashed out in terms of imagination. More generally, philosophers of mind who are interested in questions of cognitive architecture tend to be especially interested in imagination and its relationship to belief and desire.

In fact, imagination has come to play an important role in a wide variety of philosophical contexts in addition to aesthetics and philosophy of mind. It has traditionally been central to discussions of thought experimentation and modal epistemology, where an analogy is often drawn between the way perception justifies beliefs about actuality and the way imagination seems to justify beliefs about possibility. Imagination has also been invoked to explain pretence, dreaming, empathy, delusion, and our ability to engage in counterfactual reasoning.
Intention
Authors: Dunn Robert
Published: September 2018

Suppose that Kevin intends to brush up on his predicate logic, and acts on this intention, because he wants to conduct a good tutorial and he believes that some preparatory revision will help him to do so. In an example like this, we explain why Kevin intends to revise his logic, and why he (intentionally) does revise it, by appealing to the belief and desire which provide his reasons both for his intention and his corresponding intentional action. But how does Kevin’s intention to act, coming between his reasons and his action, help to explain what he does? Central questions in the theory of intention include the following: Are intentions distinct mental attitudes or are they analysable in terms of other mental attitudes – such as beliefs and desires? How is intending to do something related to judging that it is best to do it? What distinctive roles, if any, do intentions play in getting us to act? Are foreseen but undesired consequences of an intentional action intended?
Private language argument
Authors: Candlish Stewart
Published: September 2018

Ludwig Wittgenstein argued against the possibility of a private language in his 1953 book Philosophical Investigations, where the notion is outlined at §243: ‘The words of this language are to refer to what can be known only to the speaker; to his immediate, private, sensations. So another cannot understand the language.’ The idea attacked is thus of a language in principle incomprehensible to more than one person because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others; cases such as personal codes where the lack of common understanding could be remedied are hence irrelevant.

Wittgenstein’s attack, now known as the private language argument (although just one of many considerations he deploys on the topic), is important because the possibility of a private language is arguably an unformulated presupposition of standard theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy of mind from Descartes to much of the cognitive science of the late twentieth century.

The essence of the argument is simple. It is that a language in principle unintelligible to anyone but its user would necessarily be unintelligible to the user also, because no meanings could be established for its signs. But, because of the difficulty of Wittgenstein’s text and the tendency of philosophers to read into it their own concerns and assumptions, there has been extensive and fundamental disagreement over the details, significance and even intended conclusion of the argument. Some, thinking it obvious that sensations are private, have supposed that the argument is meant to show that we cannot talk about them; some that it commits Wittgenstein to behaviourism; some that the argument, self-defeatingly, condemns public discourse as well; some that its conclusion is that language is necessarily social in a strong sense, that is, not merely potentially but actually. Much of the secondary (especially the older) literature is devoted to disputes over these matters.

An account of the argument by the influential American philosopher Saul Kripke has spurred a semi-autonomous discussion of it. But Kripke’s version involves significant departures from the original and relies on unargued assumptions of a kind Wittgenstein rejected in his own treatment of the topic.
Qualia
Authors: Levin Janet
Published: September 2018

The terms ‘quale’ and ‘qualia’ (plural) are most commonly understood to mean the qualitative, phenomenal or ‘felt’ properties of our mental states, such as the throbbing pain of my current headache, or the peculiar blue of the afterimage I am experiencing now. Though it seems undeniable that at least some of our mental states have qualia, their existence raises a number of philosophical problems.

The first problem regards their nature or constitution. Many theorists have noted great differences between our intuitive conceptions of qualia and those of typical physical properties such as mass or length, and have asked whether qualia could nonetheless be identical with physical properties. Another problem regards our knowledge of qualia, in particular, whether our beliefs about them can be taken to be infallible, or at least to have some kind of special authority.
Armstrong, David Malet (1926–2014)
Authors: Jackson Frank
Published: September 2018

David Armstrong was born in Melbourne, and studied philosophy at the Universities of Sydney and Oxford. He returned to Australia to teach at the University of Melbourne and later moved to the chair at Sydney. He has made many major contributions to central topics in epistemology and metaphysics, including perception, laws, universals, the mind, belief and knowledge, and possibility. His overall programme has been the articulation of a naturalistic metaphysics, understood as the doctrine that nothing at all exists except the single world of space and time.

A notable feature of his work in these contentious areas has been its directness and clarity, and the central importance he attaches to squaring what the philosopher says with what science, especially physical science, teaches us. In both these respects he is like another important Australian philosopher, J.J.C. Smart, and together they have influenced the way a generation of philosophers in Australia do philosophy, as well as influencing the doctrines they espouse.
Smart, John Jamieson Carswell (1920–2012)
Authors: Jackson Frank
Published: September 2018

J.J.C. (Jack) Smart was born in England and studied at Glasgow and Oxford universities before moving to Australia to take up the Chair of Philosophy at Adelaide University. He was one of the earliest and most influential advocates of the mind-brain identity theory, the view that mental states are identical with brain states. He also played a major role in articulating and defending realism in science, the four-dimensional view of time and act utilitarianism in ethics.
Animal thought, recent work on
Authors: Rey Georges , Hauser Marc
Published: September 2018

In recent years there has been a good deal of experimental work on the question of animal cognition, much of it modelled on recent experiments in infant cognition. Indeed, current research suggests that the distinction between the mental capacities of humans and many animals is far subtler and more difficult to determine than traditionally has been supposed. A promising proposal is that, although humans and animals share a surprising number of basic concepts and categories, only humans have the capacity to deal with them recursively.

Throughout this entry ‘animal’ and ‘primate’ will be understood as prefixed with ‘non-human’.
Behaviourism, methodological and scientific
Authors: Gallistel C.R.
Published: September 2018

Methodological behaviourism is the doctrine that the data on which a psychological science must rest are behavioural data – or, at the very least, publicly observable data – not the private data provided to introspection by the contents of an observer’s consciousness. Scientific, or, as it was sometimes called, ‘radical’, behaviourism contends that scientific psychology ought to be concerned only with the formulation of laws relating observables such as stimuli and responses; not with unobservable mental processes and mechanisms such as attention, intention, memory and motivation. Methodological behaviourism is all but universally embraced by contemporary experimental psychologists, whereas scientific behaviourism is widely viewed as a doctrine in decline. Both forms of behaviourism were articulated by J.B. Watson in 1913. B.F. Skinner was the most prominent radical behaviourist.

In addition to its empiricist strictures against inferred mental mechanisms, radical behaviourism was also empiricist in its assumptions about learning, assuming that: (1) organisms have no innate principles that guide their learning; (2) learning is the result of a general-purpose process, not of a collection of mechanisms tailored to the demands of different kinds of problems; and (3) learning is a change in the relation between responses and the stimuli that control or elicit them. Many of these ideas continue to be influential, for example, in connectionism.
Mind, computational theories of
Authors: Block Ned , Rey Georges
Published: September 2018

The computational theory of mind (CTM) is the theory that the mind can be understood as a computer or, roughly, as the ‘software program’ of the brain. It is the most influential form of ‘functionalism’, according to which what distinguishes a mind is not what it is made of, nor a person’s behavioural dispositions, but the way in which the brain is organized. CTM underlies some of the most important research in current cognitive science, for example, theories of artificial intelligence, perception, decision making and linguistics.

CTM involves a number of important ideas. (1) Computations can be defined over syntactically specifiable symbols (that is, symbols specified by rules governing their combination) possessing semantic properties (or ‘meaning’). For example, addition can be captured by rules defined over decimal numerals (symbols) that name the numbers. (2) Computations can be analysed into ‘algorithms’, or simple step-by-step procedures, each of which could be carried out by a machine. (3) Computation can be generalized to include not only arithmetic, but deductive logic and other forms of reasoning, including induction, abduction and decision making. (4) Computations capture relatively autonomous levels of ordinary psychological explanation different from neurophysiology and descriptions of behaviour.
Eliminativism
Authors: Rey Georges
Published: September 2018

‘Eliminativism’ refers to the view that mental phenomena – for example, beliefs, desires, conscious states – do not exist. Although this can seem absurd on its face, in the twentieth century it has gained a wide variety of adherents, for example, scientific behaviourists, who thought that all human and animal activity could be explained in terms of the history of patterns of stimuli, responses and reinforcements; as well as some who have thought that neurophysiology alone is all that is needed.

Two immediate objections to eliminativism – for example, that it is incoherent because it claims there are no ‘claims’, and that it conflicts with data of which we are all immediately aware – arguably beg the question against the view. What is wanted is non-tendentious evidence for the mind. Contrary to behaviourism, this seems to be available in the intelligent behaviour of most higher animals.
Holism: mental and semantic
Authors: Block Ned
Published: September 2018

Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place in the web of beliefs or sentences comprising a whole theory or group of theories. It can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Molecularism characterizes meaning and content in terms of relatively small parts of the web in a way that allows many different theories to share those parts. For example, the meaning of ‘chase’ might be said by a molecularist to be ‘try to catch’. Atomism characterizes meaning and content in terms of none of the web; it says that sentences and beliefs have meaning or content independently of their relations to other sentences or beliefs.

One major motivation for holism has come from reflections on the natures of confirmation and learning. As Quine observed, claims about the world are confirmed not individually but only in conjunction with theories of which they are a part. And, typically, one cannot come to understand scientific claims without understanding a significant chunk of the theory of which they are a part. For example, in learning the Newtonian concepts of ‘force’, ‘mass’, ‘kinetic energy’ and ‘momentum’, one does not learn any definitions of these terms in terms that are understood beforehand, for there are no such definitions. Rather, these theoretical terms are all learned together in conjunction with procedures for solving problems.

The major problem with holism is that it threatens to make generalization in psychology virtually impossible. If the content of any state depends on all others, it would be extremely unlikely that any two believers would ever share a state with the same content. Moreover, holism would appear to conflict with our ordinary conception of reasoning. What sentences one accepts influences what one infers. If I accept a sentence and then later reject it, I thereby change the inferential role of that sentence, so the meaning of what I accept would not be the same as the meaning of what I later reject. But then it would be difficult to understand on this view how one could rationally – or even irrationally! – change one’s mind. And agreement and translation are also problematic for much the same reason. Holists have responded (1) by proposing that we should think not in terms of ‘same/different’ meaning but in terms of a gradient of similarity of meaning, (2) by proposing ‘two-factor’ theories, or (3) by simply accepting the consequence that there is no real difference between changing meanings and changing beliefs.
Introspection, psychology of
Authors: Von Eckhardt Barbara
Published: September 2018

Introspection is the process of directly examining one’s own conscious mental states and processes. Since the seventeenth century, there has been considerable disagreement on the scope, nature and epistemic status of introspection. Descartes held that all our mental states are subject to introspection; that it is sufficient to have a mental state to be aware of it; and that when we introspect, we cannot be mistaken about what we ‘see’. Each of these views has been disputed. Nineteenth-century psychology relied heavily on introspection, but with the exception of important work in psychophysics and perception, it is now primarily of historical interest. Recently, Nisbett and Wilson have argued that when people attempt to report on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do so on the basis of introspection but, rather, on the basis of an implicit common-sense ‘theory’. Ericsson and Simon have developed a model of the mechanisms by which ‘introspective’ reports are generated and have used that model to identify the conditions under which such reports are reliable.
Learning
Authors: Glymour Clark
Published: September 2018

Learning is the acquisition of some true belief or skill through experience. Rationalist/idealist philosophers held that the very constitution of thought guarantees that fundamental laws hold of the world we experience, and that our understanding of these laws was therefore innate, not learned. The empiricist tradition, doubtful of these Rationalist claims, denied that much was innate, and held that learning occurred through associations of mental representations. This view was lent support by the nineteenth-century development of physiological psychology, which led to a view of learning as a system of adjustments in a network without any intervening representations, a perspective that led in turn, in the twentieth century, to behaviourist studies of stimulus–response associations, and eventually to contemporary neural net computational models.

Empiricism, however, had also invited, especially with Hume, doubts that the correspondence between mental representations and the world could be known. Hume believed people learn, or at least form new habits, but he did not think there could be any normative theory of learning – any way of making it ‘rational’. His scepticism led to the development by Bayes and other statisticians of formal theories of how learning from evidence ought to be done. However, the standards that developed in the form of the theory of subjective probability proved impossible to apply until very fast digital computers became available.

The digital computer in turn prompted both novel normative theories of learning not considered by the statistical tradition, and also attempts to describe human learning by computational procedures. At the same time, a revolution in linguistics held that humans have an innate, specialized algorithm for learning language. Applications of computation theory to learning led to an understanding of what computational systems – possibly including people – can and cannot reliably learn. Major issues remain concerning how people acquire the system of distinctions they use to describe the world, and how – and how well – they learn the causal structure of the everyday world.
Modularity of mind
Authors: Pylyshyn Zenon W.
Published: September 2018

A common view in recent philosophy of science is that there is no principled distinction between theoretical and observational claims, since perception itself is thoroughly contaminated by the beliefs and expectations of the observer. However, recent psychological and neurological evidence casts doubt on this latter claim and suggests, instead, that perceptual processing is to a significant extent ‘cognitively impenetrable’: it takes place in informationally encapsulated ‘modules’ that cannot be rationally influenced by beliefs or other ‘central’ cognitive states, or even other portions of the perceptual system.
Moral development
Authors: Flanagan Owen
Published: September 2018

The concept of moral development has its roots in Plato’s metaphor of ascent from the dark recesses of the cave to the initially blinding sight of the form of the good. Influenced by the developmental theories of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg proposed a sequence of stages beginning with two stages of egoism, followed by stages of conventionalism, contractarianism, consequentialism, and finally a Kantianism emphasizing the role of universalizable laws. Recent empirical work has not, however, corroborated moral stage theory. There seems not to be a unified mode of thought that applies to all and only moral problems.
Psychoanalysis, post-Freudian
Authors: Hopkins James
Published: September 2018

The basic concepts of psychoanalysis are due to Sigmund Freud. After establishing psychoanalysis Freud worked in Vienna until he and other analysts fled the Nazi occupation. Post-Freudian psychoanalysis has evolved in distinct ways in different countries, often in response to influential analysts who settled there.

Freud’s patients were mainly adults who suffered from neurotic rather than psychotic disturbances. He found their psychological difficulties to be rooted in conflict between love and hate, caused by very disparate, often fantastic, images deriving from the same parental figure. These images provided the basic representations of the self and others, formed by processes of projection (representing the other via images from the self) and introjection (representing the self via images from the other). The internalized image of a parent could be used to represent the self as related to some version of the other, as in the formation of the punitive super-ego, or as like the other, as in the identification with the parent of the same sex through which the Oedipus complex was dissolved.

Later analysts, including Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, observed that the uninhibited play of children could be seen to express fantasies involving such images, often with striking clarity. This made it possible to analyse children, and to see that their representations of the self were regularly coordinated with fantastic representations of others, with both organized into systematically interacting systems of good and bad. Emotional disturbance was marked by a fantasy world in which the self and idealized good figures engaged in conflict with hateful bad objects, unmitigated by any sense that all derived from the same self and parental figures.

Such observations made it possible to confirm, revise and extend Freud’s theories. Klein saw that symptoms, character and personality could be understood in terms of relations to internalized fantasy-figures, laid down in early childhood; and this extended to psychotic disturbances, such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness, which turned on the particular nature of the figures involved. This gave rise to the British object-relations approach to psychoanalysis. It also influenced the development of ego-psychology and self-psychology by Hartmann, Kohut and others in the United States, and Lacan’s attempt to relate psychoanalysis to language, in France.
Semantics, informational
Authors: McLaughlin Brian P. , Rey Georges
Published: September 2018

Information-theoretic semantics (ITS) attempts to provide a naturalistic account of the conditions under which a psychological state such as a belief or desire has a particular mental content: what it is by virtue of which, say, a psychological state is a belief ‘that it is raining’ or a desire ‘that it stop raining’. Because of the complexities of an entirely general account, ITS typically attempts to provide merely a sufficient naturalistic condition for a belief content of the sort normally acquired by perception (for example, that it is raining). It is expected that other sorts of mental contents may require that ITS be supplemented in various ways.

ITS was inspired by Claude Shannon’s theory of ‘information’ (1948), which provided a mathematical measure of the amount of information carried by a signal. Employing a notion of ‘natural meaning’ discussed by Peirce (1931) and Grice (1957), Dretske (1981) supplemented Shannon’s work with an account of what information a signal carries. The intuitive idea is that a signal carries the information ‘that p’ if and only if it naturally means (that is, indicates) that p, as when smoke ‘means’ there is fire.

Natural indication is a key ingredient in ITS accounts of mental content. In their accounts, Stampe (1977) and Stalnaker (1984) appeal to the notion of what a state indicates under ‘optimal’ conditions. Fodor (1987) appeals to ‘asymmetric dependencies’ between the meaning-forming and the non-meaning-forming indication conditions in the causation of psychological states. Dretske (1988) appeals to the idea that, via operant conditioning, a state can acquire a functional role vis-à-vis behaviour because it naturally indicates ‘that p’ and thereby can acquire the natural function of indicating ‘that p‘.
Vision
Authors: Egan Frances
Published: September 2018

Vision is the most studied sense. It is our richest source of information about the external world, providing us with knowledge of the shape, size, distance, colour and luminosity of objects around us. Vision is fast, automatic and achieved without conscious effort; however, the apparent ease with which we see is deceptive. Since Kepler characterized the formation of the retinal image in the early seventeenth century, vision theorists have known that objects do not look the way they appear on the retina. The retinal image is two-dimensional, yet we see three dimensions; the size and shape of the image that an object casts on the retina varies with the distance and perspective of the observer, yet we experience objects as having constant size and shape. The primary task of a theory of vision is to explain how useful information about the external world is recovered from the changing retinal image.

Theories of vision fall roughly into two classes. Indirect theories characterize the processes underlying visual perception in psychological terms, as, for example, inference from prior data or construction of complex percepts from basic sensory components. Direct theories tend to stress the richness of the information available in the retinal image, but, more importantly, they deny that visual processes can be given any correct psychological or mental characterization. Direct theorists, while not denying that the processing underlying vision may be very complex, claim that the complexity is to be explicated merely by reference to non-psychological, neural processes implemented in the brain.

The most influential recent work in vision treats it as an information-processing task, hence as indirect. Computational models characterize visual processing as the production and decoding of a series of increasingly useful internal representations of the distal scene. These operations are described in computational accounts by precise algorithms. Computer implementations of possible strategies employed by the visual system contribute to our understanding of the problems inherent in complex visual tasks such as edge detection or shape recognition, and make possible the rigorous testing of proposed solutions.
Knowledge argument
Authors: Alter Torin
Published: September 2018

The knowledge argument is an argument against physicalism, the view that the world is wholly physical. It was developed by Frank Jackson (1943–) and is based on the following thought experiment.

Everything that can be known through the physical, chemical, and biological sciences – the complete physical truth – has been discovered. Mary is a brilliant scientist who is raised in a black-and-white room. She has never had colour experiences. But she learns the complete physical truth, which includes the completed science of colour vision, by reading books and watching lectures on a black-and-white television monitor. Then she leaves the room and sees colours.

Jackson’s argument runs roughly as follows. When Mary leaves the room, she learns something new. She learns what it is like to see in colour. Evidently, the complete physical truth is not the complete truth about the world. Ergo, physicalism is false.

Some react by denying that Mary learns anything when she leaves the room. Others react by accepting that she learns something but denying that this refutes physicalism. Still others accept the argument as sound. The ensuing discussion has led to a variety of insights about consciousness and its place in the natural world.
Modal logic, philosophical issues in
Authors: McKay Thomas J.
Published: September 2018

In reasoning we often use words such as ‘necessarily’, ‘possibly’, ‘can’, ‘could’, ‘must’ and so on. For example, if we know that an argument is valid, then we know that it is necessarily true that if the premises are true, then the conclusion is true. Modal logic starts with such modal words and the inferences involving them. The exploration of these inferences has led to a variety of formal systems, and their interpretation is now most often built on the concept of a possible world.

Standard non-modal logic shows us how to understand logical words such as ‘not’, ‘and’ and ‘or’, which are truth-functional. The modal concepts are not truth-functional: knowing that p is true (and what ‘necessarily’ means) does not automatically enable one to determine whether ‘Necessarily p’ is true. (‘It is necessary that all people have been people’ is true, but ‘It is necessary that no English monarch was born in Montana’ is false, even though the simpler constituents – ‘All people have been people’ and ‘No English monarch was born in Montana’– are both true.)

The study of modal logic has helped in the understanding of many other contexts for sentences that are not truth-functional, such as ‘ought’ (‘It ought to be the case that p’) and ‘believes’ (‘Alice believes that p’); and also in the consideration of the interaction between quantifiers and non-truth-functional contexts. In fact, much work in modern semantics has benefited from the extension of modal semantics introduced by Richard Montague in beginning the development of a systematic semantics for natural language.

The framework of possible worlds developed for modal logic has been fruitful in the analysis of many concepts. For example, by introducing the concept of relative possibility, Kripke showed how to model a variety of modal systems: a proposition is necessarily true at a possible world w if and only if it is true at every world that is possible relative to w. To achieve a better analysis of statements of ability, Mark Brown adapted the framework by modelling actions with sets of possible outcomes. John has the ability to hit the bull’s-eye reliably if there is some action of John’s such that every possible outcome of that action includes John’s hitting the bull’s-eye.

Modal logic and its semantics also raise many puzzles. What makes a modal claim true? How do we tell what is possible and what is necessary? Are there any possible things that do not exist (and what could that mean anyway)? Does the use of modal logic involve a commitment to essentialism? How can an individual exist in many different possible worlds?
Adverbs
Authors: Higginbotham James
Published: September 2018

Adverbs are so named from their role in modifying verbs and other non-nominal expressions. For example, in ‘John ran slowly’, the adverb ‘slowly’ modifies ‘ran’ by characterizing the manner of John’s running. The debate on the semantic contribution of adverbs centres on two approaches. On the first approach, adverbs are understood as predicate operators: for example, in ‘John ran slowly’, ‘ran’ would be taken to be a predicate and ‘slowly’ an operator affecting its meaning. Working this out in detail requires the resources of higher-order logic. On the second approach, adverbs are understood as predicates of ‘objects’ such as events and states, reference to which is revealed in logical form. For example, ‘John ran slowly’ would be construed along the lines of ‘there was a running by John and it was slow’, in which the adverb ‘slowly’ has become a predicate ‘slow’ applied to the event that was John’s running.

Since adverbs are exclusively modifiers, they are classed among the syncategorematic words of terminist logic, the investigation of which carried the subject forward from Aristotle in the thirteenth century. (The contrasting ‘categoremata’ – grammatical subjects and predicates – are those words which have meaning independently.) They are of contemporary interest for philosophical logic and semantic theory, because particular accounts of them carry implications for the nature of combinatorial semantics and language understanding, and for ontology.
Counterfactual conditionals
Authors: Doring Frank
Published: September 2018

‘If bats were deaf, they would hunt during the day.’ What you have just read is called a ‘counterfactual’ conditional; it is an ‘If…then…’ statement the components of which are ‘counter to fact’, in this case counter to the fact that bats hear well and sleep during the day. Among the analyses proposed for such statements, two have been especially prominent. According to the first, a counterfactual asserts that there is a sound argument from the antecedent (‘bats are deaf’) to the consequent (‘bats hunt during the day’). The argument uses certain implicit background conditions and laws of nature as additional premises. A variant of this analysis says that a counterfactual is itself a condensed version of such an argument. The analysis is called ‘metalinguistic’ because of its reference to linguistic items such as premises and arguments. The second analysis refers instead to possible worlds. (One may think of possible worlds as ways things might have gone.) This analysis says that the example is true just in case bats hunt during the day in the closest possible world(s) where they are deaf
De re/de dicto
Authors: Gallois Andre
Published: September 2018

‘De re’ and ‘de dicto’ have been used to label a host of different, albeit interrelated, distinctions. ‘De dicto’ means ‘of, or concerning, a dictum’, that is, something having representative content, such as a sentence, statement or proposition. ‘De re’ means ‘of, or concerning, a thing’. For example, a de dicto belief is a belief that a bearer of representative content is true, while a de re belief is a belief concerning some thing, that it has a particular characteristic.

Consider the following example:

- John believes his next-door neighbour is a Buddhist.

This statement is ambiguous. Construed de dicto, it is true in the following circumstance. John has never had any contact with his next-door neighbour. Nevertheless, John believes that his next-door neighbour is bound to be a Buddhist. Construed in this de dicto fashion, the statement does not attribute to John a belief that is distinctively about a particular individual. In contrast, construed de re, it does attribute to John a belief that is about a particular individual. For example, construed de re, the statement is true in the following circumstance. John encounters his next-door neighbour, Fred, at a party without realizing that Fred is his next-door neighbour. On the basis of his conversation with Fred, John forms a belief about the individual who is in fact his next-door neighbour to the effect that he is a Buddhist.
Indirect discourse
Authors: Segal Gabriel
Published: September 2018

Indirect discourse is a mode of speech-reporting whereby a speaker conveys the content of someone’s utterance without quoting the actual words. Thus, if Pierre says, ‘Paris est belle’, an English speaker might truly say,

- (1) Pierre said that Paris is beautiful.

In English, sentences of indirect discourse often have the form ‘A said that s’, where ‘A’ refers to a person and ‘s’ is often called the ‘content sentence’ of the report.

Sentences of indirect discourse have been classed with attributions of belief (and other psychological states) in view of an apparent conflict with the ‘principle of the intersubstitutability of coreferring terms’, which states that the truth-value of a sentence does not alter if one term in a sentence is replaced with another referring to the same thing. If (1) is true and ‘Paris’ and ‘the City of Light’ refer to the same thing, (2) may still be false:

- (2) Pierre said that the City of Light is beautiful.
Logical laws
Authors: Restall Greg
Published: September 2018

There are at least three different kinds of answer to the question ‘What is a logical law?’ One establishes what it means for something to be a logical law. This answers the semantic question: What is the meaning of ‘logical law’? The second explains what makes something a logical law. This answers the metaphysical question: What is the ground of logical law? The third tells you what the logical laws are. This answers the question: What is the extension of ‘logical law’?

Even though logic is often seen as a complete science, the answers to all three questions are disputed. For example, there are at least three different conceptions of what it means for something to be a law of logic. Different conceptions account for logic in terms of necessity, truth in all models, and proof.

There are also different answers to the metaphysical question. If truth-preservation is central to logic, then the ground of logic depends on the metaphysics of truth. If logic is a matter of the meanings of terms, then the metaphysics of meaning is important for logic. Unfortunately, there is no widespread agreement on the metaphysics of meaning or truth.

Finally, there is no widespread agreement as to what the logical laws are. There are two general disputes here. First, it is not clear what notions count as logical. Does logic contain laws about identity, second-order quantification or modality? Second, given agreement on the scope of logic, there are still questions about the logical laws in that area. Intuitionists, quantum logicians, relevance and paraconsistent logicians each reject things taken as laws by others, even in the language of ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘not’.
Mass terms
Authors: Pelletier Jeffry
Published: September 2018

Mass terms are words and phrases such as ‘water’, ‘wood’ and ‘white wallpaper’. They are contrasted with count terms such as ‘woman’, ‘word’ and ‘wild wildebeest’. Intuitively, mass terms refer to ‘stuff’; count terms refer to ‘objects’. Mass terms allow for measurement (‘three kilos of wood’, ‘much water’); count terms allow for counting, quantifying and individuating (‘three women’, ‘each word’, ‘that wildebeest over there’).

Philosophical problems associated with mass terms include (1) distinguishing mass from count terms, (2) describing the semantics of sentences employing mass terms, and (3) explicating the ontology presupposed by our use of mass versus count terms. Associated with these philosophical issues – especially the third – are the meta-philosophical issues concerning the extent to which any investigation into the linguistic practices of speakers of a language can be used as evidence for how those speakers view ‘reality’.
Modal operators
Authors: Schweizer Paul
Published: September 2018

Modal logic is principally concerned with the alethic modalities of necessity and possibility, although this branch of logic is applied to a wide range of linguistic and conceptual phenomena, including natural language semantics, proof theory, theoretical computer science and the formal characterization of knowledge and belief. This wide range of application stems from the basic form of modal assertions, such as ‘it is necessarily the case that φ’, where an entire statement φ is embedded within a context possessing rich logical structure.

When constructing a formal representation of these embedding contexts, there are several choices concerning their specific symbolic form. The most standard approach symbolizes modal contexts as operators, which combine directly with formulas of the object language to yield new formulas. The primary alternative to this approach is to treat modal contexts as predicates, which attach not to formulas directly, but to names of formulas, and thereby attribute a metalinguistic property to a syntactic object. A variation on the operator approach, which assumes the interpretive framework of possible worlds semantics, is to treat modal contexts as quantifications over possible worlds. Finally, a variation on the predicate approach is to analyse modal contexts as predicates of propositions rather than as predicates of syntactic objects.
Presupposition
Authors: Rumfitt Ian
Published: September 2018

There are various senses in which one statement may be said to ‘presuppose’ another, senses which are in permanent danger of being confused. Prominent among them are Strawsonian presupposition, a relation which obtains between statements when the falsity of one deprives the other of truth-value (for example, ‘There was such a person as Kepler’ is a Strawsonian presupposition of ‘Kepler died in misery’); semantic presupposition, which obtains between a statement and a particular use of a sentence type, when the falsity of the statement means that that use will not after all constitute the making of a statement (for example, ‘The name "Kepler" has a bearer’ is a semantic presupposition of ‘Kepler died in misery’); and pragmatic presupposition, a broader notion exemplified by the legitimate presumption that accepting or denying the statement ‘Fred knows that the earth moves’ means accepting ‘The earth moves’.
Anaphora
Authors: Asher Nicholas
Published: September 2018

Anaphora describes a dependence of the interpretation of one natural language expression on the interpretation of another natural language expression. For example, the pronoun ‘her’ in (1) below is anaphorically dependent for its interpretation on the interpretation of the noun phrase ‘Sally’ because ‘her’ refers to the same person ‘Sally’ refers to.

- (1) Sally likes her car.

As (2) below illustrates, anaphoric dependencies also occur across sentences, making anaphora a ‘discourse phenomenon’:

- (2) A farmer owned a donkey. He beat it.

The analysis of anaphoric dependence has been the focus of a great deal of study in linguistics and philosophy. Anaphoric dependencies are difficult to accommodate within the traditional conception of compositional semantics of Tarski and Montague precisely because the meaning of anaphoric elements is dependent on other elements of the discourse.

Many expressions can be used anaphorically. For instance, anaphoric dependencies hold between the expression ‘one’ and the indefinite noun phrase ‘a labrador’ in (3) below; between the verb phrase ‘loves his mother’ and a ‘null’ anaphor (or verbal auxiliary) in (4); between the prepositional phrase ‘to Paris’ and the lexical item ‘there’ in (5); and between a segment of text and the pronoun ‘it’ in (6).

- (3) Susan has a labrador. I want one too.

- (4) John loves his mother. Fred does too.

- (5) I didn’t go to Paris last year. I don’t go there very often.

- (6) One plaintiff was passed over for promotion. Another didn’t get a pay increase for five years. A third received a lower wage than men doing the same work. But the jury didn’t believe any of it.

Some philosophers and linguists have also argued that verb tenses generate anaphoric dependencies.
Propositions, sentences and statements
Authors: Engel Pascal
Published: September 2018

A sentence is a string of words formed according to the syntactic rules of a language. But a sentence has semantic as well as syntactic properties: the words and the whole sentence have meaning. Philosophers have tended to focus on the semantic properties of indicative sentences, in particular on their being true or false. They have called the meanings of such sentences ‘propositions’, and have tied the notion of proposition to the truth-conditions of the associated sentence.

The term ‘proposition’ is sometimes assimilated to the sentence itself; sometimes to the linguistic meaning of a sentence; sometimes to ‘what is said’; sometimes to the contents of beliefs or other ‘propositional’ attitudes. But however propositions are defined, they must have two features: the capacity to be true or false; and compositional structure (being composed of elements which determine their semantic properties).
Sense and reference
Authors: Marti Genoveva
Published: September 2018

The ‘reference’ of an expression is the entity the expression designates or applies to. The ‘sense’ of an expression is the way in which the expression presents that reference. For example, the ancients used ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ to designate what turned out to be the same heavenly body, the planet Venus. These two expressions have the same reference, but they clearly differ in that each presents that reference in a different way. So, although coreferential, each expression is associated with a different ‘sense’. The distinction between sense and reference helps explain the cognitive puzzle posed by identity statements. ‘The morning star is the evening star’ and ‘The morning star is the morning star’ are both true, yet the sentences differ in cognitive significance, since the former may be informative, whereas the latter definitely is not. That difference in cognitive significance cannot be explained just by appeal to the references of the terms, for those are the same. It can, however, be naturally accounted for by appeal to a difference in sense. The terms ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ used in the first sentence, having different senses, present the referent in different ways, whereas no such difference occurs in the second sentence.

The distinction between sense and reference applies to all well-formed expressions of a language. It is part of a general theory of meaning that postulates an intermediate level of sense between linguistic terms and the entities the terms stand for. Senses give significance to expressions, which in and of themselves are just noises or marks on a surface, and connect them to the world. It is because linguistic terms have a sense that they can be used to express judgments, to transmit information and to talk about reality.
Imperative logic
Authors: Green Mitchell
Published: September 2018

Imperatives lie at the heart of both practical and moral reasoning, yet they have been overshadowed by propositions and relegated by many philosophers to the status of exclamations. One reason for this is that a sentence’s having literal meaning seems to require its having truth-conditions and ‘Keep your promises!’ appears to lack such conditions, just as ‘Ouch!’ does. One reductionist attempt to develop a logic of imperatives translates them into declaratives and construes inferential relations among the former in terms of inferential relations among the latter. Since no such reduction seems fully to capture the meaning of imperatives, others have expanded our notion of inference to include not just truth – but also satisfaction – preservation, according to which an imperative is satisfied just in case what it enjoins is brought about.

A logic capturing what is distinctive about imperatives may shed light on the question whether an ‘ought’ is derivable from an ‘is’; and may elucidate the claim that morality is, or comprises, a system of hypothetical imperatives. Furthermore, instructions, which are often formulated as imperatives (‘Take two tablets on an empty stomach!’), are crucial to the construction of plans of action. A proper understanding of imperatives and their inferential properties may thus also illuminate practical reasoning.