We provide a critical study of Alex Byrne’s Transparency and Self-Knowledge.The study proceeds in... more We provide a critical study of Alex Byrne’s Transparency and Self-Knowledge.The study proceeds in three stages. First, we summarize the main features that, according to Byrne, any adequate account of basic self-knowledge should satisfy-namely, that the account should (i) explain the privilege (special epistemic security) and peculiarity (distinctive epistemic features) of basic self-knowledge, in a way that is (ii) economical (not positing any extravagant epistemic method), (iii) uniform (accounting for all basic self-belief in the same way), and (iii) detectivist (acknowledging that self-beliefs track independent mental states). Second, we summarize Byrne’s transparency account and argue that the features of this account are in tension with the desiderata Byrne himself has proposed. According to Byrne’s account, basic self-beliefs are the product of transparent inferences from world-directed beliefs; for instance, one infers, from the premise that p, to the conclusion that one believes that p. Although such an inference is logically ’mad’, Byrne argues that carrying out the inference nevertheless results in safe, true self-beliefs, and hence is a good epistemic rule to follow. We argue that Byrne’s account must invoke an epistemically deflated notion of ‘inference’ that cannot actually account for the privilege and peculiarity of basic self-beliefs while remaining economical. We also argue that Byrne’s account must posit worlds of facts that are proprietary to sensation and perception (e.g., a world of pain, a world of vision, even a world of nausea) that risk metaphysical extravagance. Finally, in the third stage, we sketch an alternative non-transparency-based schema for modelling basic self-knowledge that can account for privilege and peculiarity in an economical, uniform, and detectivist manner, without invoking what we see to be the extravagances of Byrne’s account and what we see to be contentious commitments concerning the nature of inference. The availability of accounts falling under this schema raises a challenge for Byrne: Byrne needs to demonstrate how the transparency account can do better in meeting the desiderata Byrne himself has laid out than this alternative schema.
Certain problematic philosophical positions can, I believe, be traced back to an excessively narr... more Certain problematic philosophical positions can, I believe, be traced back to an excessively narrow conception of linguistic understanding. On that conception-which I describe as a 'theory'-theory of language understanding-our understanding of other people's speech is to be explicated as fundamentally a theoretical process of figuring out, tacitly perhaps, on the basis of observation, evidence, and inference the correct interpretation of the sounds they make in speaking. 1 It can be argued, for example, that this conception plays an important role in Quine's arguments for his well-known indeterminacy thesis. 2 And it may lie behind some of Dummett's arguments for global anti-realism that proceed from considerations about speakers' linguistic understanding. 3 In this paper, I want to argue that certain mistakes committed by both proponents and opponents of so-called Conceptual Relativism can be also traced back to a commitment to the 'theory'-theory conception of linguistic understanding. A less artificial, `non-theoretical' conception would allow us to make intuitive sense of the possibility of genuine conceptual diversity. But acknowledging this possibility does not force us to join the camp of contemporary radical relativists. Accepting the possibility of conceptual diversity, I will argue, is consistent with rejecting relativism. Let me begin by formulating four different claims that have been made in connection with Conceptual Relativism. (I) There can be substantive differences among conceptual 'frameworks' or 'schemes' or 'world views' across different cultural, social, historical, etc. groups. (II) We cannot adjudicate among divergent conceptual schemes. (III) The correctness of a conceptual scheme is relative to culture, society, historical period, etc.; there is no absolute, culturally-(or socially-) independent standard for assessing conceptual correctness. I will call (I) the Conceptual Diversity claim. (II) will be the Impossibility of Adjudication claim. (III) is the Conceptual Relativity claim. These claims have familiar analogues in the
Ordinarily, if a person produces a nonreflective, ‘unstudied’ self-attribution of a present menta... more Ordinarily, if a person produces a nonreflective, ‘unstudied’ self-attribution of a present mental state – an avowal – we do not presume that they have produced the avowal on some specific epistemic basis; and we do not expect them to know how they know the self-attribution to be true. This no-‘how’ character of basic selfknowledge is puzzling, given that we regard avowals as manifesting factual, and indeed privileged, knowledge. I am here interested in views that accommodate both the baseless, no-‘how’ and the factual, privileged character of basic self-knowledge. I argue that leading constitutivist views, which embrace both, fail properly to meet the doxastic (as opposed to justificatory) requirement on basic self-knowledge, thereby failing to preserve its genuinely factual character. I then argue that an alternative, neo-expressivist approach is better placed to meet the doxastic requirement, as well as being at least as well-placed as constitutivist views to address the justificatory requirement on baseless self-knowledge.
Semantic Eliminativism and the Theory-Theory of Linguistic Understanding
Canadian journal of philosophy. Supplementary volume, 2004
Suppose, familiarly, that you and a friend have landed in an alien territory, amidst people who s... more Suppose, familiarly, that you and a friend have landed in an alien territory, amidst people who speak a language you do not know. Upon seeing you, one of them starts yelling, seemingly alarmed. You say to your friend, “She thinks we want to hurt her. She's scared. We must seem very strange to her.” Your friend, who is facing you, says, “No, I think she's actually trying to warn you: there's a snake right above your head, on that tree. You see the sling in her hand? I think she's going to try to shoot it down.“On a prevalent view, much discussed in recent years, you and your friend have engaged in a mini-theoretical enterprise. Using certain observations of the alien's behaviour as your data, and deploying certain generalizations and principles concerning human behaviour, you advance hypotheses regarding the internal psychological states which issued in her observed behaviour.
Justifying Beliefs: The Dream Hypothesis and Gratuitous Entities
Springer eBooks, 1990
Paul Moser distinguishes two roads leading to skepticism, the low road and the high road, both of... more Paul Moser distinguishes two roads leading to skepticism, the low road and the high road, both of which, he argues, are dead-ends. Travellers of the low road, among whom he identifies defenders of Cartesian skepticism like Barry Stroud, are guilty of setting excessively high and unjustified requirements for knowledge, thereby “redefining what knowledge is”. At worst, they pose a threat to our claims to shnow things. But shnowing is not knowing. Human knowledge — as opposed to the fabricated shnowledge — may still be secure. Travellers of the high roads, on the other hand, do tell us something about knowledge: that our ordinary requirements for knowledge cannot or do not get met even in the cases of mundane physical-object statements. However, what they tell us is false; a proper account of the relevant requirements, which Moser outlines, would reveal that high-road skepticism, too, can be defeated. According to this account, the common-sense realist belief in physical objects wins hands down over the skeptic’s outlandish hypotheses.
‘Pragmatics First’: Animal Communication and the Evolution of Language
Review of philosophy and psychology, Jan 25, 2024
Research on the evolution of language is often framed in terms of sharp discontinuities in syntax... more Research on the evolution of language is often framed in terms of sharp discontinuities in syntax and semantics between animal communication systems and human language as we know them. According to the so-called "pragmatics-first" approach to the evolution of language, when trying to understand the origins of human language in animal communication, we should be focusing on potential pragmatic continuities. However, some proponents of this approach (e.g. Seyfarth & Cheney 2017) find important pragmatic continuities, whereas others (e.g. Origgi & Sperber 2000) find sharp discontinuities. I begin (in Section 1) by arguing that this divergence is due to the fact that the proponents implicitly rely, respectively, on two different views of pragmatics, corresponding to different conceptions of what is involved in context-dependence-one "Carnapian", the other "Gricean". I argue that neither conception is fit to serve the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the evolution of language. In Section 2, I examine a recent formal "semantic-pragmatic" analysis of monkey calls, due to Philippe Schlenker et al. (in, e.g., 2014, 2016 a, b, 2017), which appears to improve on the Carnapian and Gricean conceptions. However, I argue that the appearances are misleading and that the S-P analysis is no better suited than Carnapian analyses for the purposes of those seeking to establish human-nonhuman pragmatic continuities. Understanding why this is so will point the way toward my preferred, genuinely intermediate conception of pragmatics (as defended in OMITTED), which-I argue in Section 3-is better fit for these purposes. Drawing on recent discussions of chimpanzee communication, I briefly indicate which aspects of extant primate call communication-both gestural and vocal-could potentially count as pragmatic according to this conception.
This chapter concerns the nature of the expression relation. Section 1 reviews two philosophical ... more This chapter concerns the nature of the expression relation. Section 1 reviews two philosophical puzzles – one concerning the origins of meaning, the other concerning ‘first-person authority’ – and well-known ‘expressivist’ attempts to address them. Section 2 sketches the neo-expressivist view of expression and expressive behavior (Bar-On 2004 and elsewhere; Bar-On and Wright 2024). Section 3 explains how neo-expressivism captures both differences and similarities between expressive communication before and after language and provides more viable solutions to the puzzles, through its appeal to the idea that expressive behavior – whether linguistic or non-linguistic – is designed to show (or display) expressers’ mental states. Section 4 explains how the idea of expressing-as-showing can apply to the use of linguistic expressives. Section 5 questions whether ‘use-conditional’ accounts of linguistic expressivity that follow Kaplan (1999) have the resources to address the two puzzles. It also argues that such accounts do not adequately capture the distinction between descriptive vs. expressive uses of language. Key words: expression, expressive behavior, neo-expressivism, origins of meaning, first-person authority, descriptive vs. expressive, expressing-as-showing, ‘use-conditional’ accounts, linguistic expressives
A standard way to explain the connection between ethical claims and motivation is to say that the... more A standard way to explain the connection between ethical claims and motivation is to say that these claims express motivational attitudes. Unless this connection is taken to be merely a matter of contingent psychological regularity, it may seem that there are only two options for understanding it. Either we can treat ethical claims as expressing propositions that entail something about the speaker's motivational attitudes (subjectivism), or we can treat ethical claims as nonpropositional and as having their semantic content constituted by the motivational attitudes they directly express (noncognitivism). In this chapter, we argue that there is another option, which can be recognized once we see that there is no need to build the expression relation between ethical claims and motivational states of mind into the semantic content of ethical claims. In articulating the third option, we try to capture what we think is worth preserving about the classical expressivist idea that ethical claims directly express motivational states, and separate it from the wrong semantic ideas with which it has traditionally been caught up. Doing so requires arguing for and deploying a distinction between claims considered as products-such as sentences-and claims considered as linguistic acts-such as utterances. In our view, the former are properly seen as standing in an expression relation to propositions, whereas the latter are properly seen as standing in an expression relation to mental states. In the first section below, we use this act/product distinction to defend a ''neo-expressivist'' view of the way in which ethical claims express For helpful feedback on earlier versions of this chapter, we'd like to thank the audience at the fourth annual metaethics workshop in Madison, Wisconsin (especially
Research on the evolution of language is often framed in terms of sharp discontinuities in syntax... more Research on the evolution of language is often framed in terms of sharp discontinuities in syntax and semantics between animal communication systems and human language as we know them. According to the so-called "pragmatics-first" approach to the evolution of language, when trying to understand the origins of human language in animal communication, we should be focusing on potential pragmatic continuities. However, some proponents of this approach (e.g. Seyfarth & Cheney 2017) find important pragmatic continuities, whereas others (e.g. Origgi & Sperber 2000) find sharp discontinuities. I begin (in Section 1) by arguing that this divergence is due to the fact that the proponents implicitly rely, respectively, on two different views of pragmatics, corresponding to different conceptions of what is involved in context-dependence-one "Carnapian", the other "Gricean". I argue that neither conception is fit to serve the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the evolution of language. In Section 2, I examine a recent formal "semantic-pragmatic" analysis of monkey calls, due to Philippe Schlenker et al. (in, e.g., 2014, 2016 a, b, 2017), which appears to improve on the Carnapian and Gricean conceptions. However, I argue that the appearances are misleading and that the S-P analysis is no better suited than Carnapian analyses for the purposes of those seeking to establish human-nonhuman pragmatic continuities. Understanding why this is so will point the way toward my preferred, genuinely intermediate conception of pragmatics (as defended in OMITTED), which-I argue in Section 3-is better fit for these purposes. Drawing on recent discussions of chimpanzee communication, I briefly indicate which aspects of extant primate call communication-both gestural and vocal-could potentially count as pragmatic according to this conception.
Even a cursory look at the literature on animal communication reveals that, on a dominant view, t... more Even a cursory look at the literature on animal communication reveals that, on a dominant view, the theoretical task of explaining the evolution of linguistic meaning is to be understood in (at least roughly) Gricean terms. After raising some diffi culties for the Gricean approach to the emergence of meaning, I will motivate an alternative conception of the explanatory task, which focuses on the potential of non-Gricean, expressive communication for illuminating the origins of meaning. This conception not only seems ethologically plausible and philosophically cogent, but it also renders the puzzle of language evolution more tractable by treating meaningfulness as a multifaceted phenomenon with potentially divergent evolutionary roots.
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Papers by Dorit Bar-On
Key words: expression, expressive behavior, neo-expressivism, origins of meaning, first-person authority, descriptive vs. expressive, expressing-as-showing, ‘use-conditional’ accounts, linguistic expressives