Temporal Externalism
"We Live Forwards but Understand Backwards:
Linguistic Practices and Future Behavior"
"Temporal Externalism and Our Ordinary Linguistic Practice"
"Temporal Externalism and Epistemic Theories of Vagueness"
"Temporal Externalism, Constitutive Norms and Theories
of Vagueness"
Semantic Norms and Temporal Externalism,
Charity, Holism & Interpretation
"Charity, Self-Interpretation, and Belief"
"Moderate Holism and the Istability Thesis"
"Holism, Context and Content"
"Minimalism, psychological reality, meaning and use"
"Descriptive Atomism and Foundational Holism"
"Foundationalism, Coherentism and Rule-Following
Skepticism."
"Charity and the Normativity of Meaning"
"Individualism and Interpretation"
"Deference and Self-Knowledge"
"Radical Interpretation and the Permutation Principle"
"Indeterminacy and Assertion"
Intuitions and Philosophical Method
"Semantic intuitions, conceptual
analysis, and cross-cultural variation"
"Intuitions and Semantic Theory"
"Ordinary Language, Conventionalism, and A Priori Knowledge"
Other Philosophy of Language and Mind
"Incompatibility Arguments and Semantic
Self-Knowledge"
"Semantic Pragmatism and A Priori Knowledge"
"Convention and Language"
"Truth, Rationality and Humanity"
"Belief, Rationality, and Psychophisical Laws"
"Conventionalism, Objectivity and Constitution"
"Expression, Thought and Language"
"Davidson, Skepticism and the Pragmatics of Justification"
"Belief Ascriptions, Prototypes and Ambiguity"
William James
"James's Pragmatic Account of Intentionality and
Truth"
"Prudential Arguments, Naturalized Epistemology, and the
Will to Believe"
"James's Naturalistic Account of Concepts and his
'Rejection of Logic'"
"James, Royce, Representation and the Will to Believe"
"James, Intentionality and Analysis"
"Wittgenstein and James's Stream of Thought"
“Pragmatism, Normativity and Naturalism”
"James's Empirical Assumptions"
Philosophy of Language and Mind
Semantic Norms and Temportal Externalism, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1996 [dissertation text in PDF format]
"We Live Forwards but Understand Backwards: Linguistic Practices and Future Behavior", Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 80 (1999) 157-77. ["PDF"][html]
Ascriptions of content are sensitive not only to our physical and social environment, but also to unforeseeable developments in the subsequent usage of our terms. This paper argues that the problems that may seem to come from endorsing such 'temporally sensitive' ascriptions either already follow from accepting the socially and historically sensitive ascriptions Burge and Kripke appeal to, or disappear when the view is developed in detail. If one accepts that one's society's past and current usage contributes to what one's terms mean, there is little reason not to let its future usage to do so as well.
"Temporal Externalism, Deference and Our Ordinary Linguistic Practice" Pacific Philosophical Quarterly,86 (2005) 379-94.. [PDF]
Temporal externalists argue that ascriptions of thought and utterance content can legitimately reflect contingent conceptual developments that are only settled after the time of utterance. While the view has been criticized for failing to accord with our ‘ordinary linguistic practices’, such criticisms (1) conflate our ordinary ascriptional practices with our more general beliefs about meaning, and (2) fail to distinguish epistemically from pragmatically motivated linguistic changes. Temporal externalism relates only to the former sort of changes, and the future usage relevant to what we mean reflects reason-driven practices that are rational for us to defer to.
"Temporal Externalism and Epistemic Theories of Vagueness" , Philosophical Studies, V 117, no.1-2, Jan 2004, pp. 79-94.[PDF]
'Epistemic' theories of vagueness notoriously claim that (despite the appearances to the contrary) all of our vague terms have sharp boundaries, it's just that we can't know what they are. Epistemic theories are typically criticized for failing to explain (1) the source of the ignorance postulated, and (2) how our terms could come to have such precise boundaries. Both of these objections will, however, be shown to rest on certain 'presentist' assumptions about the relation between use and meaning, and if allows that the meaning constitutive elements of our linguistic practices can extend into the future, the possibility of a new sort of 'normative epistemicism' emerges.
"Temporal Externalism, Constitutive Norms, and Theories of Vagueness" In Tomas Marvan (ed.), What Determines Content? The Internalism/Externalism Dispute, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press (2006)
Our concept of truth is governed by two principles. The ‘disquotational’ principle, which manifests itself in our commitment to T-sentences, and the ‘correspondence’ principle, which manifests itself in our commitment to meaning being a function of use. It has recently been argued that the phenomenon of vagueness brings these principles into conflict and thus shows that our pretheoretic concept of truth is inconsistent. This paper argues that the supposed conflict only occurs if one presupposes a ‘presentist’ conception of semantic facts, and that such semantic presentism is much more reasonable to give up than either the correspondence or disquotational principles.
"Moderate Holism and the Instability Thesis", American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 36, No.4, October 1999. ["PDF][html]
This paper argues that popular criticisms of semantic holism (such as that it leaves the ideas of translation, disagreement and change of mind problematic) are more properly directed at an "instability assumption" which, while often associated with holism, can be separated from it. The versions of holism that follow from 'interpretational' account of meaning are not committed to the instability assumption and can thus avoid many of the problems traditionally associated with holism.
"Holism, Context and Content", [PDF] presented to the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, April 2004, APA Central Division Meeting, April 2004, and the European society for Philosophy and Psychology, July 2004.
This paper will argue that while traditional accounts of word meaning have problems accounting for how the referent of a non-ambiguous/non-indexical term can shift from context to context, a moderate version of semantic holism can do so by understanding the comparative weight of the extension-determining beliefs as itself something which can vary from context to context. The view will then be used to give an account of some of the more problematic cases in the literature associated with semantic externalism.
“Descriptive Atomism and Foundational Holism: Semantics between the Old Testament and the New” in Gerhard Preyer, (ed): Protosociology, Vol 21: Compositionality, Concepts and Representations, 2005.
While holism and atomism are often treated as mutually exclusive approaches to semantic theory, the apparent tension between the two usually results from running together distinct levels of semantic explanation. In particular, there is no reason why one can’t combine an atomistic conception of what the semantic values of our words are (one’s “descriptive semantics”), with a holistic explanation of why they have those values (one’s “foundational semantics”). Most objections to holism can be shown to apply only to holistic version of descriptive semantics, and do not tell against any sorts of holistic foundational semantics. As Davidson’s work will be used to illustrate, by clearly distinguishing foundational and descriptive semantics, one can capture the most appealing features of both holism and atomism.
"Minimalism, psychological reality, meaning and use" Gerhard Preyer and George Peter (eds), Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford University Press, Forthcoming.
"Semantic Minimalists" holds that there are virtually no semantically context sensitive expressions in English. In particular, they claim that the semantics for terms like "red", "tall", "ready", "every", or "know" are not (contrary to many popular semantic theories) context sensitive. While minimalism strikes many as obviously false, it will be argued here that the view is more plausible than commonly assumed if one accepts the 'normative' conception of the relation between meaning and use characteristic of the literature on semantic externalism.
"Charity and the Normativity of Meaning" [PDF] presented at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, Paloalto, CA, March 2004,
It has frequently been suggested that meaning is, in some important sense, normative. However, precisely what is particularly normative about it is often left without any satisfactory explanation, and the ‘normativity thesis’ has thus, justly, been called into question. That said, it will be argued here that the intuition that meaning is ‘normative’ is on the right track, even if many of the purported explanations for meaning’s normativity are not. In particular, rather that being particularly social, the normativity of meaning may follow from the more logical/epistemic relations between use and meaning. Because of this, some use-based theories we still be able to accommodate the normativity of meaning by allowing that while meaning supervenes upon use, the function from use to meaning is a normative one.
"Charity, Self-Interpretation, and Belief" [PDF] Journal of Philosophical Research, Forthcoming.
The purpose of this paper is to motivate and defend a recognizable version of what is commonly known as "The Principle of Charity." The version of the Principle familiar though the work of Quine and Davidson has struck many philosophers as implausible, but it will be argued here that this is because those authors misrepresent the Principle's character and the possible motivations for it. The Principle of Charity is not subject to most of the objections commonly launched against it, and, properly understood, it can be motivated in terms of plausible constraints internal to the interpretation process.
"Intutions and Semantic Theory" [PDF]Metaphilosophy, Forthcoming.
While engaged in the analysis of topics such as the nature of knowledge, meaning, or justice, analytic philosophers have traditionally relied extensively on their own intuitions about when the relevant terms can, and can't, be correctly applied. Consequently, if intuitions about possible cases turned out not to be a reliable tool for the proper analysis of philosophically central concepts, then a radical reworking of philosophy's (or at least analytic philosophy's) methodology would seem to be in order. It is thus not surprising that the increasingly critical scrutiny that intuitions have received of late has produced what has been referred to as a "crisis" in analytic philosophy. This paper will argue, however, that at least those criticisms that stem from recent work on semantic externalism are not as serious as their proponents have claimed. Indeed, this paper will argue while the conceptual intuitions (and the analyses that result from them) will have to be recognized as fallible, they still have a prima facie claim to correctness. A naturalistic and externalistic account of concepts thus merely requires that the methodology of conceptual analysis be reinterpreted (from a 'Platonic' to a 'constructive' model) rather than given up.
"Truth, Rationality and Humanity" [PDF] Presented at the 2000 meeting of the Ontario Philosophical Association, October 2000.
When we interpret someone in terms of their beliefs and desires, we are doing something other than merely describing them, but it is far from clear what this something else is. As Dennett puts it, while there is a growing consensus about the "not-purely-descriptive nature of intentional attribution," there remains considerable disagreement over which norms govern the play of this "dramatic interpretation game." This paper will discuss three candidates for specifying the content of these norms, truth, rationality and humanity. It will argue that while truth has frequently been taken to be the least plausible candidate, once the regulative rather than constitutive status of these norms are recognized, it turns out to be the best one. It will then close with a discussion of the 'indirect' role that rationality constraints can still be seen to play in a theory of belief.
"Semantic Pragmatism and A Priori Knowledge" [PDF] Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Forthcoming.
Hillary Putnam has famously argued that we can know that we are not brains in a vat because the hypothesis that we are is self-refuting. While Putnam's argument has generated interest primarily as a novel response to skepticism, his original use of the brain in a vat scenario was meant to illustrate a point about the "mind/world relationship." In particular, he intended it to be part of an argument against the coherence of metaphysical realism, and thus to be part of a defense of his conception of truth as idealized rational acceptability. Putnam's conclusions about the scenario are, however, actually out of line with central and plausible aspects of his own account of the relationship between our minds and the world. Reflections on semantics give us no compelling reason to suppose that claims like "I am a brain in a vat" could not turn out to be true.
"Conventionalism, Objectivity and Constitution" [PDF] Presented at the 2000 Meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association, May 2000. [html]
John Haugeland has recently attempted to provide a naturalistic account of intentionality that explains how we can (collectively) misidentify objects in the world in terms of the interplay of two types of 'recognitional' skill. Nevertheless, it is argued here that his inegalitarian conception of the two sorts of skill leaves him with a quasi-conventionalist account of our relation to the world which lacks the more robust sort of objectivity that a more holistic theory could provide.
"Convention and Language" [PDF]Synthese, 117 (3) 1998:295-312.[html]
This paper has three objectives. The first is to show how David Lewis' influential account of how a population is related to its language requires that speakers be 'conceptually autonomous' in a way that is incompatible with content ascriptions following from the assumption that its speakers share a language. The second objective is to sketch an alternate account of the psychological and sociological facts that relate a population to its language. The third is to suggest a modification of Lewis' account of convention that will allow one to preserve the claim that there are conventions of language.
"Ordinary Language, Conventionalism, and A Priori Knowledge" [PDF]Dialectica, Forthcoming. [html]
This paper examines popular 'conventionalist' explanations of why philosophers need not back up their claims about how 'we' use our words with empirical studies of actual usage. It argues that such explanations are incompatible with a number of currently popular and plausible assumptions about language's 'social' character. Alternate explanations of the philosopher's purported entitlement to make a priori claims about 'our' usage are then suggested. While these alternate explanations would, unlike the conventionalist ones, be compatible with the more social picture of language, they are each shown to face serious problems of their own.
"Radical Interpretation and the Permutation Principle", [PDF] Erkenntnis. v. 44, no. 3: pp. 317-26.
Davidson has claimed that to conclude that reference is inscrutable, one must assume that "If some theory of truth . . . is satisfactory in the light of all relevant evidence . . . then any theory that is generated from the first theory by a permutation will also be satisfactory in the light of all relevant evidence." This paper argues, however, that given that theories of truth are not directly read off the world, but rather serve as parts of larger theories of behavior, this assumption is far from self-evident. A proper understanding of the role truth theories play in theories of interpretation makes the inscrutability of reference much less wide-spread than Davidson suggests, and, as a result, the radical interpretation methodology is much less likely to saddle its defenders with counterintuitive cases of indeterminacy than is commonly supposed.
"Indeterminacy and Assertion", [PDF]Presented at the 2000 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy, March 2000. [html]
This paper will appeal a recent argument for the indeterminacy of translation to show not that meaning is indeterminate, but rather that assertion cannot be explained in terms of an independent grasp of the concept of truth. In particular, it will argue that if we try to explain assertion in terms of truth rather than vice versa, we ultimately will not be able to make sense of the difference between assertion and denial. This problem with such 'semantic' accounts of assertion then illustrates why we need not worry about the purported argument for indeterminacy.
"Foundationalism, Coherentism and Rule-Following Skepticism.", [PDF] International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Forthcoming.
Semantic holists view what one's terms mean as function of all of one's usage. Holists will thus be coherentists about semantic justification: showing that one's usage of a term is semantically justified involves showing how it coheres with the rest of one's usage. Semantic atomists, by contrast, understand semantic justification in a foundationalist fashion. Saul Kripke has, on Wittgenstein's behalf, famously argued for a type of skepticism about meaning and semantic justification. However, Kripke's argument has bite only if one understands semantic justification in foundationalist terms. Consequently, Kripke's arguments lead not to a type of skepticism about meaning, but rather to the conclusion that one should be a coherentist about semantic justification, and thus a holist about semantic facts.
"Expression, Thought and Language",[PDF] Philosophia, Forthcoming
This paper discusses an "expressive constraint" on accounts of thought and language which requires that when a speaker expresses a belief by sincerely uttering a sentence, the utterance and the belief have the same content. It will be argued that this constraint should be viewed as expressing a conceptual connection between thought and language rather than a mere empirical generalization about the two. However, the most obvious accounts of the relation between thought and language compatible with the constraint (giving an independent account of one of either linguistic meaning or thought content and understanding the other in terms of it) both face serious difficulties. Because of this, the following will suggest an alternative picture of the relation between thought and language that remains compatible with the constraint.
"Individualism and Interpretation" [PDF] Southwest Philosophy Review V.14, n. 1, Jan 1998. [html]
'Interpretational' accounts of meaning are frequently treated as incompatible with accounts stressing language's 'social' character. However, this paper argues that one can reconcile interpretational and social accounts by distinguishing "methodological" from "ascriptional" individualism. While methodological individualism requires only that the meaning of one's terms ultimately be grounded in facts about oneself, ascriptional individualism requires that the meaning of one's terms be independent of how others use theirs. Interpretational accounts are committed only to methodological individualism, while arguments for languages social character are best understood as attacks on ascriptional individualism. As a result, one can recognize language's social character and still be an interpretationalist.
"Deference and Self-Knowledge" [PDF] Southwest Philosophy Review, V.16, n. 1, Jan 2000. [html]
It has become increasingly popular to suggest that non-individualistic theories of content undermine our purported a priori knowledge of such contents because they entail that we lack the ability to distinguish our thoughts from alternative thoughts with different contents. However, problems relating to such knowledge of 'comparative' content tell just as much against individualism as non-individualism. Indeed, the problems presented by individualistic theories of content for self-knowledge are at least, if not more, serious than those presented by non-individualistic theories. Consequently, considerations of self-knowledge give one no reason to embrace individualism. If anything, they give one reason to reject it.
"Belief, Rationality, and Psychophisical Laws" [PDF] Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Volume9: Philosophy of Mind. [html]
This paper argues that Davidson's claim that the connection between belief and the "constitutive ideal of rationality" precludes the possibility of any type-type identities between mental and physical events relies on blurring the distinction between two ways of understanding this "constitutive ideal", and that no consistent understanding the constitutive ideal allows it to play the dialectical role Davidson intends for it.
"Davidson, Skepticism and the Pragmatics of Justification" [PDF] Presented at Society for Realist/Anti-Realist Discussion, APA Central Division Meeting, May 1998. [html]
This paper is concerned with Davidson's argument that very general properties of the theory of interpretation make the skeptical claim that most of our beliefs could turn out to be false insupportable. Conceived as a 'straight' answer to the skeptic Davidson's argument is not especially convincing. In particular, Davidson's answer to the skeptic presupposes a framework that allows for a new and seemingly more radical skepticism according to which we might not even have beliefs at all. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which Davidson's account of content remaps the conceptual terrain in a fashion that absolves us of the need to rule out the scenarios the skeptic describes. The paper will both present the problems Davidson's position has as a 'straight' solution to skepticism, and discuss the way in which his externalism does weaken the strength of the skeptical challenge.
"Belief Ascriptions, Prototypes and Ambiguity", [PDF] Presented at the APA Central Division Meeting, April 2000. [html]
Many philosophers have suggested that belief predicates are ambiguous between a de dicto and a de re reading. However, the impression of ambiguity is a function of the narrow ranges of examples that philosophers focus on. When we consider our ascriptional practices as a whole, the suggestion that belief predicates are ambiguous is neither plausible nor needed to explain the de dicto/de re distinction. This paper will argue that understanding paradigmatic de dicto and de re ascriptions in terms of disavowals from a more basic sort of ascription is preferable to positing an ambiguity in which each of the two sorts of ascription are conceptually primitive.
William James
"James' Pragmatic Account of Intentionality and Truth" [PDF] The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Winter 1998, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1. [html]
William James presents a preference-sensitive and future-directed notion of truth that has struck many as wildly revisionary. This paper argues that such a reaction usually results from failing to see how his accounts of truth and intentionality are intertwined. James' forward-looking account of intentionality (or "knowing") compares favorably the 'causal' and 'resemblance-driven' accounts that have been popular since his day, and it is only when his remarks about truth are placed in the context of his account of intentionality that they come to seem as plausible as they manifestly did to James.
"Prudential Arguments, Naturalized Epistemology, and the Will to Believe", [PDF] Transactions of the C.S Peirce Society Winter 1999, Vol. XXXV, No. 1. [html]
This paper argues that treating James' "The Will to Believe" as a defense of prudential reasoning about belief seriously misrepresents it. Rather than being a precursor to current defenses of prudential arguments, James paper has, if anything, more affinities to certain prominent strains in contemporary naturalized epistemology.
"James's Naturalistic Account of Concepts and his 'Rejection of Logic'" ["PDF] Presented at the 1999 Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, February 1999. [html]
Logic is viewed by many as inseparable from rationality, and James' 'rejection of logic' in A Pluralistic Universe may be the most flagrantly 'irrational' strand in his philosophy. Nevertheless, when viewed in the context of the psychological naturalism developed in The Principles of Psychology, James' 'rejection of logic' can seem both plausible and, crucially, rational. James' rejection of conceptual logic is deeply connected to his naturalism about concepts, and his belief that there is no reason to think that an intellect "built up of practical interests" need develop concepts that accurately mirror the structure of reality. James position is, then, not so much that we should give up logic, but rather that (given the practical rather than theoretical nature of our concepts) we should give up the assumption that we are rationally obligated to accept all the apparent logical consequences of all the claims that we accept.
"James, Royce, Representation and the Will to Believe", [PDF] Mid-South Philosophy Conference, February 2001.
This paper discusses the relationship between the views of James and Royce on representation and their attempts to explain the "possibility of error," views which are, I argue, closer than many have thought. Appreciating where they do differ will point not only to an unstressed problem with Royces' argument for the Absolute but also to some unappreciated features of how James' account of truth ties in with his account of epistemic justification.
"James, Intentionality and Analysis" , [PDF] Presented at the 2002 Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, March 2002.
James was always interested in the problem of how our thoughts come to be about the world. Nevertheless, if one takes James to be trying to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a thought's being about an object, counterexamples to his account will be embarrassingly easy to find. James, however, was not aiming for this sort of analysis of intentionality. Rather than trying to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for every case of a thought's being about an object, James focused his analysis on the prototypical/paradigm cases. This analysis of the core could then be supplemented with additional remarks about how the less prototypical cases could be understood in terms of their relations to (and similarities with) the paradigm. It is argued that this type of analysis is psychologically well motivated, and makes James account surprisingly plausible.
"Wittgenstein and James's Stream of Thought", [PDF] Presented at the 2004 meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy.
William James has been characterized as “the major whipping boy of the later Wittgenstein,” and the currency of this impression of the relation between James and Wittgenstein is understandable. Reading Wittgenstein and his commentators can leave one with the impression that James was a badly muddled “exponent of the tradition in the philosophy of mind that [Wittgenstein] was opposing.” There have been recent attempts to resist this trend, but even these tend to focus on the affinities between the two philosophers, still accepting the prevailing view that Wittgenstein was often critical of James, and that in such cases Wittgenstein was always right and James was always wrong. By contrast, by focusing on Wittgenstein’s discussion of James’s “if-feeling”, it will be argued that Wittgenstein’s criticisms of James are often not as damaging, or even as extensive, as has often been assumed.
“Pragmatism, Normativity and Naturalism”, [PDF] to appear in Ghiraldelli, P. (ed) What is Pragmatism? Londrina: South America Theology Institute. 2004.
This paper argues that, according to James, we are committed to their being a kind of stable consensus, and we are committed to its being one that we can recognize ourselves in, but by underwriting such regulative ideals through a ‘will to believe’ rather than a transcendental argument, we make our commitment to their being an end of inquiry a practical rather than theoretical one. Objectivity is something we are committed to making, not something that we are committed to their already being out there to find. There is thus no limit we are approaching that is independent of our approach. Pragmatism is thus a position between Realism and Subjectivism because it takes it as unsettled which story will ultimately hold for us. Subjectivism may reign even after we do our best, but we might be able to do better, and if we can, it is incumbent upon us to do so.
"James's Empirical Assumptions",
[PDF] Streams of William James, Volume
6, Issue 1, Spring 2004
Those sympathetic to the naturalistic side of James hope that his critique of ‘philosophical materialism’ can be separated from those elements of his thinking that are essential to his pragmatism. Such a separation is possible once we see that James’s critique of materialism grows out of his views about its incompatibility with the existence of objective values. Objective values (as James understands them) are incompatible, however, not with materialism in its most general form, but rather with materialism that understood the ‘material world’ in terms of the sciences of the late nineteen hundreds. In particular, one could not defend the potential objectivity of value in the way that James hoped if one endorsed the particular ‘pessimistic’ cosmology characteristic of the sciences at the turn of the last century. Consequently, if one rejects certain ‘empirical assumptions’ associated with the science of James’s day, the possibility of a type of ‘melioristic materialism’ opens up, and this sort of materialist could still understand value in the way that James proposes.
William James
"James' Pragmatic Account of Intentionality and Truth" The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Winter 1998, Vol. XXXIV, No. 1. [html]
William James presents a preference-sensitive and future-directed notion of truth that has struck many as wildly revisionary. This paper argues that such a reaction usually results from failing to see how his accounts of truth and intentionality are intertwined. James' forward-looking account of intentionality (or "knowing") compares favorably the 'causal' and 'resemblance-driven' accounts that have been popular since his day, and it is only when his remarks about truth are placed in the context of his account of intentionality that they come to seem as plausible as they manifestly did to James.
"Prudential Arguments, Naturalized Epistemology, and the Will to Believe", Transactions of the C.S Peirce Society Winter 1999, Vol. XXXV, No. 1. [html]
This paper argues that treating James' "The Will to Believe" as a defense of prudential reasoning about belief seriously misrepresents it. Rather than being a precursor to current defenses of prudential arguments, James paper has, if anything, more affinities to certain prominent strains in contemporary naturalized epistemology.
"James' Naturalistic Account of Concepts and his 'Rejection of Logic'" Presented at the 1999 Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, February 1999. [html]
Logic is viewed by many as inseparable from rationality, and James' 'rejection of logic' in A Pluralistic Universe may be the most flagrantly 'irrational' strand in his philosophy. Nevertheless, when viewed in the context of the psychological naturalism developed in The Principles of Psychology, James' 'rejection of logic' can seem both plausible and, crucially, rational. James' rejection of conceptual logic is deeply connected to his naturalism about concepts, and his belief that there is no reason to think that an intellect "built up of practical interests" need develop concepts that accurately mirror the structure of reality. James position is, then, not so much that we should give up logic, but rather that (given the practical rather than theoretical nature of our concepts) we should give up the assumption that we are rationally obligated to accept all the apparent logical consequences of all the claims that we accept.
"James, Royce, Representation and the Will to Believe", Mid-South Philosophy Conference, February 2001.
This paper discusses the relationship between the views of James and Royce on representation and their attempts to explain the "possibility of error," views which are, I argue, closer than many have thought. Appreciating where they do differ will point not only to an unstressed problem with Royces' argument for the Absolute but also to some unappreciated features of how James' account of truth ties in with his account of epistemic justification.
"James, Intentionality and Analysis" Presented at the 2002 Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, March 2002.
James was always interested in the problem of how our thoughts come to be about the world. Nevertheless, if one takes James to be trying to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a thought's being about an object, counterexamples to his account will be embarrassingly easy to find. James, however, was not aiming for this sort of analysis of intentionality. Rather than trying to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for every case of a thought's being about an object, James focused his analysis on the prototypical/paradigm cases. This analysis of the core could then be supplemented with additional remarks about how the less prototypical cases could be understood in terms of their relations to (and similarities with) the paradigm. It is argued that this type of analysis is psychologically well motivated, and makes James account surprisingly plausible.