Thoughts Animals Can TU. Attributhg Beliefs and Describing Content
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Stalnaker on Sleeping Beauty Brian Weatherson
Stalnaker on Sleeping Beauty Brian Weatherson The Sleeping Beauty puzzle provides a nice illustration of the approach to self-lo- cating belief defended by Robert Stalnaker in Our Knowledge of the Internal World (Stalnaker, 2008), as well as a test of the utility of that method. The setup of the Sleeping Beauty puzzle is by now fairly familiar. On Sunday Sleeping Beauty is told the rules of the game, and a (known to be) fair coin is flipped. On Monday, Sleeping Beauty is woken, and then put back to sleep. If, and only if, the coin landed tails, she is woken again on Tuesday after having her memory of the Monday awakening erased.1 On Wednesday she is woken again and the game ends. There are a few ques- tions we can ask about Beauty’s attitudes as the game progresses. We’d like to know what her credence that the coin landed heads should be (a) Before she goes to sleep Sunday; (b) When she wakes on Monday; (c) When she wakes on Tuesday; and (d) When she wakes on Wednesday? Standard treatments of the Sleeping Beauty puzzle ignore (d), run together (b) and (c) into one (somewhat ill-formed) question, and then divide theorists into ‘halfers’ or ‘thirders’ depending on how they answer it. Following Stalnaker, I’m going to focus on (b) here, though I’ll have a little to say about (c) and (d) as well. I’ll be following 1 orthodoxy in taking 2 to be the clear answer to (a), and in taking the correct answers to (b) and (c) to be independent of how the coin lands, though I’ll briefly question that assumption at the end. -
Giving Voice to the "Voiceless:" Incorporating Nonhuman Animal Perspectives As Journalistic Sources
Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Communication Faculty Publications Department of Communication 2011 Giving Voice to the "Voiceless:" Incorporating Nonhuman Animal Perspectives as Journalistic Sources Carrie Packwood Freeman Georgia State University, [email protected] Marc Bekoff Sarah M. Bexell [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_facpub Part of the Journalism Studies Commons, and the Social Influence and oliticalP Communication Commons Recommended Citation Freeman, C. P., Bekoff, M. & Bexell, S. (2011). Giving voice to the voiceless: Incorporating nonhuman animal perspectives as journalistic sources. Journalism Studies, 12(5), 590-607. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Communication at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. VOICE TO THE VOICELESS 1 A similar version of this paper was later published as: Freeman, C. P., Bekoff, M. & Bexell, S. (2011). Giving Voice to the Voiceless: Incorporating Nonhuman Animal Perspectives as Journalistic Sources, Journalism Studies, 12(5), 590-607. GIVING VOICE TO THE "VOICELESS": Incorporating nonhuman animal perspectives as journalistic sources Carrie Packwood Freeman, Marc Bekoff and Sarah M. Bexell As part of journalism’s commitment to truth and justice -
Semantical Paradox* Tyler Burge
4 Semantical Paradox* Tyler Burge Frege remarked that the goal of all sciences is truth, but that it falls to logic to discern the laws of truth. Perceiving that the task of determining these laws went beyond Frege’s conception of it, Tarski enlarged the jurisdiction of logic, establishing semantics as truth’s lawyer.1 At the core of Tarski’s theory of truth and validity was a diagnosis of the Liar paradox according to which natural language was hopelessly infected with contradiction. Tarski construed himself as treating the disease by replacing ordinary discourse with a sanitized, artificial construction. But those interested in natural language have been dissatisfied with this medication. The best ground for dis satisfaction is that the notion of a natural language’s harboring contradictions is based on an illegitimate assimilation of natural language to a semantical system. According to that assimilation, part of the nature of a “language” is a set of postulates that purport to be true by virtue of their meaning or are at least partially constitutive of that “language”. Tarski thought that he had identified just such postulates in natural language as spawning inconsistency. But postulates are contained in theories that are promoted by people. Natural languages per se do not postulate or Tyler Burge, “Semantical Paradox", reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979), 169-98. Copyright © 1979 The Journal of Philosophy. Reprinted by permission of the Editor of The Journal of Philosophy and the author. * I am grateful to Robert L. Martin for several helpful discussions; to Herbert Enderton for proving the consistency (relative to that of arithmetic) of an extension of Construction C3; to Charles Parsons for stimulating exchanges back in 1973 and 1974; and to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for its support. -
Two Views of the De Re E) Scope Paradoxes: (5) John Thinks at Least Two Men in the Room Are Spies
two views of the de re e) scope paradoxes: (5) John thinks at least two men in the room are spies. (John is not thinking of them as the men in the room) PLUK, Leeds, 2014 Daniel Rothschild ([email protected]) 2 neo-Fregean orthodoxy 1 de re in attitudes Kaplan [1986], building on Quine [1956] sets the standard for accounts of the de re. Basic assumption: semantic values in attitude reports present certain problems not present for other intensional contexts (such as metaphysi- cal modals). (6) (x believes α is a drunk and α denotes y) iff (9 guise g (satisfying some conditions that could make reference to x), the g = y and x A reasonable subset of the data to be captured, for the use of a term α in believes the g is drunk.) an attitude context. Covers a), b) be modified to handle c), d) and e) a) attitude about α does not require the attitude holder to think of α under the predicative content expressed by α. So substitution of co- a) we do not require that x think about y as α. extensive terms: b) we can make the with two different guises x can think y is drunk and is not drunk. (1) John thinks the mayor/the man in the corner is tall. Kaplan puts no contextual restrictions on what guises (his `names') can be, he just quantifies over them and requires them to be vivid, be an b) double vision. at least across different conversation contexts, but per- acquaintance relation for the attitude holder of the referent. -
Mind and Language Seminar: Theories of Content
Mind and Language Seminar: Theories of Content Ned Block and David Chalmers Meetings • Main meeting: Tuesdays 4-7pm over Zoom [4-6pm in weeks without a visitor] • Student meeting: Mondays 5-6pm hybrid • Starting Feb 22 [only weeks with a visitor] • Enrolled students and NYU philosophy graduate students only. • Feb 2: Background: Theories of Content • Feb 9: Background: Causal/Teleological Theories • Feb 16: Background: Interpretivism • Feb 23: Nick Shea • March 2: Robbie Williams • March 9: Frances Egan • March 16: Adam Pautz • March 23: Veronica Gómez Sánchez • March 30: Background: Phenomenal Intentionality • April 6: Imogen Dickie • April 13: Angela Mendelovici • April 20: Background: Conceptual-Role Semantics • April 27: Christopher Peacocke • May 4: David Chalmers Assessment • Draft paper due April 19 • Term paper due May 17 Attendance Policy • Monday meetings: Enrolled students and NYU philosophy graduate students only. • Tuesday meetings: NYU and NYC Consortium students and faculty only • Very limited exceptions • Email us to sign up on email list if you haven’t already. Introductions Short History of the 20th Century • 1900-1970: Reduce philosophical questions to issues about language and meaning. • 1970s: Theories of meaning (philosophy of language as first philosophy) • 1980s: Theories of mental content (philosophy of mind as first philosophy). • 1990s: Brick wall. Theories of Content • What is content? • What is a theory of content? Content • Content (in the broadest sense?) is intentionality or aboutness • Something has content when it is about something. Contents • Content = truth-conditions • Content = satisfaction-conditions • Content = propositions • Content = objects of intentional states • Content = … What Has Content? • What sort of thing has content? What Has Content? • What sort of thing has content? • language (esp. -
1 the Problem of Intentionality: a Cardinal Difficulty for Physicalism Or What Happens to the World When a Mind Shows Up? Joel S
The Problem of Intentionality: A Cardinal Difficulty for Physicalism Or What Happens to the World When a Mind Shows Up? Joel Steinmetz I. What is the Socratic Club? • Content: Issues related to the truth or falsity of the Christian faith • Method: In the Socratic spirit to follow the argument wherever it leads • Motivation: “In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into coteries where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say. In the Socratic all this was changed. Here a man could get the case for Christianity without all the paraphernalia of pietism and the case against it without the irrelevant sansculottisme of our common anti-God weeklies. At the very least we helped civilize one another…. Everyone found how little he had known about everyone else.”1 II. What is the problem of intentionality (a brief historical intro)? • The way in which intentionality is understood, or the aspect of intentionality that is emphasized, focuses the way in which intentionality is problematic. Analytic vs. Continental divide: • Phenomenology: explain the essential structures of intentionality; how does objectivity arise from subjectivity? • Analytic: intentionality is mark of mental; how can we explain, or incorporate, intentional mental states into a physicalist account of the world? • Why a physicalist account of the world? “These days we’re all materialists for much the reason that Churchill gave for being a democrat: the alternatives seem even worse. -
Human Uniqueness in the Age of Ape Language Research1
Society and Animals 18 (2010) 397-412 brill.nl/soan Human Uniqueness in the Age of Ape Language Research1 Mary Trachsel University of Iowa [email protected] Abstract This paper summarizes the debate on human uniqueness launched by Charles Darwin’s publi- cation of The Origin of Species in 1859. In the progress of this debate, Noam Chomsky’s intro- duction of the Language-Acquisition Device (LAD) in the mid-1960s marked a turn to the machine model of mind that seeks human uniqueness in uniquely human components of neu- ral circuitry. A subsequent divergence from the machine model can be traced in the short his- tory of ape language research (ALR). In the past fifty years, the focus of ALR has shifted from the search for behavioral evidence of syntax in the minds of individual apes to participant- observation of coregulated interactions between humans and nonhuman apes. Rejecting the computational machine model of mind, the laboratory methodologies of ALR scientists Tetsuro Matsuzawa and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh represent a worldview coherent with Darwin’s continu- ity hypothesis. Keywords ape language research, artificial intelligence, Chomsky, comparative psychology, Darwin, human uniqueness, social cognition Introduction Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts should have been perfected, not by means superior to, though analogous with, human reason, but by the accumulation of innumerable slight variations, each good for the individual possessor. (Darwin, 1989b, p. 421) With the publication of The Origin of Species (1859/1989a), Charles Darwin steered science directly into a conversation about human uniqueness previ- ously dominated by religion and philosophy. -
Qt11c0x4n5.Pdf
UC Berkeley Working Papers Title Figure and Ground in Logical Space Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/11c0x4n5 Author Yalcin, Seth Publication Date 2015-12-02 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Figure and Ground in Logical Space⇤ Seth Yalcin [email protected] April 22, 2011 1Introduction The idea that states of belief are, in a certain sense, sensitive to questions, or to subject matters, or more generally to ways of resolving logical space,helpsin some simple ways with aspects of the classical problem of logical omniscience. So I argue here. Focusing on belief, I begin by reviewing a version of a familiar story about belief and belief content, what I will call the map picture of belief. I will suggest that the picture is incomplete in ways that lead to the problems of logical omniscience, and that the addition of the aforementioned kind of sensitivity helps to fill in the picture in ways that start to address the problems. My larger aim is to explore the extent to which the idea of belief as question- sensitive state can be motivated by considerations in the philosophy of content, considered largely in abstraction from issues in descriptive semantics per se (e.g., in abstraction from the detailed compositional semantics of belief ascription). By the end, we will not have fully resolved the problems of logical omniscience, but we will have made some headway. 2Themappicture The motto of the map picture is: belief is the map by which we steer.1 You will have heard some version this story before, but we need a single version of it for operating on. -
What Are Centered Worlds?*
What Are Centered Worlds?* Shen-yi Liao e Philosophical Quarterly (2012)† Abstract David Lewis argues that centered worlds give us a way to capture de se, or self- locating, contents in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. In recent years, centered worlds have also gained other uses in areas ranging widely from metaphysics to ethics. In this paper, I raise a problem for centered worlds and discuss the costs and benets of different solutions. My investigation into the nature of centered worlds brings out potentially problematic implicit commit- ments of the theories that employ them. In addition, my investigation shows that the conception of centered worlds widely attributed to David Lewis is not only problematic, but in fact not his. is paper raises a problem for centered worlds and discusses the costs and benets of different solutions. In recent years, centered worlds have gained uses in a variety of philosophical sub-disciplines, from metaphysics to ethics. Given the diverse applica- tions and theoretical usefulness of centered worlds, the problem and solutions raised in this paper have wide ramications. Examining the nature of centered worlds brings out implicit commitments of the theories that employ them. §1 motivates the present investigation into what centered worlds are by reviewing their applications. e original motivation for positing centered worlds is to have a way of adequately capturing the self-locating contents of attitudes such as belief. Since then, philosophers have given centered worlds new uses in the metaphysics of prop- erties, foundations of two-dimensional semantics, and relativist theories in aesthetics, epistemology, metaethics, and philosophy of language. -
Human–Animal Communication*
AN46CH21-Kulick ARI 26 September 2017 7:48 Annual Review of Anthropology Human–Animal Communication∗ Don Kulick Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University, 751 26, Uppsala, Sweden; email: [email protected] ANNUAL REVIEWS Further Click here to view this article's online features: t%PXOMPBEmHVSFTBT115TMJEFT t/BWJHBUFMJOLFESFGFSFODFT t%PXOMPBEDJUBUJPOT t&YQMPSFSFMBUFEBSUJDMFT t4FBSDILFZXPSET Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2017. 46:357–78 Keywords First published as a Review in Advance on August animal studies, animal communicators, animal training, ape language, 7, 2017 companion species, ethics, pets The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at by [email protected] on 11/02/17. For personal use only. anthro.annualreviews.org Abstract https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116- Since the demise in the 1980s of research by psychologists who attempted 041723 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2017.46:357-378. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org to teach human language to apes, a range of other perspectives has arisen Copyright c 2017 by Annual Reviews. ⃝ that explore how humans can communicate with animals and what the pos- All rights reserved sibility of such communication means. Sociologists interested in symbolic ∗This article is part of a special theme on interactionism, anthropologists writing about ontology, equestrian and ca- Human–Animal Interaction. For a list of other articles in this theme, see http://www. nine trainers, people with autism who say they understand animals because annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev- they think like animals, and a ragbag of sundry New Age women who claim an-46-themes to be able to converse with animals through telepathy have started discussing human–animal communication in ways that recast the whole point of think- ing about it. -
Defining Language in the Wake of Primate Language Research
Defining Language in the Wake of Primate Language Research Hanna L. Meyer December 2018 Abstract This text examines language as it is used in the animal language debate through pragmatic and structural linguistic perspectives on primate language research. The surge of primate language studies in America in the 1970's generated a wave of public and academic interest in animal language that continues today in the form of ongoing primate research both in the lab and in the wild. These studies have forced the field to examine the way it conceptualizes language, as well as the current criteria with which we use to define it I argue that the traditional linguistic approach to defining language, which measures language through surface level features, as can be seen in Hockett's design features, cannot fully describe language, and instead must include a more pragmatic perspective in order to more accurately measure primate language. Finally I argue that the term language, as it has historically been used to describe only human language is useless, as its exclusivity ignores the gradient of the complexity of higher mental faculties across the evolutionary tree. 1 Introduction From the domestication of dogs approximately 30,000 years ago (Saey, 2017), of horses 5,500 years ago (Wilfred, 2009), and the creation of the first zoo 5,000 years ago (Boissoneault, 2015), it is clear that the human interest in interacting with different species is deeply rooted in our natural history. Central to our interest in non-human animals is an interest in their communication abilities. It is impossible to understand 1 the cognitive abilities or social hierarchies of a species without an understanding of their system(s) of communication. -
What in the World Are the Ways Things Might Have Been?
Philos Stud (2007) 133:443–453 DOI 10.1007/s11098-006-9063-y ORIGINAL PAPER What in the world are the ways things might have been? Jeffrey C. King Published online: 6 March 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007 Abstract Robert Stalnaker is an actualist who holds that merely possible worlds are uninstantiated properties that might have been instantiated. Stalnaker also holds that there are no metaphysically impossible worlds: uninstantiated properties that couldn’t have been instantiated. These views motivate Stalnaker’s ‘‘two dimen- sional’’ account of the necessary a posteriori on which there is no single proposition that is both necessary and a posteriori. For a (metaphysically) necessary proposition is true in all (metaphysically) possible worlds. If there were necessary a posteriori propositions, that would mean that there were propositions true in all possible worlds but which could only be known to be true by acquiring empirical evidence. Consider such a purported proposition P. The role of empirical evidence for establishing P’s truth would have to be to rule out worlds in which P is false. If there were no such worlds to be ruled out, we would not require evidence for P. But by hypothesis, P is necessary and so true in all metaphysically possible worlds. And on Stalnaker’s view, the metaphysically possible worlds are all the worlds there are. So there can be no proposition that is true in all possible worlds, but that we require evidence to know. In this way, the motivation for Stalnaker’s two dimensional ac- count of the necessary a posteriori rests on his denying that there are metaphysically impossible Worlds.