We are very happy to have Jonathan Birch (LSE) blogging this week on The Philosophy of Social Evolution, new from Oxford University Press. To view all his posts on a single page, click here.
Category: books
6. Descriptive names
Consider the following example: Case 1: ‘Tremulous Hand’ ‘Tremulous Hand’ is used to refer to the otherwise unidentified author of around 50,000 Thirteenth Century glosses in manuscripts. Palaeographical analysis provides strong evidence that these glosses are the work of a single person with distinctive (tremulous and left-leaning) handwriting. All that …
5. A virtuous circle
So, why is the proposal of Fixing Reference not guilty of circularity or equivocation or both? Here are two observations to prepare the way for the answer to this question that I want to propose. Firstly, formation of beliefs by uptake from perception and testimony are among the most basic …
4. ‘This’
A ‘perceptual demonstrative’ thought is a thought of the kind standardly made available by a perceptual link with an ordinary thing, and standardly expressed using ‘this’ or ‘that’ – for example, when you look at a grapefruit on the table in front of you and think the thought you would …
3. The mind needs to think about things outside itself
This post is about justification: the justification of perceptual demonstrative beliefs by uptake from perception, and of many of the beliefs we express using proper names by uptake from testimony. What I’m about to suggest is perhaps a little surprising. But I also suggest that extant attempts to explain how …
2. Reference and Justification
In my first post I sketched an argument for a principle connecting aboutness and justification. Here is the sketch version again as a little graphic: The resulting principle, which I call in the book ‘Reference and Justification’, brings out the significance for accounts of aboutness of the fact that justification is …
1. The Theory of Reference is Retro-chic
Remember the causo-descriptivist wars? If your education was anything like mine, at some point you were walked across the old battlefield and shown some of the main sights: early naïve descriptivism about proper names; its cluster theoretic successor; Kripke’s attack on descriptivism in Naming and Necessity; his causal inheritance picture; …