Category: NYU

Reply to Otero’s “Boghossian’s Inference Argument against Content Externalism Reversed” In my (1992, 1994), I argued that introspective accessibility of facts about sameness and difference of the concepts exercised in our thoughts plays a pivotal role in our most basic conceptions of rational agency and rational explanation. In particular, I argued that any theory of…

15.14 Is the Millian Assumption the Problem? If these considerations are correct, then the problem of finitude looks to remain with us, even if we take into account all the naturalistic facts that have been thought remotely relevant to the fixation of meaning. It is time now to wonder whether our problem would be alleviated…

15.9 Dispositions and Rules A number of writers sympathetic to dispositionalism are prepared to concede that we do need to work with the dispositions that we actually have, as opposed to those that we would have under enhanced conditions. But they maintain that, in the relevant sense, we do have the requisite dispositions. Martin and…

15.5 The Argument from Error A more important argument of Kripke’s is his Argument from Error. It begins with the observation that most any person’s dispositions may contain dispositions to make mistakes.5 For example, someone might systematically forget to ‘carry’ in certain circumstances. If we tried to read off the function that’s meant from the…

Is (Determinate) Meaning a Naturalistic Phenomenon? 15.1 Introduction When philosophers worry about the relation between the mental and the physical, they typically have in mind the problem of consciousness: how could phenomenal states emerge from the comings and goings of purely naturalistic—that is, purely physical/functional—things and states? How could there be something that it’s like…

Can Experience Commit Category Errors? A third version of the argument from charity alleges that according to projectivism, visual experience commits not just a mistake but a category mistake, by representing external, material objects as having properties that can occur only within the mental realm.19 Such a mistake is thought too gross for visual experience…

The Case Against Intentionalism Peacocke has argued elsewhere, and on independent grounds, for the need to speak about a sensory field modified by intrinsic sensational qualities.12 We should like to add some arguments of our own. Our first argument rests on the possibility, noted above, of seeing an afterimage without illusion. Consider such an experience,…

Problems in the First Version of Content-dispositionalism The problem with this version has to do with the property expressed by the word red’ in the phrasea disposition to appear red under standard conditions’ -the phrase constituting the right side of biconditional (iii). Keep in mind that the entire phrase has itself been offered as expressing…

Colour as a Secondary Quality by Paul Boghossian With J. David Velleman. THE GALILEAN INTUITION Does modern science imply, contrary to the testimony of our eyes, that grass is not green? Galileo thought it did: Hence I think that these tastes, odors, colors, etc., on the side of the object in which they seem to…

FREGEAN, REALIZATION-THEORETIC THEORIES Russellian and identity-theoretic versions of physicalism fail to cope with the epistemology of color because they must portray visual experience as represent ing color without a characterization that denotes it necessarily. Such visual representations would denote properties only contingently, and would therefore fail to provide the appropriate introspective knowledge of the properties…