Category: NYU

The Constitutive Nature of the Sceptical Problem 7. Having a meaning is essentially a matter of possessing a correctness condition. And the sceptical challenge is to explain how anything could possess that. Notice, by the way, that I have stated the sceptical problem about meaning without once mentioning Kripke’s notorious sceptic. That character, as everyone…

The Rule-Following Considerations 1 INTRODUCTION 1. Recent years have witnessed a great resurgence of interest in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, especially with those passages-roughly, Philosophical Investigations ##138-242 and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, section VI-that are concerned with the topic of rules. Much of the credit for all this excitement, unparalleled since…

Intentions and Intentional States How should we proceed? I have been talking about the Intention View, but, of course, everything I’ve been saying will apply to any Intentional View. So let me restate our problem in full generality exposing as many of our assumptions as possible. (p.42) The claim is that the following five propositions…

Problems for the Intention View But what concerns me in this essay is whether it is true that we can solve Kripke’s problem as easily as all that? Can we really just appeal to intentions with infinitary contents to explain how the Acceptance condition on rule-following gets fulfilled? I can think of three reasons that…

Blind Rule-Following 1. Introduction It is a great pleasure to be able to contribute to this Festschrift in honor of Crispin Wright, with whom I have enjoyed countless stimulating conversations about a host of fundamental philosophical issues over the past twenty years. It is especially appropriate that my contribution to this Festschrift concern the topic…

Rules, Norms and Principles: A Conceptual Framework 1.1 Introduction In looking at the literature on rules one is struck by two related observations: one is that different notions are often conflated; the other is that it is often hard to see when a dispute is merely verbal and when it is substantive. Part of the…

Socially Constructed Belief If the preceding considerations are correct, social construction talk does not cogently apply to the facts studied by the natural sciences; does it fare any better when applied to the beliefs about those facts produced by those sciences? 5The issue is not whether science is a social enterprise. Of course, it is.…

WHAT IS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION? Paul A. Boghossian Social Construction Social construction talk is all the rage. But what does it mean and what is its point? The core idea seems clear enough. To say of something that it is socially constructed is to emphasize its dependence on contingent aspects of our social selves. It is…

Clearly, this is not the assertion of someone who is prepared to say, “Relative to my political perspective, it is justified to say that recent work has indicated the need to review and revise traditional views about knowledge; however, if you happen not to share that perspective, you may ignore everything I say, for I…

Constructivist and Relativist Conceptions of Knowledge in Contemporary (Anti-) Epistemology: A Reply to Barbara Herrnstein Smith This ought to be an exciting time for academic philosophy, for we are witnessing today a virtually unprecedented level of interest in philosophical issues across a virtually unprecedented range of academic disciplines. Why, then, instead of a sense of…