School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemMulti-domain incommensurability( 2000)Interesting instances of Incommensurability sometimes arise in the mental health sciences that cannot be accounted for with our currently available understanding of that phenomenon. I focus on what happens when there is ambiguity between a methodological-value use of a term and a theoretical-entity use of the same term. I call the kind of Incommensurability that can arise in such cases multi-domain Incommensurability. I propose that an interpretation of taxonomic Incommensurability offered by Howard Sankey represents "the sententialist current state of play" and that it may be used as the standard within the semantic/analytic tradition. I contend that Sankey's analysis fails to accommodate multi-domain Incommensurability in social sciences. I diagnose this failure and explore several possible reactions. This diagnosis highlights important features of social sciences that suggest reasons why this particular sort of Incommensurability will be so difficult to accommodate within the semantic/analytic tradition. We may be tempted to either reject social sciences or reject sententialism as a way to make the problems seem to disappear. I find neither of these alternatives satisfactory. The road that suggests rejection of the scientific status of social sciences is pyrrhic, self-defeating, and ultimately begs the question of multi-domain Incommensurability. The road that suggests rejection of sententialism simply abandons valuable insights and tools of investigation before having fully gone down the road. A form of argument extracted from the controversy in social science over dual relationships points to three constraints on a semantics capable of addressing multi-domain Incommensurability. I show why both intentional (roughly Fregegn - description views) and extentional ( roughly Kripkean - Essentialist views) solutions must fail to adequately resolve multi-domain Incommensurability. S suggest a hybrid analysis, consistent with many proposed alternatives to sententialism, that expands upon the current state of sententialist analysis of Incommensurability and draws upon a pragmatic, naturalised approach to semantics.
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ItemDavidson and realism( 1998)The consequence of constraints imposed on epistemology by scepticism of the Cartesian variety on the one hand, and accounts of the appropriate criteria for meaning ori the other, is that arguments in epistemological realism, about the external world, must take a specific form. Such arguments are required to argue transcendentally for realism from explanations of meaning, or interpretation, if they are to negotiate the impasse created by the constraints indicated above. Donald Davidson's arguments for realism appear to satisfy the necessary requirements to argue for epistemological realism about the external world successfully. This thesis is an evaluation of whether Davidson's claims succeed. Three related, though separate arguments for realism, are distinguished. They are related by virtue of all stemming from the same explanation of interpretation. Where they differ is in how the realist thesis is transcendentally deduced from the common theory of interpretation. The third argument is distinct from the first two by way of incorporating a naturalistic argument into the transcendental deduction. I argue that only the third argument actually qualifies as a possible successful argument in epistemological realism because it is the only version that can potentially make the realist thesis an explanation of a necessary relation between What we mean and believe and what there is, rather than the previous ploys which could only draw, as candidates for a realist thesis, a necessary relation between what we mean and believe and what must obtain for that meaning and believing to be intelligibly explainable. However, I. conclude that Davidson's third argument does not succeed for it reverts back to an old source of scepticism in appealing to a notion of the epistemic priority of sense experience. What this means is that Davidson can give us no reason for why we must take the object of our beliefs to be synonymous with the idea of an objective world. I do offer, by way of conclusion, what I think would be a likely naturalistic source for an argument in epistemological realism, and I draw on a particular interpretation of a passage in Wittgenstein to make this point.
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ItemTruth-theories : content and structure( 1981)A meaning-theory for a language, L, ought to be able to function as a description of what is sufficient to understand L, it could then be called a theory of interpretation.) As such it must be capable of generating, for each complete linguistic act licensed by L, a re-description of the act as an item of behaviour that is intelligible to the speaker. Because it is the sentence that is usable to perform complete linguistic acts the meaning-theory ought somehow "state the meanings" of the sentences of L, that is it must be able to effect a re-description of behaviour - initially described in terms of the utterance by some speaker, U, of some sentence, s, in some node f (assertive, imperative, or whatever) - in terms of U f-ing that p, where P gives the content of s. But a theorist will only be justified in constructing a theory which makes such re-descriptions of linguistic behaviour if the behaviour as described in the output of that theory is intelligible in the lights of propositional attitudes that can plausibly be attributed to speakers of L (as indeed any behaviour can only be made sense of against the background of beliefs, desires, etc. of the subject of that behaviour). Thus the behaviour described as a f-ing that P by U is made intelligible if that content, P, can be ascribed to U as the content of some propositional attitude fitting to his mode of utterance of s. And so a constraint (the Propositional Attitude Constraint) on a meaning-theory for L will be just that it assign contents to sentences of L apt for ascription of plausible propositional attitudes to speakers of L on the grounds of their utterances of those sentences.