In this paper I show that two conflicting theories of literal meaning can be found in Donald Davidson's philosophy of language. In his earlier writings, Davidson espoused the common sense idea that words have literal meanings independently of particular contexts of use. In his later writings, however, Davidson insisted that the literal meaning of a word is a function of the speaker's intentions in using it, from which it follows that words do not have literal meanings independently of particular contexts. In this paper I examine and evaluate the transition from Davidson's earlier to his later view of literal meaning. I show that the change in view came about through Davidson's efforts to extend a theory of literal meaning to malapropisms but that Davidson's understanding of malapropisms is seriously flawed. I conclude that Davidson had no good reason for espousing his later intentions-based theory of literal meaning.

Andy Clark and David Chalmers have recently argued that the world beyond our skin can constitute part of the mind. That is, our minds can and sometimes do extend beyond our heads and bodies. Clark and Chalmers refer to this claim as the 'Extended Mind'. After illustrating the Extended Mind via a thought-experiment I turn to consider a criticism made by Lawrence Shapiro. After outlining Shapiro's claim I will show that in fact this does little to call into to doubt the Extended Mind. However, Clark holds that the Extended Mind does face a serious criticism from the threat of 'Mental Bloat'; the worry here is that arguing that the mind extends beyond the skin quickly leads to absurdities. I consider Clark's response to this worry but find it to be unconvincing. However, I go on to show that there is in fact little to fear from Mental Bloat. Therefore, it will be my conclusion that there is some reason to hold that the mind ain't just in the head.

When are the meanings of two utterances the same? And how, if at all, could we determine this sameness? In this paper I take a look at the contextualist answer of Hilary Putnam and Charles Travis. One characteristic trait of Hilary Putnam's conception of meaning is what he calls 'semantic externalism' and what I shall label 'public semantics' to avoid confusion with the topological or what I call 'locational' connotation of externalism in other contexts:1 the meaning of a word and the full meaning/sense of a sentence or utterance are not determined by some private mental state(s) of the speaker but are determined by the use of words on an occasion or in a saying. According to Hilary Putnam and Charles Travis (both elaborating on Wittgenstein's discussions in his Philosophical Investigations), the varieties of such situational uses or occasions, the varieties of public semantics, can themselves not be described or determined once and for all. It is therefore not possible to reduce or absorb each and every pragmatic aspect into semantics. That means that semantics is essentially open and questions as to the sameness of meaning or sense of utterances cannot be answered independently of a pragmatic approach. Travis extends this diagnosis in his most recent book {Unshadowed Thought) to thought, beliefs and attitudes: no one thought, attitude or belief can be individuated independently of relevant situational aspects, these including, among others, acts in accord with, say, an attitude on some occasion or other. The approach pursued here claims that pragmatics is in either of these areas unavoidable and genuine. It cannot be explained away or be re-absorbed into semantics or epistemology.2 This has important consequences for what it means to do philosophy, as can be seen in Putnam's arguments as to the unintelligibility of various philosophical positions.

In this paper we examine whether the sense of agency represents an obstacle to the project of naturalizing the mental. On the basis of a thought experiment we suggest that the sense of agency is not an epiphenomenon. We also examine Frith's attempt to explain in functionalist terms the sense of agency through the comparator and metarepresentational mechanisms. Through a variety of arguments we try to show that explanation by recourse to these mechanisms is inadequate. We conclude by suggesting that one possible reason for the failure of the functionalist approaches is that they begin from the assumption that thought is a form a of willed action.

'Epistemic' accounts of vagueness argue that so called 'borderline' cases of a term actually always do (or don't) fall within that term's extension. What makes the case borderline is that this fact may be unknowable. Such epistemic theories have traditionally been taken to be unable to accommodate the intuitive connection between meaning and use. However, it will be argued here that if one endorses a type of 'Temporal Externalism' about meaning (according to which future linguistic developments can help determine the semantic values of our current utterances), then one can both endorse epistemic accounts of vagueness and hold on to the traditional tie between meaning and use.

This paper traces the development of transcendental philosophy in the 20th century back to the strongly perceived need to preserve an exclusive area of a priori research for philosophy. It will argue that a genuine sort of aprioristic philosophical inquiry does not in fact require the step from descriptive psychology to transcendental phenomenology taken by Husserl and well attested in his works from at least his 1911 essay "Philosophy as Strict Science", nor does it require the "detranscendentalization" of Husserlian phenomenology carried out in the work of Heidegger. On the contrary, as I will show, recent work in philosophy connected to the development of the cognitive sciences suggests how it is possible to obtain significant a priori knowledge, by a sort of "wide reflexive equilibrium", consistently with the empirical impugnability of knowledge required by Quinean empiricism.

Intuitively, the concept of truth occupies a substantive role in explaining the contribution of our linguistic utterances to the success of our ordinary actions. However, this claim has been denied recently by advocates of deflationary theories of truth. Although the technical details of the various deflationary theories differ, these theories agree in claiming that the concept of truth does not have a significant role in explaining success and that the utility of the truth predicate consists mainly in its being a device for expressing infinite conjunctions and disjunctions. This paper argues that deflationary accounts of the utility of truth are mistaken. Section 1 outlines a direction for developing the claim that truth plays a substantive role in explaining success. Section 2 argues that deflationary accounts of success are inadequate since they fail to distinguish between the triggering and structuring causes of an event.

There is a widespread belief among contemporary philosophers that skeptical hypotheses—such as that we are dreaming, or victims of an evil demon, or brains in a vat—cannot definitively be ruled out as false. This belief is ill-founded. In fact it is based on a failure to see that skeptical arguments beg the question. Such arguments assume that reality is not an immediate given of experience in order to prove that reality is not an immediate given of experience. This point is explained and justified in detail. Conversely, however, the realist would beg the question in the opposite way if he tried to prove realism. The conclusion we should reach is that skepticism and realism are problems of immediacy and not of proof. They face us with a choice between alternatives that are not only radically different but also pretty much impregnable and irrelevant to each other. This choice is not arbitrary, for there are grounds to determine it. But the grounds are the immediate evidence and not the arguments.

Conceptual activity is a normative activity, consisting in using or exercising rules which are functional in the formation of language, particularly judgments and propositions. Concepts, the essential elements of propositional content, are not to be considered as simple properties or predicates, but instead as constituting the rules of correct judgment. Two aspects of these claims are to be underlined. First, the dimension of normativity: the concept itself is a rule, a mode of functioning of understanding. Second, the notion of understanding as disposition to judgment. Anyone who expresses a judgment exercises a certain responsibility, an implicit or explicit endorsement of a rule.

Recently, several philosophers of language have claimed that, at least in some respects, Peter Geach proposed a view about proper names that anticipated important features of the causal theory (or historical chain theory) that was later set forth by Saul Kripke and others. Quentin Smith, for example, in his essay, "Direct, Rigid Designation and A Posteriori Necessity: A History and Critique," says explicitly that "Geach (1969) ... originated the causal or 'historical chain' theory of names" (1999). In his entry on "Proper Names" for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Graeme Forbes speaks of the "Geach-Kripke historical chain account" of proper names. In this paper, I suggest that, while there are very clear affinities between Geach's view on proper names and that of Kripke, there are several important differences, differences that are significant enough for me to claim that Geach and Kripke do not share a single account of proper names.

Since Kripke's attack on Nozick's Tracking Theory of knowledge, there has been strong suspicion that tracking theories are false. We think that neither Kripke's arguments and examples nor other recent attacks in the literature show that the tracking theories are false. We cannot address all of these concerns here, but we will show why some of the most discussed examples from Kripke do not demonstrate that the tracking theories are false.

Emotions are fascinating phenomena which occupy a pivotal position in our lives. I have presented elsewhere (Ben-Ze'ev, 2000) a comprehensive framework for understanding emotions in our everyday life. The paper briefly describes the characterization of typical emotions, while indicating their relevance to online personal relationships. It discusses issues such as emotional complexity; the typical emotional cause, concern, and object; emotions and intelligence; and managing the emotions. The paper then goes on to examine whether the emotions elicited in online relationships are similar to those in face-to-face relationships or whether we are witnessing the emergence of new types of emotions.

Can non-human animals think, or arc they mindless automatons? The question is an ancient one, but as we enter the new millennium its answer is of increasing importance to both ethics and the philosophy of mind. Donald Davidson is perhaps the best known contemporary proponent of the claim that animals cannot think. His argument is characteristically systematic and far-reaching. He claims that the capacity for surprise is a necessary condition for thought, and that such a capacity presupposes complex attitudes involving sophisticated concepts and higher-order beliefs. He argues that only creatures with a fully developed language could reasonably be said to be capable of such attitudes, and as such, he concludes that humans are the only animals that can think. I argue against Davidson along both positive and negative dimensions. First, I develop a simple argument (similar in structure to Davidson's) designed to show that we have good reason to believe that even with several important Davidsonian assumptions in place, animals can think. Second, I argue that Davidson has failed to provide plausible support for his assumption that the capacity to be surprised (as he defines it) is anything other than a sufficient condition for thought. Finally, I suggest that we distinguish between thought and rationality in the hopes of better capturing the wide diversity of mental landscapes.

This paper examines the debate over the relationship between the public sphere and communication, which has become a focus of attention after the publication of Jürgen Habermas's Structural Transformation of Public Sphere in English in 1989, following the two volumes of his The Theory of Communicative Action in 1984 and 1987. Although the historical account of the public sphere has also received a good deal of attention, I deal mainly with the normative dimension of Habermas's theory as it led to a rethinking and reassessment of public broadcasting, to the end of restructuring it as a site where 'citizens act as a public'. That is to say, a site where people assemble and unite freely, and express and publicize their opinions on matters of general interest without constraint in an age of deregulated communications. Several scholars have provided us with maps for re-organizing the media of communications in this respect, but they have failed to analyze the 'information' which feeds the 'informed citizen'. This paper addresses not only what information means today—whether it is a digit, a signal, or content—but also how it is produced within daily routine practices and how the nature of the means of its dissemination influences its character. Another serious aspect of those assessments, including that of Habermas, is the global character of communications today. Habermas is well aware of the mismatch between the global market and the absence of its corollary in politics. Yet his silence in the economics of information, even as he acknowledges the digitalization of communications and 'a world public sphere', also calls for a critical account of the relations between 'information', democratic politics and the question of scale.

The current discussions of conceptual schemes and related topics are misguided; for they are based on a tacit assumption that the difference between two schemes consists in the different distributions in truth-values. I argue that what should concern us, in the discussions of conceptual schemes and related issues, is not truth-values of assertions, but rather the truth-value-status of the sentences used to make the assertions. This is because the genuine conceptual innovation between alternative theories or languages does not lie in differences in determining truth-values of their sentences, but turns on whether these sentences have truth-values when considered within the context of a competing one. This new interpretation of the notion of conceptual schemes, which I refer to as presuppositional languages, is not only good in itself—for establishing the intelligibility and tenability of the notion—but quite beneficial in its effect on other related issues.

My aim in this article is to analyze and to discuss what I think are the two most important approaches to a theory of truth from a non-realist standpoint: the proposal of Crispin Wright and the proposal enounced by Putnam in Reason, Truth and History. Wright argues for a minimalist theory of truth according to which truth has to be a metaphysically neutral notion and admits several possible models. One of these possible models is Putnam's notion of "rational acceptability under ideal epistemic circumstances"; the other one is Wright's own proposal of truth as "superassertibility". Both authors are seeking for a notion of truth that is both absolute and stable (in contrast with warranted assertibility). I will claim that neither of the proposals satisfies these requirements as long as we understand them as generalizations from the mathematical (proof-based) model.

In this essay, I argue that the deflationary view of truth is inconsistent with Davidson's theory of meaning. I take deflationism to consist of two basic theses: the linguistic thesis that truth talk is always expressive and never explanatory, and the metaphysical thesis that truth is not a property. Since Davidson construes meaning in terms of truth-conditions, it appears that Davidson regards truth talk as explanatory, and truth as a property. Michael Williams argues otherwise, suggesting that Davidson's theory of meaning can be understood in terms of his theory of radical interpretation, and that radical interpretation does not require a notion of truth richer than the deflationist allows. I argue that at the level of the T-sentences Davidson's theory of meaning entails (T-sentences yielded through the practice of radical interpretation), a non-deflationary notion of truth is indeed required. This is because, first, for Davidson, to grasp the meaning of a sentence is to grasp the T-sentence associated with it, and the T-sentence predicates the property truth of that sentencesecond, because it does so, in T-sentences "true" is explanatory, not merely expressive. I then consider the objection that T-sentences can be understood in terms of a norm of assertion, rather in terms of "true" as predicating a property of sentences, and I respond that the objection confuses pragmatic issues with semantic issues.

John Searle has argued that the aim of strong AI to create a thinking computer is misguided. Searle's "Chinese Room Argument" purports to show that syntax does not suffice for semantics and that computer programs as such must fail to have intrinsic intentionality But we are not mainly interested in the program itself, but rather the implementation of the program in some material. It does not follow by necessity from the fact that computer programs are defined syntactically that the implementation of them cannot suffice for semantics. Perhaps our world is a world in which any implementation of the right computer program will create a system with intrinsic intentionality, in which case Searle's "Chinese Room Scenario" is empirically (nomically) impossible. But perhaps our world is a world in which Searle's "Chinese Room Scenario" is empirically (nomically) possible, and the silicon basis of modern-day computers is one kind of material unsuited to give you intrinsic intentionality. The metaphysical question turns out to be a question of what kind of world we are in, and I argue that in this respect we do not know our model address. The "Model Address Argument" does not ensure that strong AI will succeed, but it shows that Searle's challenge to the research program of strong AI fails in its objectives.