Philosophers of language inspired by Grice have long sought to show how facts about reference boil down to facts about speakers’ communicative intentions. I focus on a recent attempt by Stephen Neale (2016), who argues that referring with an expression requires having a special kind of communicative intention—one that involves representing an occurrence of the expression as standing in some particular relation to its referent. Neale raises a problem for this account: because some referring expressions are unpronounced, most language users don’t realize they exist, and so seemingly don’t have intentions about them. Neale suggests that we might solve this problem by supposing that speakers have nonconscious or “tacit” intentions. I argue that this solution can’t work by arguing that our representations of unpronounced bits of language all occur within a modular component of the mind, and so we can’t have intentions about them. From this line of thought, I draw several conclusions. (i) The semantic value of a referring expression is not its referent, but rather a piece of partial and defeasible evidence about what a speaker refers to when using it literally. (ii) There is no interesting sense in which speakers refer with expressions; referring expressions are used to give evidence about the sort of singular proposition one intends to communicate. (iii) The semantics–pragmatics interface is coincident with the interface between the language module and central cognition.

The problem of value disagreement and contextualist, relativist and metalinguistic attempts of solving it are laid out. Although the metalinguistic account seems to be on the right track, it is argued that it does not sufficiently explain why and how disagreements about the meaning of evaluative terms are based on and can be decided by appeal to existing social practices. As a remedy, it is argued that original suggestions from Putnam’s “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” ought to be taken seriously. The resulting dual aspect theory of meaning can explain value disagreement in much the same way as it deals with disagreement about general terms. However, the account goes beyond Putnam’s by not just defending a version of social externalism, but also defending the thesis that the truth conditional meaning of many evaluative terms is not fixed by experts either and instead constantly contested as part of a normal function of language.

In response to Stephen Neale (2016), I argue that aphonic expressions, such as PRO, are intentionally uttered by normal speakers of natural language, either by acts of omitting to say something explicitly, or by acts of giving phonetic realization to aphonics. I argue, also, that Gricean intention-based semantics should seek divorce from Cartesian assumptions of transparent access to propositional attitudes and, consequently, that Stephen Schiffer’s so-called meaning-intention problem is not powerful enough to banish alleged cases of over-intellectualization in contemporary philosophy of language and mind.

Stephen Schiffer introduced the “meaning-intention problem” as an argument against certain semantic analyses that invoke hidden indexical expressions. According to the argument, such analyses are incompatible with a Gricean view of speaker’s meaning, for they require speakers to refer to things about which they are ignorant, such as modes of presentation. Stephen Neale argues that a complementary problem arises due to the fact that speakers may also be ignorant of the very existence of such aphonic expressions. In this paper, I attempt to articulate the assumptions that support the meaning-intention problem. I argue that these assumptions are incompatible with some basic linguistic data. For instance, a speaker could have used a sentence like “The book weighs five pounds” to mean that the book weighs five pounds on Earth, even before anyone knew that weight was a relativized property. The existence of such “extrinsic parameters” undermines the force of the meaning-intention problem. However, since the meaning-intention problem arises naturally from a Gricean view of speaker’s meaning and speaker’s reference, the failure of the argument raises problems for the Gricean. I argue that the analysis of referring-with offered by Schiffer, and defended by Neale, is defective.

I develop and defend a novel answer to Peter van Inwagen’s ‘Special Composition Question,’ (SCQ) namely, under what conditions do some things compose and object? My answer is that things will compose an object when and only when they exist simultaneously relative to a reference frame (I call this ‘Temporally Restricted Composition’ or TREC). I then show how this view wards off objections given to ‘Unrestricted Mereology’ (UM). TREC, unlike other theories of Restricted Composition, does not fall prey to worries about vagueness, anthropocentrism, or arbitrariness. TREC also has advantages over all the other answers to the SCQ. TREC is an account an A-theorist anti-Eternalist who wants an unrestricted mereology should accept. I also engage in some conceptual hygiene by showing how UM, as it should be used, should not, in itself, entail or contain a commitment to either Eternalism or Four-Dimensionalism.

The paper is a discussion of Charles Taylor’s recent book The Language Animal. The criticism of Taylor’s view of language clusters around two main themes: first, that he seems to “mysterianize” language somewhat, whereas the topics he addresses can be adequately dealt with within standard formal approaches in the philosophy of language and cognitive science; second, that his focus on language is in many cases misplaced, and should indeed be replaced with a focus on human conceptual structure, which language only fragmentarily expresses.

The scientist’s toolkit counts at least three practices: real, thought and numerical experiments. Although a deep investigation of the relationships between these types of experiments should shed light on the nature of scientific enquiry, I argue that it has been compromised by at least four factors: (i) a bias for the epistemological superiority of real experiments; (ii) an almost exclusive focus on the links between either thought or numerical experiments, and real experiments; (iii) a tendency to try and reduce one kind to another; and (iv) an excessive attention to the outputs of these types of experiments, more than to their processes. In this paper I support an unbiased triangular comparative analysis that focuses on the processes involved in real, thought and numerical experiments, and claim that all three types of experimentation are fundamental to scientific research. I do so by clarifying different notions of experimental processes, and by introducing a distinction between two varieties of mental simulation that play a role in them (i.e., mental models and imaginings). I then compare real, thought and numerical experiments in light of this distinction, showing their similarities, but also fundamental differences, which suggest that none of them is dispensable.

The aim of this paper is to point to the analogy between mathematical and physical thought experiments, and even more widely between the epistemic paths in both domains. Having accepted platonism as the underlying ontology as long as the platonistic path in asserting the possibility of gaining knowledge of abstract, mind-independent and causally inert objects, my widely taken goal is to show that there is no need to insist on the uniformity of picture and monopoly of certain epistemic paths in the epistemic descriptive context. And secondly, to show the analogy with the ways we come to know the truths of (natural) sciences.

The ongoing epistemological debate on scientific thought experiments (TEs) revolves, in part, around the now famous Galileo’s falling bodies TE and how it could justify its conclusions. In this paper, I argue that the TE’s function is misrepresented in this a-historical debate. I retrace the history of this TE and show that it constituted the first step in two general “argumentative strategies”, excogitated by Galileo to defend two different theories of free-fall, in 1590’s and then in the 1638. I analyse both argumentative strategies and argue that their function was to eliminate potential causal factors: the TE serving to eliminate absolute weight as a causal factor, while the subsequent arguments served to explore the effect of specific weight, with conflicting conclusions in 1590 and 1638. I will argue thorough the paper that the TE is best grasped when we analyse Galileo’s restriction, in the TE’s scenario and conclusion, to bodies of the same material or specific weight. Finally, I will draw out two implications for the debate on TEs.

Ever since the term ‘thought experiment’ was coined by Ørsted, philosophers have struggled with the question of how thought experiments manage to provide knowledge. Ernst Mach’s seminal contribution has eclipsed other approaches in the Austrian tradition. I discuss one of these neglected approaches. Faced with the challenge of how to reconcile his empiricist position with his use of thought experiments, Moritz Schlick proposed the following ‘Sinnkriterium’: a thought experiment is meaningful if it allows to answer a question under discussion by imagining the experiences that would confi rm that the thought experimental scenario is actual. I trace this view throughout three exemplary thought experiments of Schlick’s.

H. L. A. Hart’s The Concept of Law is an important and infl uential work in the modern philosophy and theory of law. In it, Hart introduced and discussed three imaginary scenarios: the absolute monarchy under the Rex dynasty; the pre-legal society governed by primary rules of obligation; and the worlds in which rules would be different from those in our actual world. Although Hart did not use the expression “thought experiments” in his work, some of his interpreters refer to the imaginary scenarios as thought experiments. However, interpreters do not go into the question of whether the imaginary scenarios in Hart’s work do indeed satisfy a general characterization of thought experiments. In this article, the author fi rst summarizes the three imaginary scenarios in Hart’s work and points to the context within which we encounter each of them. Then, he makes use of a general characterization of thought experiments in the contemporary philosophical literature and briefl y examines the way and the extent to which the imaginary scenarios in Hart’s work can satisfy its requirements.

McGinn claims, among other things, that we cannot understand the theory that explains how echolocationary experiences arise from the bat’s brain. One of McGinn’s arguments for this claim appeals to the fact that we cannot know in principle what it is like to have echolocationary experiences. According to Kirk, McGinn’s argument fails because it rests on an illegitimate assumption concerning what explanatory theories are supposed to accomplish. However, I will argue that Kirk’s objection misfires because he misapprehends McGinn’s argument. Further, I will articulate and briefly assess some ways in which McGinn’s argument can be blocked.

In this paper, I introduce and elucidate what seems to me the best understanding of moral intuition with reference to the intellectual seeming account. First, I will explain Bengson’s (and Bealer’s) quasi-perceptualist account of philosophical intuition in terms of intellectual seeming. I then shift from philosophical intuition to moral intuition and will delineate Audi’s doxastic account of moral intuition to argue that the intellectual seeming account of intuition is superior to the doxastic account of intuition. Next, I argue that we can apply our understanding of the intellectual seeming account of philosophical intuition to the moral intuition. To the extent that we can argue for the intellectual seeming account of philosophical intuition, we can have the intellectual seeming account of moral intuition.

Numerous philosophers have recently tried to defend physicalism regarding phenomenal consciousness against dualist intuitions, by explaining the existence of dualist intuitions within a purely physicalist framework. David Papineau, for example, suggested that certain peculiar features of some of our concepts of phenomenal experiences (the so-called “phenomenal concepts”) led us to commit what he called the “Antipathetic Fallacy”: they gave us the erroneous impression that phenomenal experiences must be distinct from purely physical states (the “intuition of distinctness”), even though they are not. Papineau’s hypothesis has been accepted, though under other names and in different forms, by many physicalist philosophers. Pär Sundström has tried to argue against Papineau’s account of the intuition of distinctness by showing that it was subjected to counterexamples. However, Papineau managed to show that Sundström’s counterexamples were not compelling, and that they could be answered within his framework. In this paper, I want to draw inspiration from Sundström, and to put forth some refined counterexamples to Papineau’s account, which cannot be answered in the same way as Sundström’s. My conclusion is that we cannot explain the intuition of distinctness as the result of a kind of “Antipathetic Fallacy”.

Philosophical thought-experimentation has a long and influential history. In recent years, however, both the traditionally secure place of the method of thought experimentation in philosophy and its presumed epistemic credentials have been increasingly and repeatedly questioned. In the paper, I join the choir of the discontents. I present and discuss two types of evidence that in my opinion undermine our close-to-blind trust in moral thought experiments and the intuitions that these elicit: the disappointing record of thought-experimentation in contemporary moral philosophy, and the more general considerations explaining why this failure is not accidental. The diagnosis is not optimistic. The past record of moral TEs is far from impressive. Most, if not all, moral TEs fail to corroborate their target moral hypotheses (provided one can determine what results they produced and what moral proposition these results were supposed to verify or falsify). Moral intuitions appear to be produced by moral heuristics which we have every reason to suspect will systematically misfi re in typical moral TEs. Rather than keep relying on moral TEs, we should therefore begin to explore other, more sound alternatives to thought-experimentation in moral philosophy.