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does not establish meaning but is merely one of several conversational principles. He states that “context does not determine (in the sense of constitute), but merely enables the hearer to determine (in the sense of ascertain) what the speaker means.” Context provides constraints on what a speaker can reasonably mean and on what a hearer can reasonably interpret a speaker to mean. “contextualist platitude” does not preclude the “older picture of language and communication” and “a fairly standard semantic-pragmatic distinction.” Pragmatic considerations and context do not contribute to the content of what is said. Bach admits that there is meaning in utterances beyond the semantic content of a sentence, but he maintains that context does not determine speaker meaning but rather constrains how a speaker can expect to be understood and helps the hearer understand what is said. “We need the level of locutionary act and, correlatively, a strict, semantic notion of what is said in order to account for (the content of) what a speaker does in uttering a sentence independently of whatever communicative intention (if any) he has in uttering it and regardless of how the content of that intention may depart from the semantic content of the sentence.”
640:, which is to say that when humans reason, many steps in their reasoning are taken by default- i.e. they are “based on some generalization or stereotype which is overridden only if there occurs the thought of an alternative or of a reason to the contrary.” An example of this would be seeing an apple on the table. Bach would argue that, under normal circumstances, the belief “there is an apple on the table” will be formed without reflection on the process by which that belief was formed since the reasoning process of the agent that sees the apple is working under the assumption that seeing something means it is there. Given this, Bach holds that the internalist is expecting too much for a belief to be justified, since expecting reasoning to be evaluated in every step would mean denying justification to the large majority of beliefs since they are formed via default reasoning. Bach therefore holds that if internalism cannot provide a solid argument against the default reasoning model of human cognition, then they must be satisfied in defining what a justified
688:. Fodor claims that there is no lexical structure to such verbs as "keep", "get", "make" and "put". He suggests that, alternatively, "keep" simply expresses the concept KEEP (Fodor capitalizes concepts to distinguish them from properties, names or other such entities). If there is a straightforward one-to-one mapping between individual words and concepts, "keep your clothes on"*, "keep your receipt" and "keep washing your hands" will all share the same concept of KEEP under Fodor's theory. This concept presumably locks on to the unique external property of keeping. But, if this is true, then RETAIN must pick out a different property in RETAIN YOUR RECEIPT, since one can't retain one's clothes or retain washing one's hands. Fodor's theory also has a problem explaining how the concept FAST contributes,
393:. Direct reference is the principle that singular terms contribute their referents to the propositions expressed by the sentences which contain them. Compositionality is the ideas that the meaning of a composite expression is derived from the parts which make it up. Semantic innocence is the principle that "embedding" a term or name in a "that" clause should not change its semantic value.
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592:. But let us suppose that Peter hears a recording of Paderewski playing Mozart and is impressed with the performance. Later, he hears a recording of Paderewski playing Keith Jarret and is disgusted by the performance. Given that we have the same individual Paderewski and that Peter still does not know that it is the same individual in the two cases, we would have to say that
353:. This is basically the idea that the "that"- clauses of belief reports ("that William will take the train tomorrow", "that the sun will rise tomorrow morning") specify (i.e. directly refer to) propositions (or sentences) that the believer believes. Bach suggests that "that"-clauses do not specify but merely "describe" or "characterize" what a person believes.
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all primitive, innate and unanalyzable because they all fall into the category of what he calls "lexical concepts" (those for which our language has a single word). Against this view, Bach argues that the concept VIXEN is almost certainly composed out of the concepts FEMALE and FOX, BACHELOR out of SINGLE and MALE, and so on.
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she believes it. The two sentences do not differ in their contents, the singular proposition expressed by the statement that
Superman/Clark Kent is a wimp, but by some implicitly referred to way of taking the proposition. In Bach's view this approach violates the principle of compositionality. There
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depends on the specifics of the theory. However that may be, this view also violates the principle of semantic innocence: the referents of terms change from ordinary contexts (where they are objects in the external world) to attitude report contexts (where they are linguistic items. Hence, it has the
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According to Bach, “a belief can be justified even in the absence of any action on the part of the believer, as in the case of beliefs formed automatically or routinely without any deliberate consideration;” whereas “a person is justified in believing something to the extent that he holds the belief
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possible? Bach sketches four historical approaches to the resolving the problem and demonstrates each of their inadequacies. The first approach is that of Frege himself. Frege claimed that the reference of a term in the context of a belief report (or any other attitude attribution) was no longer its
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Attempts have been made to resolve the
Paderewski puzzle by suggesting that the "that"-clauses involved are not sufficiently specific and that if all contextually relevant information were provided in detail, then we could eventually determine exactly what it is that Peter believes and disbelieves.
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What makes Fodor's view of concepts extremely difficult to digest for many critics is simply his insistence that such a large, perhaps implausible, number of them are primitive and undefinable. For example, Fodor considers such concepts as BACHELOR, EFFECT, ISLAND, TRAPEZOID, VIXEN, and WEEK to be
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Bach argues against over-interpreting what he labels the "contextualist platitude" which he defines as: “Generally what a speaker means in uttering a sentence, even if the sentence is devoid of ambiguity, vagueness, or indexicality, goes beyond what the sentence means.” Bach asserts that context
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describes him as believing something else. Since the "that"-clauses do not specify what the two things are that Peter believes (they do not refer to one specific object), then they are not necessarily the same thing. The condition for the truth of a belief report is that the believer must believe
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for some "unarticulated constituent" or "hidden indexical". He also points out that sentences such as "Joe is ready" and "Fred has finished", which are missing an argument, are not necessarily sentences that express propositions with unarticulated constituents. They may simply be semantically
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rationally and responsibly.” On this view, the root of the debate over what constitutes justification between internalists and externalists is that internalists are interested in what makes a believer justified and externalists are concerned with what makes a belief justified.
405:). While this proposal maintains compositionality, however, it obviously violates the aforementioned principle of semantic innocence. Terms do not have the same reference in attitude attribution contexts that they do in ordinary sentence contexts. Bach illustrates
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Bach's own, alternative solution is to reject the
Specification Assumption discussed at the beginning. He further illustrates the problems associated with this assumption by way of another famous philosophical puzzle:
692:, to the contents of FAST CAR, FAST DRIVER, FAST TRACK, and FAST TIME. Whether or not the differing interpretations of "fast" in these sentences are specified in the semantics of English, or are the result of
360:. The first type of puzzle is a variation on the classic problem of the substitution of co-referential terms in the context of attitude attributions. A simple illustration is the following pair of sentences:
381:(and hence the content) of the sentence from true to false. But this should be impossible if we are faithful to a few simple and reasonable assumptions that are commonly accepted among philosophers:
349:, Bach argues that there is a false assumption underlying all of the traditional forms of explanation of the nature of belief reports: they all implicitly endorse something that he refers to as the
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provided that (a) it does not occur to one that the situation might be out of the ordinary, and (b) it probably would occur to one that the situation might be out of the ordinary.
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of the term in the terminology of Frege. Consequently, Frege's theory "denies semantic innocence" and this makes it ring somewhat counterintuitive.
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Bach presents his own theory as to what constitutes justified belief which he calls the “taking-for-granted principle.” This principle holds that:
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view. On this view, a sentence embedded in a "that"-clause refers to some sort of sentence, whether the sentence itself or a sentence in some
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to be two different individuals: one a statesman and the other a pianist. In fact, they are one and the same person. According to Bach's
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theory. Neo-Russelians attempt to solve the problem by rejecting the "anti-substitution intuition". They insist that sentences such as
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As Bach puts it, " are not inherently capable of specifying their contents fully".
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title=Content Ex
Machina. Semantic vs. Pragmatics, ed. Zoltan Gendler Szabo.
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theories of justification by introducing a distinction between justified
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Peter believes that
Paderewki "the classical pianist playing Mozart"...".
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Peter believes that
Paderewski the "classical pianist" has musical talent
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Peter disbelieves that
Paderewski the "jazz pianist" has musical talent
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attributions, in particular belief attributions. Such attributions (or
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Peter disbelieves that
Paderewski "the statesman" has musical talent
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this is a problem by providing an example sentence that involves
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Peter believes that Paderewski "the pianist" has musical talent
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from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially
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from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially
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Bach argues that the reasoning method employed by humans is
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Lois Lane believes, but with what they implicitly say about
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Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is a wimp, but he is not
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and that leads to serious problems for the Fregean view:
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The last position that Bach considers is the so-called
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Review of Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong
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Kripke's puzzle arises from the fact that Peter takes
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incomplete and hence not express propositions at all.
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Exit-existentialism;: A philosophy of self-awareness
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Peter disbelieves that Paderewski had musical talent
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same problem as Frege's, as well as several others.
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Exit-existentialism: A philosophy of self-awareness
318:is the subject to whom a belief is attributed and
781:Kent Bach, "A Puzzle about Belief Reports" (1997)
534:Peter believes that Paderewski had musical talent
472:above has nothing to do with what they say about
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563:Peter as believing something and sentence
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219:about living persons that is unsourced or
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505:is true, then it is also true that
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584:which further specifies that
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916:Philosophers from California
197:biography of a living person
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224:must be removed immediately
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863:Bach, "Rationale," 259.
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483:A believes that G is F
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