Dialectica

In the unpublished work Theory of Knowledge† a complex is assumed to be “anything analyzable, any- thing which has constituents” (p. 79), and analysis is presented as the “discovery of the constituents and the manner of combination of a given complex” (p. 119). The notion of complex is linked in various ways with the notions of relating relation, logical form and proposition, taken as a linguistic expression provided with meaning. This paper mainly focuses on these notions, on their links and, more widely, on the role of logical form, by offering a new way of understanding what Russell was doing in TK as concerns the logical-ontological matter of this manuscript. In particular, a new account of Russell's theory of judgment will be given, by taking a stand with respect to the main accounts already given, and it will be argued for the presence in TK of a notion of type different from the one applied to propositional functions in ML and PM.

Theories of practical reason must meet a psychological requirement: they must explain how normative practical reasons can be motivationally efficacious. It would be pointless to claim that we are subject to normative demands of reason, if we were in fact unable to meet those demands. Concerning this requirement to account for the possibility of rational motivation, internalist approaches are distinguished from externalist ones. I defend internalism, whilst rejecting both ways in which the belief-desire model can be instantiated. Both the Humean and the Kantian instantiation of that model fail to account for the internal (conceptual) connection between normative and motivating reasons required by internalism. The two classes of reasons rather come to be seen as mutually exclusive. Opposing the belief-desire model, I argue that rational motivation can only be established by reference to emotion. Emotions are affective perceptions. They have motivational force so that they can contribute to the explanation of action. At the same time they can rationalise actions because they have an intentional content which resembles the content of sensory perception in being representational. Because of this, the emotions can noninferentially justify judgements which in turn can justify actions. I conclude by outlining the Aristotelian account of practical reason and ethics which emerges from integrating the emotions into practical reasoning. Doing the right thing is much more a matter of seeing things right than of drawing the right inferences. Seeing things right, in its turn, is not only to justify an action: it necessarily implies to be motivated to act accordingly.

There is an enormous literature on Moore's so-called “proof”per se, but practically nothing has been written on the distinctions upon which the proof is bases, such as “being presented in space” and “being met with in space”. These are crucial to the argument, since Moore wishes to draw the line between the external and internal world via such distinctions. The author argues that these distinctions themselves crucially depend on a point that Moore does not argue for, but assumes, namely that afterimages, negative after-images, some sense-data and pains are private to those that have them, and that two different people cannot sense numerically the same after-images, pains etc. The author shows that this assumption is nonsense and that the entire proof, based upon it, therefore fails.II existe une littérature considérable sur la soi-disantdémonstrationde Moore elle-même, mais pratiquement rien n'a étéécrit à propos des distinctions sur lesquelles elle est basée, distinctions telles queétant présentée dans ľespace ≪, rencontrée dans ľéspace≪ etc. Elles jouent pourtant un rôle crucial dans ľargumentation puisque Moore voudrait les utiliser pour tracer la frontiére entre les mondes externe et interne. Le présent article montre que ces distinctions elles-mêmes dépendent ?un point que Moore accepte sans discussion, à savoir que les post-images positives ou négatives, cer-taines données des sens, les douleurs appartiennent au domaine privé de ceux qui en sont affectés et que deux personnes ne peuvent ressentir une post-image, douleur etc. numériquement identique. Ľauteur montre que ces suppositions sont dépourvues de sens et done que la démonstration qui repose sur elles perd toute validité.Es gibt eine beträchtliche Literatur über Moores sog. ≫Beweis≪ als solchen; dage-gen ist fast nichts über die Unterscheidungen geschrieben worden, auf welchen dcr Be-weis beruht, wie diejenige zwischen ≫im Raum dargegeben≪ und ≫im Raum begegnet≪. Diese sind für das Argument insofern entscheidend, als Moore die Trennungslinie zwischen der äusseren und der inneren Welt auf Grund von solchen Unterscheidungen Ziehen mochte. Der Autor zeigt, dass diese selbst in entscheidender Weise von einem Punkt abhängen, für welchen Moore nicht argumentiert, sondern den er einfach vor-aussetzt, nämlich, dass gewisse positive oder negative Nach-Bilder sowie gewisse Sinnes-daten und Schmerzen privater Natur sind und dass verschiedene Subjekte nicht numerisch identische solche Gebilde wahrnehmen können. Es wird gezeigt, dass diese Voraussetzung unsinnig sei und dass deshalb das Argument nicht stichhaltig sein kann.

The paper examines three essays that Leibniz wrote in 1688, immediately after the composition of the Discourse on Metaphysics, one of his most organic philosophical works. The main topics which emerge from these essays are: the relationship between substance and accidents; the nature of accidents; and, more generally, the nature of abstract entities. Given that accidents’ nature is that of changing, Leibniz sees how hard it is to give an account of the relationship between substance and accidents that does not imply any change in the substance, when its accidents undergo a change. To find a way out of this problem, Leibniz assumes that abstract terms (whiteness, wisdom, etc.) do not name real properties or real parts of substances, and that any sentence containing real abstract terms can be rephrased as a sentence containing logical abstract terms, which do no imply any commitment to the existence of real properties. Coherently with this nominalistic attitude, Leibniz ends up, in the Theodicy and in his correspondence with Des Bosses, considering accidents as modes or internal modifications of the substance.

The challenge of handling fictional discourse is to find the best way to resolve the apparent inconsistencies in our ways of speaking about fiction. A promising approach is to take at least some such discourse to involve pretense, but does all fictional discourse involve pretense? I will argue that a better, less revisionary, solution is to take internal and fictionalizing discourse to involve pretense, while allowing that in external critical discourse, fictional names are used seriously to refer to fictional characters. I then address two objections to such realist theories of fiction: One, that they can't adequately account for the truth of singular nonexistence claims involving fictional names, and two, that accepting that there are fictional characters to which we refer is implausible or ontologically profligate.

Forthcoming in dialectica. Please refer to the final version. According to naïve realist (or primitivist) theories of colour, colours are sui generis mind-independent properties. The question that I consider in this paper is the relationship of naïve realism to what Mark Johnston calls Revelation, the thesis that the essential nature of colour is fully revealed in a standard visual experience. In the first part of the paper, I argue that if naïve realism is true, then Revelation is false. In the second part of the paper, I defend naïve realism against a number of objections. 1. NAÏVE REALISM AND REVELATION The naïve realist theory of colour can be understood as the conjunction of two theses: MIND-INDEPENDENCE: colours are properties of material objects, light sources, etc. whose essential nature is constitutively independent of the experiences of perceiving subjects; DISTINCTNESS: colours are sui generis properties that are distinct from properties described in the vocabulary of phy...

The long-standing issue of Wittgenstein's controversial remarks on Gödel's Theorem has recently heated up in a number of different and interesting directions [(Floyd and Putnam. 2000), (Steiner, 2001), (Floyd, 2001)]. In their (2000), Juliet Floyd and Hilary Putnam purport to argue that Wittgenstein's‘notorious’(RFM App. III, §8) “Contains a philosophical claim of great interest,” namely, “if one assumed. that →P is provable in Russell's system one should… give up the “translation” of P by the English sentence ‘P is not provable’,” because if ωP is provable in PM, PM is ω -inconsistent, and if PM is ω-inconsistent, we cannot translate ‘P’as ’P is not provable in PM’because the predicate‘NaturalNo.(x)’in ‘P’“cannot be…interpreted” as “x is a natural number.” Though Floyd and Putnam do not clearly distinguish the two tasks, they also argue for “The Floyd-Putnam Thesis,” namely, that in the 1930's Wittgenstein had a particular (correct) understanding of Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem. In this paper, I endeavour to show, first, that the most natural and most defensible interpretation of Wittgenstein's (RFM App. III, §8) and the rest of (RFM App. III) is incompatible with the Floyd-Putnam attribution and, second, that evidence from Wittgenstein's Nachla (i.e., a hitherto unknown “proof sketch” of Gödel's reasoning, Wittgenstein's only mention of ω-inconsistency, and Wittgenstein's only mention of “K provable”) strongly indicates that the Floyd- Putnam attribution and the Floyd-Putnam Thesis are false. By way of this examination, we shall see that despite a failure to properly understand Gödel's proof—perhaps because, as Kreisel says, Wittgenstein did not read Gödel's 1931 paper prior to 1942-Wittgenstein's 1937–38, 1941 and 1944 remarks indicate that Gödel's result makes no sense from Wittgenstein's own (idiosyncratic) perspective.

The rejection of the idea that the so-called Duhem-Quine thesis in fact expresses a thesis upheld by either Duhem or Quine invites a more detailed comparison of their views. It is suggested that the arguments of each have a certain impact on the positions maintained by the other. In particular, Quine's development of his notion of ontological commitment is enlisted in the interpretation of Duhem's position. It is argued that this counts against the instrumentalist construal usually put on what Duhem says about approximation and historical continuity.

Wolfgang Künne's Conceptions of Truth (2003) is a magnificent achievement. Wonderfully clear, erudite, compendious, honest and insightful on some very tricky issues–these are some of its many virtues. I have benefited a great deal from studying it. In this short note, I will concentrate on Künne's own positive proposal about the concept of truth, his modestly named 'Modest Account'. I will raise some questions about its ultimate viability. The Modest Account is an account of the concept of truth. It takes the form of an explicit definition, ...

... ARGUMENTACIÓN. HACIA UN ENFOQUE UNIFICADO DE SUS DIMENSIONES LÓGICA, DIALÉCTICA Y RETÓRICA Tesis doctoral Autora: Lilian Bermejo Luque Directores: Dr. E. Gustavo Fernández Díez-Picazo Dr. Frans H. van Eemeren Departamento de Filosofía. ...

I attempt to explain Frege's handling of the Julius Caesar issue in terms of his more general philosophical commitments. These only became fully explicit in his middle-period writings, but his earlier moves are best explained, I suggest, if we suppose them to be implicit in his earlier thinking. These commitments conditionally justify Frege in rejecting Hume's Principle as either a definition or axiom but in accepting Axiom V. However, the general epistemological picture they constitute has serious problems in accounting for how knowledge is possible at all of such propositions as that Julius Caesar is not a number.

https://doi.org/10.18566/escr.v28n60.a08

En la apresurada afirmación de que la escritura es un testamento que concentra el  patrimonio de la intención de un ausente, se ha generalizado la idea de la inmutabilidad del texto que responde y obedece a un criterio de coherencia en el cual, el tratamiento de su idea fluye sin el atisbo de obstáculos atribuibles a una perspectiva hermenéutica que le sugiere plasticidad a la escritura y, por consiguiente, apertura creativa y propositiva a la lectura.  Frente a esta problemática que restringe el carácter dialéctico del lenguaje, la apuesta conceptual que a continuación se plantea tiene como objetivo cuestionar el criterio de objetivación lingüística por separar a la palabra de su naturaleza reflexiva en sintonía con la referencia al ente que moviliza en sus significados. El alcance dinámico de la escritura admite que la lectura acontezca como un apéndice de la observación que no solamente se prepara cognitivamente al análisis del conjunto de grafemas que se integran para mostrar por medio de las palabras, sino que debe apropiarse sensorialmente de la imagen que le expresa sus atributos y alteraciones al lenguaje como vínculo imprescindible en todo acto de enunciación.  En este sentido, la ruta conceptual marxista se trenza con un panorama filosófico crítico con el que cobra vigencia la relación dialógica entre texto y lector en un movimiento de la mirada hacia el corazón mismo de la pretensión expositiva, a fin de pedagogizar el encuentro con el texto mediante un enfoque hermenéutico crítico guiado por el paradigma cualitativo.  Bajo esta forma, se puede sintetizar que la resignificación de la escritura comporta su connotación de textura dinámica permeable por los interrogantes que favorecen nuevos y sorprendentes hallazgos en la humana y loable tarea de conocer la materia. Esto supone comprometer la palabra, tanto oral como escrita, con nuevos retos de indagación que hacen del conocimiento una experiencia en continua mutación.

... In the sec-ond scenario, suppose Jones*, who is post-surgery Jenny, and exactly like Jones, also performs A, and her A-ing, too, is not causally determined. ... But Jones* is a psychological twin of Jill and she, too, just like Jill, is a prod-uct of Max. ...

La filosofia moderna se ha caracterizado por un interes especial hacia el metodo cientifico. Su propuesta se ha constituido como un novum organum contra el vetus organon de Aristoteles. Sin embargo, tras cuatro siglos de esfuerzos, solo hallamos anarquia o ineficacia en los metodos propuestos; por eso, se ha intentado una rehabilitacion del metodo aristotelico.En el presente texto se investiga, en primer lugar, si los procedimientos cognitivos, propuestos en los Analytica, son el metodo de la filosofia o si, mas bien, describen procedimientos propios de otras ciencias; y entonces el autentico metodo de la filosofia —y de la episteme en general— habria que buscarlo en los Topicos: «El fin de este tratado es encontrar un methodos, que nos permita argumentar […] sobre cualquier problema propuesto» (Topica, A 1, 100 a 18-21). En segundo lugar, se expone en que consiste y como procede la dialectica aristotelica como metodo de la filosofia, «aplicada a las ciencias filosoficas» (Topica, A...

How Ficta Follow Fiction (HFFF) attempts to deal with a familiar topic, fictional entities. It does so in the most fruitful way in which such a topic can be approached today: syncretistically. The main flaw of the various traditional doctrines on this topic is that they are incomplete. They ...