Wide Scope A philosophy blog that ranges over philosophy and other fun stuff.

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I’m attracted to a traditional account of the semantics of belief reports which holds that the semantic content of a belief report of the form ‘S believes that P’ is a two-place relation that holds between a person and a proposition. I’m curious about other common phrases in English that (a) use the word ‘believe’, (b) ...

This is a heads up for readers in the area. Our philosophy department chair, Neil Feit, is the 2009 Hagan award recipient, and he will be presenting a talk titled “Mental Representation and the Self” this Thursday at 4PM in McEwen Hall Room 209.  Here’s the an excerpt of the press release from SUNY Fredonia. ...

I like Ways-Millianism. It’s a combo-theory about meaning and the metaphysics of belief. Here are two of the core theses. (M) The meaning of a proper name is its referent. (W) Belief is a mediated relation between a person and a proposition. People believe propositions in virtue of standing in relation to some third thing - call ...

Here’s a fun case. I was walking around the Science Museum in Buffalo with Simon yesterday, and I came across this odd passage in the dinosaur exhibit. Here is a picture of it, but I’ll type out the passage so you don’t have to click away. Triceratops, the Fighter Paleontologists believe that Triceratops used its three horns ...

I’ve been thinking more about the possible reply that Stanley/Hawthorne types (hereafter SSIers) might offer in response to an objection to SSI that I presented. Here is the original objection, and here is the possible reply that an SSIer might offer. ...

In the last post, I presented an objection to one of the main motivations for Subject Sensitive Invariantism (here). There is an obvious difference between the Guard Dog and Contractor cases on the one hand and Stanley’s cases on the other. ...

Consider the following two cases Guard Dog Case Bob’s mom is worried about burglars. She tells him she needs a dog (but not that it’s to scare away burglars). Bob goes out and gets her a tea cup poodle. She laughs at him and says, “You don’t understand. I’m worried about burglars. That’s not a dog. I ...

So let’s talk about where I was headed with those last three posts on linguistic appropriateness. We had four cases of assertion. I’ll give a quick summary of each with links to the original post. ...

Confession time. I don’t have a good grasp as to what linguistic appropriateness is. But in so far as I do, I’m starting to get interested in cases where it seems intuitive that the person has done something linguistically inappropriate. In the long run, I’m interested in how the cases might inform some debates in ...