Andrew Cullison

It’s been awhile since my last blog entry. We hit the end of the semester crunch, and then I went out of town. I’m now back doing work, and posts will resume. Two cool things happened in that break. I had two papers accepted for publication! The first is a paper on the problem of [...]

Filed under: epistemology, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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I’m giving a talk at Northwestern today called “Descriptivism Meets Gettier” as part of their Epistemology Brown Bag Lecture Series. I’ll post a draft of the paper later (I’ll likely want to make changes after the talk), but here’s the basic idea. I think Descriptivism (about semantic content) is committed to certain speakers having knowledge [...]

Filed under: epistemology, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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Listen Links to Journal Articles

Filed under: epistemology, metaethics, metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of language, podcast by Andrew Cullison
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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’, [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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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.

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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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 [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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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 [...]

Filed under: epistemology, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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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.

Filed under: philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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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.

Filed under: epistemology, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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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 [...]

Filed under: epistemology, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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