Andrew Cullison

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.

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

Filed under: epistemology, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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In this previous post, I briefly outlined how epistemologists sometimes take linguistic appropriateness into account. Let’s grant the judgements about appropriateness in George’s case from that post. In this post, let’s consider some more cases.

Filed under: epistemology, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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In this post, I want to illustrate a methodological assumption that is sometimes made in epistemology.The idea is that facts about the linguistic appropriateness/inappropriateness of an assertion can count as evidence for or against an epistemic theory Here’s an example as to how someone might make use of this assumption.

Filed under: epistemology, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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Here’s an argument that the semantic content of some term is directly referential. It’s designed to mirror the regress argument for foundationalism in epistemology.

Filed under: Uncategorized, epistemology, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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You know why Lewis Powell is awesome? He loves thinking about Frege’s Puzzle. You know why Lewis Powell is even awesomer? He loves thinking about Frege’s Puzzle this much.

Filed under: fun, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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Here are two quotes from the first few pages in the new reader Experimental Philosophy edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols. Of course, the most salient difference is just the fact that experimental philosophers conduct experiments and conceptual analysts do not. Thus, the conceptual analyst might write, “In this case, one would surely say…,” [...]

Filed under: epistemology, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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Consider the following theses. (A) For any person P, P exists iff P is alive. (B) For any person P, P is alive iff P is not dead. (C) Whether or not some person is dead is vague. (D) Whether or not someone exists is not vague. On the face of it, these four theses [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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Dan Korman just posted a nice little discussion on Hawthorne’s objection to common sense ontology here. I don’t dispute anything Korman says, but this has inspired to test drive another response to this kind of argument that I’ve been kicking around for awhile. Here’s the quote from Hawthorne that Korman uses. “Barring a kind of [...]

Filed under: Uncategorized, metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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Here’s a puzzle that Joan Weiner raises for supervaluationism from a recent PPQ paper. The basic idea is that supervaluationism is alleged to be in tension with perfectly acceptable scientific methodology. Here’s a quote from the paper that summarizes the point. This much is certainly true; we want to know whether minoxidil (Rogaine) can prevent [...]

Filed under: philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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