Acta Analytica

The aim of this paper is to propose an exploratory artefactual theory of fictional objects based on Evnine’s amorphism, with the goal of reconciling the inconsistent intuitions surrounding these entities. While not presenting a fully developed and comprehensive theory, I aim to explore the possibilities of amorphism and to offer a preliminary investigation into the nature of fictional objects and the challenges posed by our basic intuitions regarding their non-existence, creation, and property attribution. I formulate a two-level criterion of identity-based on creative acts and utilize the notion of internal predication to account for how fictional objects possess the properties attributed to them in relevant stories. Additionally, I propose considering a subset of essential properties to fix the identity of ficta across stories. Lastly, I address the challenge of negative existential statements by equating non-existence with unreality, asserting that fictional objects are constituted by the properties attributed to them but do not fully exemplify them.

The semantic blindness objection to contextualism challenges the view that there is no incompatibility between (i) denials of external-world knowledge in contexts where radical-deception scenarios are salient, and (ii) affirmations of external-world knowledge in contexts where such scenarios are not salient. Contextualism allegedly attributes a gross and implausible form of semantic incompetence in the use of the concept of knowledge to people who are otherwise quite competent in its use; this blindness supposedly consists in wrongly judging that there is genuine conflict between claims of type (i) and type (ii). We distinguish two broad versions of contextualism: relativistic-content contextualism and categorical-content contextualism. We argue that although the semantic blindness objection evidently is applicable to the former, it does not apply to the latter. We describe a subtle form of conflict between claims of types (i) and (ii), which we call différance-based affirmatory conflict. We argue that people confronted with radical-deception scenarios are prone to experience a form of semantic myopia (as we call it): a failure to distinguish between différance-based affirmatory conflict and outright inconsistency. Attributing such semantic myopia to people who are otherwise competent with the concept of knowledge explains the bafflement about knowledge-claims that so often arises when radical-deception scenarios are made salient. Such myopia is not some crude form of semantic blindness at all; rather, it is an understandable mistake grounded in semantic competence itself: what we call a competence-based performance error.

Intentionality is a mark of the mental, as Brentano (1874) noted. Any representation or conception of anything has the feature of intentionality, which informally put, is the feature of being about something that may or may not exist. Visual artworks are about something, whether something literal or abstract. The artwork is a mentalized physical object. Aesthetic experience of the artwork illustrates the nature of intentionality as we focus attention on the phenomenology of the sensory exemplar. This focus of attention on the exemplar in aesthetic experience simultaneously exhibits what the intentional object is like and what our conception of it is like. The exemplar is Janus-faced, looking in one direction outward toward the objects conceived and in the other direction inward toward our conceiving of them. It shows us what intentionality is like and how we know it.

Contextualism has been a prominent epistemological theory for more than twenty years. Its central claim is that standards for justification and of knowledge ascriptions can vary from one context to another context. However this in not the end of the story, for one must subsequently explain these variations of standards in order to avoid arbitrariness. Two strategies offer themselves at this point: generalism and particularism. We argue that the latter could provide a viable support for an overall contextualist approach. David Lewis in his paper “Elusive Knowledge” provides a nice case of contextual epistemology and points to several important aspects of knowledge. But we disagree with Lewis on two points of his account: (i) knowledge without justification and (ii) set of exceptionless rules that determine relevant alternatives. We preserve the overall conception of knowledge as justified true belief and attempt to work out a contextualist account of knowledge by pointing to an alternative, particularistic view of relevance and relevant alternatives.

This paper is about paradigmatic slurs, i.e. expressions that are prima facie associated with the expression of a contemptuous attitude concerning a group of people identified in terms of its origin or descent (‘spic’), race (‘nigger’), sexual orientation (‘faggot’), ethnia or religion (‘kike’), gender (‘whore’), etc. Our purpose is twofold: (i) explaining their expressive meaning dimension in terms of a version of stereotype semantics and (ii) analysing their original and most typical uses as insults, which will be called with a neologism ‘insultive’, in terms of a speech act theory.

The basic idea of conversational contextualism is that knowledge attributions are context sensitive in that a given knowledge attribution may be true if made in one context but false if made in another, owing to differences in the attributors’ conversational contexts. Moreover, the context sensitivity involved is traced back to the context sensitivity of the word “know,” which, in turn, is commonly modelled on the case either of genuine indexicals such as “I” or “here” or of comparative adjectives such as “tall” or “rich.” But contextualism faces various problems. I argue that in order to solve these problems we need to look for another account of the context sensitivity involved in knowledge attributions and I sketch an alternative proposal.

Argument for fatalism attempts to prove that free choice is a logical or conceptual impossibility. The paper argues that the first two premises of the argument are sound: propositions are either true or false and they have their truth-value eternally. But the claim that from the fatalistic premises with the introduction of some innocent further premise dire consequences follow as regards to the possibility of free choice is false. The introduced premise, which establishes the connection between the first two premises (which are about the nature of propositions) and the concept of free choice is not innocent. It creates the impression that the truth of certain propositions can somehow determine the occurrence of certain events. But no proposition can have such an effect since the counterfactuals “If proposition P were true, event E would happen” does not say anything about determination. The argument for fatalism is, however, not a boring sophism. It does reveal something about the nature of propositional representation. It shows that each proposition represents necessarily the fact what it represents, i.e. it shows that propositions have their truth conditions non-contingently. But from this nothing follows as regards to the contingent nature of the facts represented. On the bases of the first two premises of the argument for fatalism we cannot infer to the impossibility of free choice. The argument for fatalism should not be interpreted as an attempt to prove on purely logical or conceptual grounds that we do not have the ability to influence future events by our choices. But it could be used to show something about the nature of propositional representation.