Topoi

In the original article, the section heading was incorrectly published. The heading of Section 8 should read as “Nomothetic and Idiographic Principles” rather than “Omothetic and Idiographic Principles”.

The Standard View is that, other things equal, speakers’ judgments about the meanings of sentences of their language are correct. After all, we make the meanings, so how wrong can we be about them? The Standard View underlies the Elicitation Method, a typical method in semantic fieldwork, according to which we should work out the truth-conditions of a sentence by eliciting speakers’ judgments about its truth-value in different situations. I put pressure on the Standard View and therefore on the Elicitation Method: for quite straightforward reasons, speakers can be radically mistaken about meanings. Lewis (Convention: A Philosophical Study, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1969) gave a theory of convention in a game-theoretic framework. He showed how conventions could arise from repeated coordination games, and, as a special case, how meanings could arise from repeated signaling games. I put pressure on the Standard View by building on Lewis’s framework. I construct coordination games in which the players can be wrong about their conventions, and signaling games in which the players can be wrong about their messages’ meanings. The key idea is straightforward: knowing your own strategy and payoff needn’t determine what the others do, so leaves room for false beliefs about the convention and meanings. The examples are simple, explicit, new in kind, and based on an independently plausible meta-semantic story.

The semantic inferentialist account of the social institution of semantic meaning can be naturally extended to account for social ontology. I argue here that semantic inferentialism provides a framework within which mathematical ontology can be understood as social ontology, and mathematical facts as socially instituted facts. I argue further that the semantic inferentialist framework provides resources to underpin at least some aspects of the objectivity of mathematics, even when the truth of mathematical claims is understood as socially instituted.

I examine the way a relevant conceptual novelty in mathematics, that is, the notion of group, has been constructed in order to show the kinds of heuristic reasoning that enabled its manufacturing. To this end, I examine salient aspects of the works of Lagrange, Cauchy, Galois and Cayley (Sect. 2). In more detail, I examine the seminal idea resulting from Lagrange’s heuristics and how Cauchy, Galois and Cayley develop it. This analysis shows us how new mathematical entities are generated, and also how what counts as a solution to a problem is shaped and changed. Finally, I argue that this case study shows us that we have to study inferential micro-structures (Sect. 3), that is, the ways similarities and regularities are sought, in order to understand how theoretical novelty is constructed and heuristic reasoning is put forward.

We investigate and compare two major approaches to enhancing the expressive capacities of modal languages, namely the addition of subjunctive markers on the one hand, and the addition of scope-bearing actuality operators, on the other. It turns out that the subjunctive marker approach is not only every bit as versatile as the actuality operator approach, but that it in fact outperforms its rival in the context of cross-world predication.

Some versions of the doctrine of divine simplicity imply that God lacks really differentiated parts. I present a new argument against these views based on divine beauty. The argument proceeds as follows: (1) God is beautiful. (2) If God is beautiful, then this beauty arises from some structure. (3) If God’s beauty arises from a structure, then God possesses really differentiated parts. If these premises are true, then divine simplicity (so characterized) is false. I argue for each of the argument’s premises and defend it against objections, including an objection based on analogical predication, and an objection that supposes that God is simple while appearing complex.

In 2002, Luciano Floridi published a paper called What is the Philosophy of Information?, where he argues for a new paradigm in philosophical research. To what extent should his proposal be accepted? Is the Philosophy of Information actually a new paradigm, in the Kuhninan sense, in Philosophy? Or is it only a new branch of Epistemology? In our discussion we will argue in defense of Floridi’s proposal. We believe that Philosophy of Information has the types of features had by other areas already acknowledge as authentic in Philosophy. By way of an analogical argument we will argue that since Philosophy of Information has its own topics, method and problems it would be counter-intuitive not to accept it as a new philosophical area. To strengthen our position we present and discuss main topics of Philosophy of Information.

Because the History of Philosophy is a branch of both History and Philosophy, it faces tasks which are Historical, tasks which are Philosophical, and tasks which overlap both. As Philosophy typically flourishes by incorporating and assimilating ideas and bodies of text which have either not previously been part of its stock in trade or have been forgotten, the main task facing the History of Philosophy today is that of developing serious scholarship in areas that have been largely neglected, such as Philosophy in Arabic and Persian as well as in Sanskrit and Chinese.

At the center of the debate between contextualist versus relativist semantics for epistemic modal claims is an empirical question about when competent subjects judge epistemic modal disagreement to be present. John MacFarlane’s relativist claims that we judge there to be epistemic modal disagreement across the widest range of cases. We wish to dispute the robustness of his data with the results of two studies. Our primary conclusion is that the actual disagreement data is not consistent with relativist predictions, and so, that the primary motivation for relativism disappears. Our study differs from a related study by Knobe and Yalcin (Semant Pragmat 7(10):1–21, 2014) in that we focus directly on the question of genuine disagreement, as opposed to a question about truth or the appropriateness of retraction. Some of our findings agree with theirs about relativism. We uncover new lessons along the way, including that there are widespread situation effects of epistemic modal discourse; idiosyncratic features of the vignettes significantly influencing judgments about epistemic modal disagreement. We reflect with mixed feelings on the prospects for contextualism to accommodate our findings.