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A Defense Of Russellian Descriptivism, Brandt H. Van Der Gaast
A Defense Of Russellian Descriptivism, Brandt H. Van Der Gaast
Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation, I defend a Russellian form of descriptivism. The main supporting argument invokes a relation between meaning and thought. I argue that the meanings of sentences are the thoughts people use them to express. This is part of a Gricean outlook on meaning according to which psychological intentionality is prior to, and determinative of, linguistic intentionality. The right approach to thought, I argue in Chapter 1, is a type of functionalism on which thoughts have narrow contents. On this view, the attitude ascriptions of a regimented psychology capture what people really believe and desire. These attitude ascriptions have …
The Problem Of Confirmation In The Everett Interpretation, Emily Adlam
The Problem Of Confirmation In The Everett Interpretation, Emily Adlam
Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research
I argue that the Oxford school Everett interpretation is internally incoherent, because we cannot claim that in an Everettian universe the kinds of reasoning we have used to arrive at our beliefs about quantum mechanics would lead us to form true beliefs. I show that in an Everettian context, the experimental evidence that we have available could not provide empirical confirmation for quantum mechanics, and moreover that we would not even be able to establish reference to the theoretical entities of quantum mechanics. I then consider a range of existing Everettian approaches to the probability problem and show that they …