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Full-Text Articles in Philosophy of Language
Review Of Rene Van Woudenberg’S "The Epistemology Of Reading And Interpretation.”, Jeffrey C. Goodman
Review Of Rene Van Woudenberg’S "The Epistemology Of Reading And Interpretation.”, Jeffrey C. Goodman
Faculty Scholarship
I here review Rene van Woudenberg’s monograph, The Epistemology of Reading and Interpretation
On Reading, Jeffrey C. Goodman
On Reading, Jeffrey C. Goodman
Faculty Scholarship
What is reading? Seeing and comprehending a contentful, written text counts as reading, of course, but that is simply the paradigm; it is not reading itself. Blind people, e.g., often read using Braille. It is sometimes claimed that one engages in reading when one listens to an audiobook. So, my project in this paper is to address this question: What is the proper analysis of person S reads text W? Surprisingly, no philosophical attempts to analyze reading exist; this question has (to my knowledge, anyway) yet to be tackled. Can other sensory modalities be used to read? What more …
Review Of Anthony Everett's "The Nonexistent", Jeffrey C. Goodman
Review Of Anthony Everett's "The Nonexistent", Jeffrey C. Goodman
Faculty Scholarship
I here review Anthony Everett's monograph, The Nonexistent
Creatures Of Fiction, Objects Of Myth, Jeffrey C. Goodman
Creatures Of Fiction, Objects Of Myth, Jeffrey C. Goodman
Faculty Scholarship
Artifactualists hold that some abstracta are contingent entities, products of the intentional activities of people. A great many artifactualists are fictional creationists, asserting that fictonal characters are abstracta of this sort, but some, notably Kripke (1973), Salmon (1998, 2002), and Braun (2005), further embrace mythical creationism. They hold that certain entities that figure in false theories are likewise abstracta that are produced by our intentional activities. A paradigm example would be Vulcan, the planet proposed by Le Verrier to be the cause of perturbations in the orbit of Mercury. I here argue that one may not reasonably take the metaphysical …
On Inadvertently Created Abstracta, Fictional Storytelling, And Scientific Hypothesizing, Jeffrey C. Goodman
On Inadvertently Created Abstracta, Fictional Storytelling, And Scientific Hypothesizing, Jeffrey C. Goodman
Faculty Scholarship
In my “Creatures of Fiction, Objects of Myth” (2014), I present and defend an argument for thinking that mythical creationism – the view that mythical objects like phlogiston and Vulcan are abstract artifacts – is false. One intriguing sort of objection to my argument has been recently put forth by Zvolenszky (2016); she claims that a crucial premise is seen to be unjustified once one considers the phenomena of inadvertently created abstracta, specifically, inadvertently created fictional characters. I here argue that even if we admit inadvertently created abstracta into our ontology, my argument survives. I ultimately defend a view on …
Review Of Peter Alward's "Empty Revelations", Jeffrey C. Goodman
Review Of Peter Alward's "Empty Revelations", Jeffrey C. Goodman
Faculty Scholarship
I here review Peter Alward's monograph Empty Revelations
Pretense Theory And The Imported Background, Jeffrey C. Goodman
Pretense Theory And The Imported Background, Jeffrey C. Goodman
Faculty Scholarship
Kendall Walton’s pretense theory, like its rivals, says that what’s true in a fiction F depends in part on the importation of background propositions into F. The aim of this paper is to present, explain, and defend a brief yet straightforward argument – one which exploits the specific mechanism by which the pretense theory says propositions are imported into fictions – for the falsity of the pretense theory.
A Critical Discussion Of Talking Past One Another, Jeffrey C. Goodman
A Critical Discussion Of Talking Past One Another, Jeffrey C. Goodman
Faculty Scholarship
One sort of usage of the phrase ‘talking past one another’ that is quite prevalent in the philosophical literature suggests the following account of a particular phenomenon of miscommunication: Agent A and agent B talk past one another during a philosophical discussion if and only if A has in mind one meaning or conception of a crucial expression P that is distinct from some meaning or conception of P had in mind by B. In this paper, however, I argue that this account – given the sort of phenomenon it is intended to be an account of – misses the …
An Extended Lewis-Stalnaker Semantics And The New Problem Of Counterpossibles,, Jeffrey C. Goodman
An Extended Lewis-Stalnaker Semantics And The New Problem Of Counterpossibles,, Jeffrey C. Goodman
Faculty Scholarship
Closest-possible-world analyses of counterfactuals suffer from what has been called the ‘problem of counterpossibles’: some counterfactuals with metaphysically impossible antecedents seem plainly false, but the proposed analyses imply that they are all (vacuously) true. One alleged solution to this problem is the addition of impossible worlds. In this paper, I argue that the closest possible or impossible world analyses that have recently been suggested suffer from the ‘new problem of counterpossibles’: the proposed analyses imply that some plainly true counterpossibles (viz., ‘counterlogicals’) are false. After motivating and presenting the ‘new problem’, I give reasons to think that …
Where Is Sherlock Holmes?, Jeffrey C. Goodman
Where Is Sherlock Holmes?, Jeffrey C. Goodman
Faculty Scholarship
Most philosophers would say that fictional characters lack spatiotemporal location simply because such entities do not exist. However, even prominent believers in ficta hold that they must lack location. I here focus on the views of one such believer, Amie Thomasson, and her Artifactual Theory. The fundamentals of her ontology seem correct, but I argue that the view implies that ficta do have location. I provide a diagnosis of an argument Thomasson gives for the contrary, and then suggest a way for the Artifactual Theory to account for the locations of ficta. I conclude by discussing some potential applications of …