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"Stalnaker, Robert"
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Our knowledge of the internal world
On the traditional Cartesian picture, knowledge of one's own current inner experience is the unproblematic foundation for all knowledge. The philosophical problem is to explain how we move beyond this knowledge to form a conception of an external world, and to know that the world answers to our conception. This book is in the anti-Cartesian tradition that seeks to reverse the order of explanation, arguing that we can understand our knowledge of our thoughts and feeling only by situating ourselves in a conception of an external world. The argument begins with Frank Jackson's famous example of Mary, who lacks knowledge of what it is like to see color because she has had no visual experience of color. The framework of possible worlds and a new account of self-locating information are used to clarify Mary's situation, and more generally to represent our knowledge of both our inner experience and the external world. The argument criticizes the use by philosophers of the notion of acquaintance to characterize our epistemic relation to the phenomenal character of our experience, and to attempt to provide a foundation for knowledge, and it explores the tension between an anti-individualist conception of the propositional content of thought and the thesis that we have introspective access to that content. The conception of knowledge that emerges is contextualist and anti-foundationalist, but it is argued that this conception is compatible with realism about both the external and the internal worlds.
eBook
Diagnosing Sorites arguments
This is a discussion of Delia Fara's theory of vagueness, and of its solution to the sorites paradox, criticizing some of the details of the account, but agreeing that its central insight will be a part of any solution to the problem. I also consider a wider range of philosophical puzzles that involve arguments that are structurally similar to the argument of the sorites paradox, and argue that the main ideas of her account of vagueness helps to respond to some of those puzzles.
Esta es una discusión sobre la teoría de la vaguedad de Delia Fara, y de su solución a la paradoja de Sorites, criticando alguno de los detalles de su aproximación, pero de acuerdo en que la intuición central es parte de cualquier solución al problema. También considero un rango más amplio de puzles filosóficos que incluyen argumentos estructuralmente similares al argumento de la paradoja de Sorites, y defiendo que las ideas principales de su aproximación a la vaguedad ayudan a responder algunos de esos puzles.
Journal Article
On Hawthorne and Magidor on Assertion, Context, and Epistemic Accessibility
Hawthorne and Magidor's criticisms of the model of presupposition and assertion that I have used and defended are all based on a rejection of some transparency or introspection of assumptions about speaker presupposition. This response to those criticisms aims first to clarify, and then to defend, the required transparency assumptions. It is argued, first, that if the assumptions are properly understood, some prima facie problems for them do not apply, second, that rejecting the assumptions has intuitively implausible consequences, and third, that the ‘margin of error’ argument against the principle of positive introspection has a false premiss. The paper concludes with a response to a criticism of what Hawthorne and Magidor call ‘the uniformity principle’ that is used in the model to explain some pragmatic phenomena.
Journal Article
Common Ground
Paul Grice's (1989) use of the term common ground to refer to background information presumed to be shared by participants in a conversation is argued to highlight the social character of speaker presuppositions, the abstract structure of which is clarified by introducing a simplifying assumption that identifies common ground with common belief. The logic of common belief is formalized in a highly idealized semantic framework that identifies belief with truth in all doxastic alternatives, which are represented by a binary relation of accessibility for each believer. Common beliefs & individuals' beliefs about common beliefs are derived from ordinary individual beliefs, & presupposition accommodation is characterized as a natural kind of belief change; a notion of common ground is developed in terms of acceptance to allow for divergence between common ground & common belief due to accommodation to a recognition of defective contexts. 24 References. J. Hitchcock
Journal Article
On Logics of Knowledge and Belief
Much later, this kind of theory was taken up and applied by theoretical computer scientists and game theorists.1 The formal semantic project gained new interest when it was seen that it could be applied to contexts with multiple knowers, and used to clarify the relation between epistemic and other modal concepts.Edmund Gettiers classic refutation of the Justied True Belief analysis of knowledge (Gettier, 1963) was published at about the same time as Hintikkas book, and it immediately spawned an epistemological industry a project of attempting to revise the refuted analysis by adding further conditions to meet the counterexamples. Because knowledge implies truth, it would be false, in such a case, that the agent knew that /, but the agent could not know that she did not know that / without having inconsistent beliefs. [...]to capture the fact that our intended concept of belief is a strong one subjective certainty we assume that believing implies believing that one knows. Since all possible worlds outside of any D-set will be invisible to worlds within it, one could drop them from the model (taking the set of all possible worlds to be those R-related to the actual world) without aecting the truth values (at the actual world) of any sentence.
Journal Article
Précis of Context
The book is a general discussion of the notion of a speech context, and the development and defense of a particular way of representing context in a theory of the dynamics of discourse. A context, on the account I develop, is a body of information, represented by a set of possibilities—the common ground, or the information that is presumed to be shared by the participants in the conversation. This evolving body of information plays two roles: first, it represents the information that is available to the participants to use in order to interpret what is said; second, it is a representation of the possibilities that the participants mean to distinguish between with the speech acts that they perform. To play these two roles, the common ground must include two kinds of information: first, information about the subject matter of the discourse, and second, information about the conversation itself—about the beliefs and intentions of the participants and about the course that the conversation has taken, and is expected to take. One way to see the book is as a sequence of elaborations of the formal representation of common ground, which was initially, in early work on presupposition, just an unstructured set of possibilities, the context set.
Journal Article
Models and reality
Kripke models, interpreted realistically, have difficulty making sense of the thesis that there might have existed things that do not in fact exist, since a Kripke model in which this thesis is true requires a model structure in which there are possible worlds with domains that contain things that do not exist. This paper argues that we can use Kripke models as representational devices that allow us to give a realistic interpretation of a modal language. The method of doing this is sketched, with the help of an analogy with a Galilean relativist theory of spatial properties and relations.
Journal Article
Assertion Revisited: On the Interpretation of Two-Dimensional Modal Semantics
This paper concerns the applications of two-dimensional modal semantics to the explanation of the contents of speech and thought. Different interpretations and applications of the apparatus are contrasted. First, it is argued that David Kaplan's two-dimensional semantics for indexical expressions is different from the use that I made of a formally similar framework to represent the role of contingent information in the determination of what is said. But the two applications are complementary rather than conflicting. Second, my interpretation of the apparatus is contrasted with that of David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, and David Lewis. It is argued that this difference reflects a contrast between internalist and externalist approaches to the problem of intentionality.
Journal Article