There have been recent discussions on other weblogs of the last century’s five most important books in epistemology and ten most important books in the philosophy of biology (also here and here).  Being something of a listmaniac, I couldn’t help starting to think about a similar list in the philosophy of mind.  What’s surprising was how hard it was.  By my lights, three books select themselves: Broad’s The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925), Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949), and Armstrong’s A Materialist Theory of the Mind (1968).  But it’s hard to think of others that stand alongside these.  Maybe Sellars’ Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1953) and Feigl’s The "Mental" and the "Physical" (1958) count retrospectively, although neither was a book at the time.  One could make a case for Price’s Perception (1932) and just maybe something by Russell (The Analysis of Mind?) or Wittgenstein (the Investigations?).  One should probably include something by Husserl (but which book?), and some would include Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and/or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943).  But no book from the last thirty years or so seems to quite stand alongside the first three, although of course there could be illusions of perspective.

So to make it easier, I then lowered the standards and considered the ten most important books in the philosophy of mind from the last thirty years.  It wasn’t too hard to come up with a first pass at a list: Fodor’s The Language of Thought (1975), Jackson’s Perception (1977), Dennett’s Brainstorms (1978), Churchland’s Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (1979), Dretske’s Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981), Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), Searle’s Intentionality (1983), Millikan’s Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (1983), Fodor’s Psychosemantics (1987), and Dennett’s The Intentional Stance (1987).  I see there’s nothing there from the last 15 years, because that’s just too close.  But anyway, I’m sure that I’ve overlooked a number of books and that a better list is possible.

So I hereby throw open the listmaking to all-comers.  People are welcome to contribute to either question: most important of the last 100 years, and of the last 30 years.  Feel free to include books from the last 15 years if you like (but I stipulate that no book by an author of this weblog is eligible).

- Article Source

I published the anthology Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings with Oxford University Press in 2002.  In preparing that anthology, it proved impossible to do justice to the philosophy of cognitive science, which has become a huge field in its own right.  So that volume concentrated on relatively traditional philosophy of mind, and in the introduction I promised an eventual companion anthology on the philosophy of cognitive science.  Those promises catch up with one, and the press thinks it’s time for the new anthology.  So Tim Bayne and I have put together a proposal.

The proposed table of contents is below.  Note that this list is extremely tentative: it hasn’t yet been through the review process for the press, and we haven’t yet sought permission to reprint any of the articles.  So the final product may look significantly different.  We have aimed for good coverage of many different areas of the philosophy of cognitive science, including both traditional areas of the field and recently active areas.  We’ve also aimed for a fairly even mix of articles by philosophers and articles by scientists on foundational topics.  Note that one constraint was that the anthology shouldn’t overlap with the other anthology, so it doesn’t include any of those articles (contents here) and more generally doesn’t aim for extensive coverage of traditional philosophy of mind.  Another constraint is that the anthology probably can’t be any longer than this (11 sections with 6 articles per section).

At this point we are looking for feedback on the proposal.  It would be especially useful to get feedback from people who teach courses in the philosophy of cognitive science (or related topics such as the philosophy of psychology/AI/neuroscience) about what would be desirable for a collection to be used in those courses.  But all thoughts are welcome, including suggestions about other papers that might be included, about the balance of coverage, and so on.  Feel free to comment either here or by e-mail.

Philosophy of Cognitive Science: Classical and Contemporary Readings

David Chalmers and Tim Bayne, editors.

Proposed Table of Contents.

A. History

1. Descartes, R. 1664. Treatise on Man. In J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (eds.) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Vol. 1). CUP.

2. Hume, D. 1739/1740. A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, Part 1. OUP. 

3. James, W. 1890. The stream of thought.  From Principles of Psychology.

4. Watson, J.B. 1913. Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20: 158-177.

5. Skinner, B.F. 1953. Selections from Science and Human Behavior. Macmillan Free Press.

6. Chomsky, N. 1959. A Review of BF Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Language, 35, No. 1: 26-58.

B. Foundations

1. Cummins, R. 2000. "How does it work?" vs. "What are the laws?" Two conceptions of psychological explanation. In F. Keil and R. Wilson (eds), Explanation and Cognition, MIT Press, pp. 117-145.

2. Pylyshyn, Z.W. 1987. What’s in a mind? Synthese 70:97-122.

3. Marr, D. 1982. Levels of explanation,. From Vision (Chapter 1, The philosophy and the approach). New York: W.H. Freeman and Co., pp. 19-28.

4. Lycan, W. 1987. Homuncular functionalism. From Consciousness (Chapter 4, The continuity of levels of nature). In Consciousness. MIT Press.

5. Haugeland, J. 1991. Representational genera. In W. Ramsey, S.P. Stich, & D.E. Rumelhart (eds)    Philosophy and Connectionist Theory (pp. 61-89).

6. Something on reduction.

C. Artificial Intelligence and Computation

1. Turing, A.M. 1950. Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59:433-60.

2. Newell, A. and Simon, H. 1976. Computer Science as empirical inquiry: Symbols and Search. Communications of the ACM 19:113-26

3. Searle, J.R. 1981. Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 417-57.

4. Block, N. 1990. The computer model of the mind, In D. Osherson and E. Smith (Eds) Thinking: An Invitation to Cognitive Science. Vol. 3. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

5. Hofstadter, D.R. 1985. Waking up from the Boolean dream. From Metamagical Themas. New York: Basic Books.

6. Dennett, D. 1984. Cognitive wheels: the frame problem of AI.  In C. Hookway (ed) Minds, Machines and Evolution, CUP: 129-51.

D. Cognitive architecture

1. Churchland, P. and Sejnowski, T. 1989. Neural representation and neural computation. In L. Nadel, L. Cooper, P. Culicover and R.M. Harnish (eds) Neural Connections, Mental Computations, MIT Press (section three onward ).

2. Fodor, J.A. 1987. Why there still has to be a language of thought. Psychosemantics. Cambridge: MA: MIT.

3. van Gelder, T. 1995. What might cognition be, if not computation? Journal of Philosophy, 91: 345-81.

4. Brooks, Rodney A. 1991. Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence, 47(1-3): 139-159.

5. Clark, A. 1997. The dynamical challenge. Cognitive Science 21: 461-81.

6. Fodor, J.A. 1990. Precis of The Modularity of Mind. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8: 1-5.

E. Neuroscience

1. Lashley, K. 1950. In search of the engram. Soc. Exp. Biol., 1950, 4: 454-482.

2. Bechtel, W. & Mundale, J. 1999. Multiple realizability revisited: Linking cognitive and neural states. Philosophy of Science 66: 175-207.

3. Stoljar, D. and Gold, I. 1998. On Biological and Cognitive Neuroscience, Mind and Language, 13/1: 110-131.

4. Henson, R. in press. What can neuroimaging tell the experimental psychologist? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

5. Coltheart, M. 2001. Assumptions and methods in Cognitive Neuropsychology. In B. Rapp (Ed.). Handbook of Cognitive Neuropsychology. Philadelphia: Psychology Press.

6. Bickle, J. in press. Reducing mind to molecular pathways. Synthese.

F. Theory of mind

1. Gordon, R.M. 1986. Folk psychology as simulation. Mind and Language 1: 158-71.

2. Stich, S.P. & Nichols, S. 1996. Mental simulation versus tacit theory. In S. Stich Deconstructing the Mind, Oxford: OUP, 136-67.

3. Gopnik, A. & Wellman, H. 1992. Why the child’s theory of mind really is a theory. Mind and Language, 7:145-171.

4. Gallese, V. & Goldman, A. 1998. Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mindreading, Trends in the Cognitive Sciences, 12/2: 493-502.

5. Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. 1977. Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84: 231-259.

6. Povinelli, D.J. & Vonk, J. 2003. Chimpanzee minds: Suspiciously human? Trends in the Cognitive Sciences, 7, 157-160.

G. Consciousness

1. Chalmers, D. 2004. How can we construct a science of consciousness? In M. Gazzaniga (ed.), The Cognitive Neurosciences III. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

2. Dennett, Daniel C. 1991. Multiple drafts versus the Cartesian Theatre. In Consciousness Explained. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co.

3. Churchland, P.S. 1994. What can neurobiology tell us about consciousness? In Proceedings and Addresses of the APA.

4. Crick, F. & Koch, C. 1998. Consciousness and neuroscience. Cerebral Cortex 8: 97-107.

5. Block, N. 1998. How not to find the neural correlate of consciousness.  In A. O’Hear (ed.) Royal Institute of Philosophy, Supplement: 43, pp. 23-34.

6. Palmer, S. 1999. Color, consciousness, and the isomorphism constraint. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22 (6): 1-21.

H. Concepts

1. Wittgenstein. L. 1953. Selections from Philosophical Investigations (sections 65-76)

2.Rosch, E. 1978. Principles of categorization. In E. Rosch & B. Lloyd (eds) Cognition and Categorization. Lawrence Erlbaum.

3. Armstrong, S.L., Gleitman, L.R., and Gleitman, H. 1983. What some concepts might not be. Cognition, 13: 263-308.

4. Millikan, R. 1998. A common structure for concepts of individuals, stuffs, and real kinds: More mama, more milk, and more mouse. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21(1): 55-65.

5. Peacocke, C. 1996. Precis of A Study of Concepts. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 56: 407-11.

6. Fodor, J. 1994. Concepts: A potboiler. Cognition, 50: 95-113.

I. Perception

1. Gibson, J. J. 1972. A theory of direct visual perception. In J. Royce, W. Rozenboom (Eds.). The Psychology of Knowing. New York: Gordon & Breach.

2. Rock, I. 1982. Inference in perception, PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Volume 2: 525-40. 

3. Marr, D. 1982. Vision (pp. 29-38). MIT Press.

4. Akins, K. 1996. Of sensory systems and the "aboutness" of mental states. Journal of Philosophy, 91: 337-72.

5. Milner, A.D. & Goodale, M.A. 1998. The functions of vision. Psyche, 4/12.

6. Noe, A. & O’Regan, J.K. 2002. On the brain basis of visual consciousness: a sensorimotor account. In A. Noe & E. Thompson (eds.) Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception. Cambridge: MA: MIT Press.

J. Evolution and Innateness

1. Chomsky, N. 1987. On the nature, use and acquisition of language. In N. Chomsky, Generative Grammar, Kyoto University of Foreign Studies.

2. Pinker, S. and Bloom, P. 1990 Natural language and natural selection. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 13 (4): 707-784.

3. Bates, E., Elman, J., Johnson, M., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., & Plunkett, K. 1999. Innateness and emergence,. In (Bechtel & Graham, eds) Companion to Cognitive Science. Blackwell.

4. Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. 1997. Evolutionary psychology: A primer. http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html.

5. Gould, S. J. 1997. Evolution: The pleasures of pluralism. New York Review of Books, 44/11: 47-52. (second half)

6. Spelke, E. 1994. Initial knowledge: Six suggestions. Cognition, 50: 431-45.

K. Miscellaneous

1. Wegner, D. 2003. The minds best trick: How we experience conscious will. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7/2: 65-69.

2. Griffiths, P.E. 1990. Modularity and the psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. Biology & Philosophy 5: 175-196.

3. Hardcastle, VG. 2001. The nature of pain. In W. Bechtel, P. Mandik, J. Mundale, and R. S. Stufflebeam (Eds) Philosophy and the Neurosciences: A Reader. Basil Blackwell.

4. Samuels, S., Stich, S. & Tremoulet, P. 1999. Rethinking rationality: From bleak implications to Darwinian modules, In E. Lepore & Pylyshyn (eds) What is Cognitive Science?, pp. 74-120 (or excerpt). Blackwell.

5. Bermudez, J.L. 1999. Precis of The Paradox of Self-Consciousness. PSYCOLOQUY 10(35).

6. Farah, M.J. 2002. Emerging ethical issues in neuroscience. Nature Neuroscience 5:1123-1129.

---

- Article Source

Any other EP (or should our acronym be "X-Phi"?) folks going to be at the Mid-South philosophy conference in February?  It looks like I’ll be commenting on a paper by Henry Jackman that is a response to some recent experimental philosophy work, i.e., the Machery et al. article on cross-cultural differences in semantic intuitions.

- Article Source

A few new links to sites with online papers.  FIrst, and particularly relevant, is the page for the NYU Consciousness Seminar run by Ned Block and Tom Nagel this semester, with a number of new papers on the philosophy and science of consciousness, and more to be added in coming weeks.  In addition, I’ve added some new people to my page of people with online papers (with most of the additions courtesy of Ming Tan, as always).  Today’s additions include Daniel Bonevac, Mark Sainsbury (with two online books!), and three researchers from the very active LOGOS group in Barcelona: Jose Diez, Mario Gomez-Torrente, and Dan Lopez de Sa.  Some other additions in recent months include George Bealer, Cristina Bicchieri, Susanne Bobzien, Radu Bogdan, Emma Borg, Bill Brewer, Herman Cappelen, David Copp, Tim Crane, Naomi Eilan, Evan Fales, Michael Gill, John Greco, Nadeem Hussain, Rosanna Keefe, Angelika Kratzer, Philip Kremer, Jennifer Lackey, Marc Lange, Edouard Machery, Adam Morton, John O’Dea, Samir Okasha, Eric Olson, Graham Oppy, David Owens, Jeff Pelletier, Peter Roeper, Rob Stainton, Stephen Stich, David Sobel, Evan Thompson, J.D. Trout, Peter Vallentyne, and John Worrall.  As always, if you know of others who should be on the list, please let me know.

- Article Source

Now that I’ve figured out photo exporting in the OS X environment, I’ve made some additions to my photo gallery.  There are photos from the recent Concepts and Conceptual Analysis conference, and from conferences on The Extended Mind and on Mental Causation in Sydney last year.  Of more localized interest, I’ve uploaded a few new family and party photos.

- Article Source

An excellent conference on Concepts and Conceptual Analysis here at the ANU has just finished.  Lots of interesting talks — David Braddon-Mitchell on fine-graining two-dimensionalism (into three-dimensionalism!) to handle a priori equivalent but cognitively distinct concepts, Laura Schroeter and John Bigelow on Against Apriori Reductions (arguing against Chalmers and Jackson 2001, by appealing to an "improv" model of concepts), and Anna Wierzbicka on her remarkable project of conceptually analyzing all linguistic expressions into 65 or so conceptual primitives that can be found in all languages.  Also I gave a talk on a different approach to primitive concepts (no paper yet, but here’s a Powerpoint version).

Here I’ll say a few words about Frank Jackson’s talk, which set out his version of two-dimensionalism and made clear a number of differences with my version.  Frank complained that people sometimes assume that he believes everything I believe (except about consciousness), so it’s useful to clarify the differences.

A first, relatively predictable difference is that Frank doesn’t like versions of two-dimensionalism that conceive of the two dimensions as operating over two different modal spaces (epistemic possibilities and metaphysical possibilities, say) — he wants a single space of worlds, with at most a difference in centering.

A second difference is that Frank holds that while linguistic expressions have two-dimensional content, mental states do not — they only have primary intensions (A-intensions), not secondary intensions (C-intensions).  I think this is tied to Frank’s endorsement of a "map" theory of belief, on which there aren’t really token beliefs, and certainly nothing like sentences in a language of thought (it may also be tied to his view of the special role of linguistic conventions in determining content).  I’m more sympathetic with token beliefs than Frank is, but I think that even if belief states were holistic map-like states, one could still associate these with individuals and properties represented, and so with entities like secondary intensions, in a way that’s useful for many explanatory purposes (e.g., for tracking certain sorts of agreement and disagreement across believers, and certain sorts of communication). The alternative view has some odd results: e.g. no relevant mental content will be shared by two people who believe I am hungry and He is hungry of the same individual, although intuitively these people are agreeing and in some sense believe "the same thing".

The third difference, and the most surprising to me (well, the second would have been just as surprising, but I knew about it already) was Frank’s suggestion that there aren’t really two different "true at a world" relations between sentences and worlds, but just one.  Now one might think that the existence of two different relations here is a sine qua non for two-dimensionalism (at least for versions with a single space of worlds).  But what Frank meant by this was that the "true at a world considered as actual" relation (i.e. the primary intension or A-intension relation) is derivative on the ordinary "true at a world" relation.  His view was something like the following: sentence S is true at world W considered as actual iff a related sentence S’ is true at W simpliciter.  For example, when S is ‘the actual F is phi’ (and F is "one-dimensional", introducing no 2D variations of its own), S’ is ‘the F is phi’.  Frank suggested that this model generalizes: all "two-dimensional" expressions are equivalent to expressions of the form ‘the actual F’ for some one-dimensional F, and their two-dimensional evaluation can be defined in these terms.  (Aficionados will note the resemblance to Davies and Humberstone’s framework, where 2D evaluation is defined entirely in terms of the behavior of ‘actually’).

This claim surprised me in a few ways.  First, the claim that all names, natural kind terms, and indexicals are equivalent to expressions of the form ‘the actual F’ is a strong and substantive assumption, one that I’ve always taken it that the two-dimensionalist isn’t committed to.  The claim looks especially difficult in the case of indexicals such as ‘I’.  Frank suggested that ‘I’ is equivalent to something like ‘the actual utterer of this sentence’, but then one has the further indexical ‘this sentence’ to worry about, and so on.  (In discussion afterwards Frank said he might want to have a somewhat different treatment for evaluation of indexicals.)  And for names and natural kind terms, the relevant F is at least not easy to find (especially given the requirement that F be one-dimensional).

Further, it seems to me that we test hypotheses about whether N is equivalent to ‘the actual F’ in part by considering scenarios as actual ("what if the world turned out this way?"), and seeing whether the two expressions give equivalent results (as in e.g. the standard 2D construal of what’s going on in Kripke’s ‘Godel’ argument).  But this suggests that we have a grip on evaluation of expressions in worlds considered as actual that doesn’t derive from our grip on associated descriptions.  Of course one could hold that an underlying description is tacitly guiding our evaluation.  But my view has always been that a two-dimensionalist needn’t make this claim, and that we can evaluate expressions in worlds considered as actual simply by reasoning about those worlds (e.g. by what one should infer if one accepted the hypothesis that W is actual), whether or not there is an associated description.

What emerged from the discussion is that for Frank, two-dimensionalism is a sort of byproduct of a prior descriptivism. On his view there is 2D-independent reason to think that names and the like are equivalent to rigidified descriptions, and once we have this equivalence we can use it to ground a 2D analysis.  On my view, by contrast, things are closer to the other way around.  We have an independent grip on how to evaluate sentences in worlds considered as actual and counterfactual (grounded in our grip on certain epistemic and subjunctive modal notions), and this grounds a 2D analysis of content.  This analysis might then be used to ground a sort of quasi-descriptivism, or at least a framework that resembles descriptivism in some respects by delivering some of the results results that descriptivists wanted. But the descriptivism plays no essential role in grounding the two-dimensionalism, and some of the stronger claims of descriptivism need not be true (for example, I don’t think that names are semantically equivalent to expressions of the form ‘the actual F’).  I think that in addition to being correct, this version is more effective dialectically, in that to presuppose descriptivism is to presuppose a view that a lot of people think is false. 

In any case, it’s good to get clear on the alternatives.  The difference is in some respects analogous to that between Frege’s and Russell’s views in the philosophy of language.  As Kent Bach notes, although both Frege and Russell are sometimes described as descriptivists about names, only Russell is a true descriptivist who thinks that names are abbreviations of definite descriptions.  Frege thinks that names have non-extensional semantic values, senses, which are tied to epistemic role and which are in certain respects like the senses of descriptions.  One might say that Frank’s two-dimensionalism is "Russellian" while mine is "Fregean".

- Article Source

Chris (of Mixing Memory) has posted some helpful suggestions concerning the methodolgy experimental philosophers have adopted in their attempts to get at folk intuitions. In doing so, he surveys some of the research that has been done on folk theories of physics, minds, biology, etc. Very interesting stuff–indeed, it is precisely the kind of interdisciplinary work that I was hoping to fascilitate when I started this blog. I am going to email Chris to see whether he would be interested in posting something here. In the meantime, I thought a number of you would be interested in what he has to say. Minimally, his suggestion that indirect and behavioral methodologies may be better suited to get at intuitions than the methods a number of us are currently using is one that we should seriously consider–although, I am admittedly unsure that the distinction Chris draws between implicit and explicit intuitions can withstand analysis. I suppose it will depend on how we analyze intuitions. On the surface–i.e., intuitively –it seems somewhat strange to call the sorts of things he is calling “implicit intuitions” intuitions at all. Fleshing out why I have preliminary doubts about the terminolgy, however, will have to wait until a later post.

- Article Source

Scott Soames’ book Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism was recently published by Princeton University Press (Amazon has the table of contents).  The book discusses various sorts of two-dimensionalism, but the heart of it is a critique of the sort of "ambitious two-dimensionalism" held by Frank Jackson and by me.  The book has a 70-page chapter arguing against my version of the view, as well as a lot of other relevant material.  There will be a reading group on the book in the coming weeks at the ANU (with Jackson and others involved too), and I’m supposed to be writing a critical notice of the book for Mind.  While working through the book, I’ll probably post some reactions to this weblog.

It looks like two chapters of the book are online: Chapter 1 and an old version of Chapter 10.  Those who are interested and haven’t seen it already might also look at my piece "Soames on Two-Dimensionalism".  This is a detailed handout from a symposium at Arizona State University last year, where I responded to two talks by Soames, which turn out to correspond fairly closely to Chapters 7 and 10 of his book.  The review article I linked to recently may also give some useful background.

The upshot of my Arizona State piece was that the versions of two-dimensionalism that Soames attacks are versions that no-one accepts (as far as I know), and certainly are quite different from the versions that I favor.  In particular, most of Soames’ arguments against two-dimensionalism in those talks were really arguments against certain two-dimensionalist accounts of propositional attitude ascriptions, accounts that I take to be obviously false and that no-one has endorsed in print, to my knowledge.  The good news is that in the book Soames discusses other accounts of attitude ascriptions, in particular giving a number of further arguments against the account that I endorse.  I don’t think that two-dimensionalism stands or falls with this (or with any) account of attitude ascriptions, but nevertheless I don’t think Soames’ arguments against it work.  I’ll post something about those arguments in coming weeks, as well as about other more general considerations.

- Article Source

Gregg Rosenberg’s book A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World was published a few months ago by Oxford University Press.  Even before publication this book had a sort of cult following among people interested in "radical" approaches to the metaphysics of consciousness.  Broadly speaking, Rosenberg defends a Russell-style metaphysics on which consciousness is grounded in the intrinsic categorical properies of certain physical processes, and in particular is closely tied to the intrinsic nature of causation itself.  This is by far the most detailed development of a Russell-style metaphysics of consciousness that I know of.  He also has a chapter with a novel anti-physicalist argument, a chapter responding to philosophical critics of anti-physicalist arguments, chapters on the "boundaries" of consciousness and on panpsychism, and a lot of material on understanding causation in its own right.  I don’t agree with everything here (and I’m still trying to understand all the details of the positive theory), but it’s well worth reading.

There’s already some discussion of the book on the web.  Apart from Rosenberg’s own website and an Amazon page, Steve Esser’s weblog "Guide to Reality" has a summary and an evaluation.  The Physics Forum website has threads discussing the book here and here.  Much of this discussion is by philosophically-interested nonphilosophers, who are often less conservative than professional philosophers where radical views of consciousness are concerned.  But there is a lot of meaty analytic philosophy in Rosenberg’s book (like my own book on consciousness, Rosenberg’s book is a revised version of his Ph.D. thesis from Indiana University), and I’d encourage interested philosophers to come to grips with it.

- Article Source

I’ve put a new paper online: "Two-Dimensional Semantics".  The paper was written for  the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, edited by Ernie Lepore and Barry Smith.  It’s an overview article with a review of the two-dimensional frameworks of Kaplan, Stalnaker, Evans, and Davies and Humberstone, and a somewhat more detailed outline of the more recent sort of two-dimensionalism defended by me, Frank Jackson, and others.  Connoisseurs who keep up with all of the recent literature won’t find too much that’s new here, though the final section on objections and replies might be useful.  Those who are less familiar with these issues might find the article to be a useful starting point.

The article is a draft and I’ll be revising it shortly.  Comments (on matters big or small, either here or by e-mail) are more than welcome.

- Article Source