Lionel Shapiro: Abstracts

“Naïve Truth-Conditions and Meaning,” The Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2008): 265-277.

Critics of explaining meaning in terms of truth-conditions have tended to charge proponents with misconceptions regarding truth. I argue that the "naive" version of the truth-conditional theory that best accounts for its resilience fails on a different and more basic ground, namely a circularity arising from the contingency of meaning. One reason this problem has been overlooked is a tendency (noted by Dummett in a different connection) to assimilate the naive truth-conditional theory to an idealized verificationism.

“The Rationale Behind Revision-Rule Semantics,” Philosophical Studies 129 (2006): 477-515

According to Gupta and Belnap, the "extensional behavior" of 'true' matches that of a circularly defined predicate. Besides promising to explain semantic paradoxicality, their general theory of circular predicates significantly liberalizes the framework of truth-conditional semantics. The authors' discussions of the rationale behind that liberalization invoke two distinct senses in which a circular predicate's semantic behavior is explained by a "revision rule" carrying hypothetical information about its extension. Neither attempted explanation succeeds. Their theory may however be modified to employ a relativized notion of extension. The resulting contextualist semantics for 'true' construes circularity as a pragmatic phenomenon.

“Brandom on the Normativity of Meaning,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2004): 141-60

Brandom's "inferentialism"—his theory that contentfulness consists in being governed by inferential norms—proves dubiously compatible with his own deflationary approach to intentional objectivity. This is because a deflationist argument, adapted from the case of truth to that of correct inference, undermines the criterion of adequacy Brandom employs in motivating inferentialism. Once that constraint is abandoned, moreover, the very constitutive-explanatory availability of Brandom's inferential norms becomes suspect. Yet Brandom intertwines inferentialism with a separate explanatory project, one that in explaining the pragmatic significance of meaning-attributions does yield a convincing construal of the claim that the concept of meaning is normative.

“‘The Transition from Sensibility to Reason In Regressu’: Indeterminism in Kant’s Reflexionen,” Kant-Studien 92 (2001): 3-12

In a remarkable series of Critical-period Reflexionen (5611-4, 5616-9), Kant sketches a defense of the possibility of freedom that differs radically from his usual compatibilism by incorporating an indeterministic account of the phenomena. Anticipating Łukasiewicz, Kant reconciles universal causal determination with an open future by positing a lower temporal bound for the infinite regress of prior determining causes issuing in a contingent action. On this account, Kant however concedes, the unity of experience "cannot fully obtain in the case of free beings." The fact that Kant even contemplated the indeterministic theory may carry implications for interpreting the Second Analogy.

"Toward 'Perfect Collections of Properties': Locke on the Constitution of Substantial Sorts," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (1999): 551-93 (revised and expanded version).

Locke's claims about the "inadequacy" of substance-ideas can only be understood once it is recognized that the "sort" represented by such an idea is not wholly determined by the idea's descriptive content. The key to his compromise between classificatory conventionalism and essentialism is his injunction to "perfect" the "nominal essence" of each sort. This injunction promotes the pursuit of collections of perceptible qualities that approach ever closer to singling out things that possess some shared explanatory-level constitution. It is in view of this norm regulating natural-historical inquiry that a substance-idea represents a sort for which some such constitution serves as the "real essence," i.e. as that on which all the sort's characteristic "properties" depend. (Something possessing all qualities in a sort's nominal essence need not possess all the sort's properties.) Locke's account of the sorts imperfectly represented by substance-ideas must be distinguished from his descriptivist account of how the extensions of substance-names are fixed. While he recognizes that the latter account renders the former one difficult to express, their juxtaposition can be defended on Lockean grounds.

“‘Coordinative Definition’ and Reichenbach’s Semantic Framework: A Reassessment,” Erkenntnis 41 (1994) 287-323

Reichenbach's Philosophy of Space and Time (1928) avoids most of the logical positivist pitfalls it is generally held to exemplify, notably both conventionalism and verificationism. To see why, we must appreciate that Reichenbach's interest lies in how mathematical structures can be used to describe reality, not in how words like 'distance' acquire meaning. Examination of his proposed "coordinative definition" of congruence shows that Reichenbach advocates a reductionist analysis of the relations figuring in physical geometry (contrary to common readings that attribute to him a holistic conventionalism), while embracing a thoroughly holistic understanding of empirical confirmation (contrary to rival operationalist readings).