This Festschrift piece is the occasion to put forth some reflections on lexical meaning and on the internalism-externalism debate. I discuss, based on some of Frank Veltman’s considerations about the pragmatic meaning of vague terms, the dynamic view whereby speaker and hearer jointly elaborate the meaning of general terms in the course of their transactions, and the question of whether general...

In this short paper, we briefly expose a position dubbed Vehicleless Externalism for Conceptual Mental Episodes (VECME). According to it, the constitutive relations there are between the production of conceptual mental episodes by an individual and the inclusion of this individual in social discursive practices make it impossible to equate, even partially, conceptual mental episodes with the oc...

This essay reflects on the ambivalent reception of The Death of Nature among Englishspeaking historians of early modern science. It argues that, despite its importance, the book was mostly ignored or marginalized by these historians (as opposed to historians interested in feminist or environmental studies) for a variety of reasons. These included the special role played by the “Scientific Revol...

In Action in Perception Alva Noë develops and presents a sensorimotor account of vision and of visual consciousness. According to such an account seeing (and indeed perceiving more generally) is analysed as a kind of skilful bodily activity. Such a view is consistent with the emerging emphasis, in both philosophy and cognitive science, on the critical role of embodiment in the construction of i...

J. L. Mackie argued that if there were objective moral properties or facts, then the supervenience relation linking the nonmoral to the moral would be metaphysically queer. Moral realists reply that objective supervenience relations are ubiquitous according to contemporary versions of metaphysical naturalism and, hence, that there is nothing especially queer about moral supervenience. In this p...

Individuating cognitive processes is important epistemological work. This is most obvious in connection with the well known generality problem for reliabilism. I don’t believe that solving the problem of process individuation constitutes a solution to the generality problem, although I do think it goes a substantial way toward solving that problem. I also think that this solution solves a numbe...

I interpret and defend Sellars’ internalist view of perceptual justification which argues that perceivers have evidence for their perceptual beliefs that includes a higher-order belief about the circumstances in which those beliefs arise, and an epistemic belief about the reliability of beliefs that are formed in those circumstances. The pattern of inference that occurs in ordinary cases of per...

Standard internalist approaches to critical thinking insist that critical thinkers maintain conscious, deliberate access to the reasons for their beliefs and actions. A more useful approach is externalist, focusing on the reliability of different types of processes for generating beliefs and decisions under different circumstances. We describe an externalist approach to critical thinking based ...

In the following I tI)' to show that there is an attractive notion of citizenship which is independent of any kind of collective identity. Citizenship is understood as one fonn of social interaction. It is argued that in order to understand social interaction adequate1y, it is necessary to introduce a structuraJ. theory ofpractical rationality, to the extent this conception of citizenship is ba...

In this reply to James H. Fetzer’s “Minds and Machines: Limits to Simulations of Thought and Action”, the author argues that computationalism should not be the view that (human) cognition is computation, but that it should be the view that cognition (simpliciter) is computable. It follows that computationalism can be true even if (human) cognition is not the result of computations in the brain....