The article considers the theoretical and practical consequences of so-called "soft" version epistemological realism in Bimal K. Matilal's philosophical project. author offers an analytical view on philosophy, which helps to understand it a broader prospective, comparing his arguments perception objectivity with contemporary Western philosophy; fact, is possible Matilal not only as proponent re...

Michael Dummett and Robert Brandom, though sharing a good deal in their approaches to language and to logic, also differ markedly in their respective views. Although that is not an observation that is likely to strain one’s capacity for philosophical insight, the differences are worth noting and understanding. Brandom distinguishes logic by means of its expressive role. Logic plays a role in en...

1. Fears, worries and hopes Holism is a multifarious doctrine, which pertains to language, thought, action, confirmation or hypothesis testing, and the nature of reality. Meaning holism is also a multifarious doctrine, which pertains to expressions, sentences, kinds of sentences, languages, meanings, and possibly all the rest of the various things just mentioned. Meaning holism is intricate, "i...

In this paper I shall deal with the role of "understanding a thought" in the debate on the definition of the content of an assertion. I shall present a well known tension in Frege's writings, between a cognitive and semantic notion of sense. This tension is at the source of some of the major contemporary discussions, mainly because of the negative influence of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which di...

Inferentialism is explained as an attempt to provide an account of meaning that is more sensitive (than the tradition of truth-conditional theorizing deriving from Tarski and Davidson) to what is learned when one masters meanings. The logically reformist inferentialism of Dummett and Prawitz is contrasted with the more recent quietist inferentialism of Brandom. Various other issues are highligh...

In what follows this assertion will be called the identifiability thesis since it states that two arbitrary but different courses-of-values can be identified with the truthvalues. Frege considers the identifiability thesis a consequence of his previous argumentation ([3], p. 17, lines 23-36) which, following Dummett ([1], p. 408), will be called the permutation argument, because the concept of ...

I am sympathetic with Ms. Burns’ general philosophy of vagueness as a pervasive, multidimensional phenomenon with a variety of sources. I am not, however, all that comfortable with some of the specific arguments she offers in support of this view. In particular, I am uneasy with Burns’ central arguments to the effect that the borderline case variety of vagueness—that which produces the sorites ...

A common view is that natural language treats numbers as abstract objects, with expressions like the number of planets, eight, as well as the number eight acting as referential terms referring to numbers. In this paper I will argue that this view about reference to numbers in natural language is fundamentally mistaken. A more thorough look at natural language reveals a very different view of th...