scholarly journals Moral Fetishism and a Third Desire for What’s Right

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Howard
Keyword(s):  
De Re ◽  
Major Point ◽  
De Dicto

A major point of debate about morally good motives concerns an ambiguity in the truism that good and strong-willed people desire to do what is right. This debate is shaped by the assumption that “what’s right” combines in only two ways with “desire,” leading to distinct de dicto and de re readings of the truism. However, a third reading of such expressions is possible, first identified by Janet Fodor, which has gone wholly unappreciated by philosophers in this debate. I identify Fodor’s nonspecific reading of “desire to do what’s right” and briefly discuss its merits.

scholarly journals Moral Appraisal for Everyone: Neurodiversity, Epistemic Limitations, and Responding to the Right Reasons

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Field
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasons ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
De Re ◽  
Moral Appraisal ◽  
De Dicto ◽  
The Right

AbstractDe Re Significance accounts of moral appraisal consider an agent’s responsiveness to a particular kind of reason, normative moral reasons de re, to be of central significance for moral appraisal. Here, I argue that such accounts find it difficult to accommodate some neuroatypical agents. I offer an alternative account of how an agent’s responsiveness to normative moral reasons affects moral appraisal – the Reasonable Expectations Account. According to this account, what is significant for appraisal is not the content of the reasons an agent is responsive to (de re or de dicto), but rather whether she is responsive to the reasons it is reasonable to expect her to be responsive to, irrespective of their content. I argue that this account does a better job of dealing with neuroatypical agents, while agreeing with the De Re Significance accounts on more ordinary cases.

scholarly journals De Re MEDIJI : POLITIKA MEDIJA

2019 ◽  
pp. 9-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Misko Suvakovic
Keyword(s):  
De Re ◽  
De Dicto

Namera mi je da dijagramski postavim jednu moguću potencijalnu teoriju De-Re medija lociranu u savremenosti globalnih ekoloških, ekonomskih, ratnih i, svakako, klasnih kriza. Razmatrana je piosebna situacija transformacije slike sveta u događaj sveta, drugim rečima, načinjen je obrt od prikazivanja sveta do izvođenja sveta ili izvođenja u svetu. Postavljena je rasprava o sredstvima medijskog rada, proizvodnje i delovanja, tj. o instrumentima i njihovim konstruktivnim funkcijama. Analiziran je kontekst medijskog rada, proizvodnje i delovanja posredstvom modela dispozitiva/aparatusa. Reinterpretirana je iz agrarne nauke i ratne terminologije teorija rojeva te primenjna na novi pojam medijuma/medija. Preuzeta je i primenjena tradicionalna i moderna rasprava razlike De Dicto i De Re sudova. Postavljena je teorija De Re medija u odnosu na koncepte medijuma i medija, postmedijuma i postmedija, digitalnih i postdigitalnih medija.

Metaphysics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin McGinn
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
A Priori ◽  
A Posteriori ◽  
De Re ◽  
Necessary Truth ◽  
Possible Worlds Theory ◽  
De Dicto

This chapter explores philosophical issues in metaphysics. It begins by distinguishing between de re and de dicto necessity. All necessity is uniformly de re; there is simply no such thing as de dicto necessity. Indeed, in the glory days of positivism, all necessity was understood as uniformly the same: a necessary truth was always an a priori truth, while contingent truths were always a posteriori. The chapter then assesses the concept of antirealism. Antirealism is always an error theory: there is some sort of mistake or distortion or sloppiness embedded in the usual discourse. The chapter also considers paradoxes, causation, conceptual analysis, scientific mysteries, the possible worlds theory of modality, the concept of a person, the nature of existence, and logic and propositions.

The Problem of de re Modality

2020 ◽  
pp. 234-246
Author(s):  
Bob Hale
Keyword(s):  
Kit Fine ◽  
Singular Terms ◽  
De Re ◽  
Modal Operators ◽  
Free Variables ◽  
De Re Modality ◽  
Basic Argument ◽  
De Dicto

The problem of de re modality is how, if at all, one can make sense of it. Most who have discussed this problem have assumed that modality de dicto is relatively unproblematic. It is, rather, the interpretation of sentences involving, within the scope of modal operators, singular terms or free variables which is thought to give rise to grave—and in the view of some, insuperable—difficulties. Quine has two arguments against the intelligibility of de re modality: a “logical” and a “metaphysical” one. That the “logical” argument is central to Quine’s attack is surely indisputable. But my claim that it is his basic argument is, in effect, denied by Kit Fine. I can (and do) agree with Fine that there are some significant differences between the two arguments. The most important question, for my purposes, is whether he is right to claim that the two arguments have force independently of one another.

Names and the ?de re ? De dicto? distinction

1981 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. W. Fitch
Keyword(s):  
De Re ◽  
De Dicto

Phenomenology and De Re Interpretation: A Critique of Brandom's Reading of Hegel

2008 ◽  
Vol 29 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 30-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Houlgate
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Reference Dependence ◽  
De Re ◽  
Philosophical Text ◽  
De Dicto ◽  
Gilbert Harman ◽  
Made In

At first sight Robert Brandom's two essays on Hegel in his book Tales of the Mighty Dead appear barely to be about Hegel at all. The first essay on holism and idealism, for example, talks of ‘sense dependence’ and ‘reference dependence’, and even invokes a point in logic made by Gilbert Harman (TMD 191-2, 194). Scarcely normal fare for the average commentator on Hegel. Brandom himself is acutely conscious of the impression his work on Hegel (and on the other philosophers discussed in Tales of the Mighty Dead) might have on his readers. ‘I am aware’, he writes, ’that the relations between the stories told here and my own philosophical views [ … ] may seem to some particularly problematic’ (TMD 90). In the section of his book called ‘Pretexts’, however, Brandom provides a subtle defence of his approach and makes it clear that he is by no means simply ‘foisting’ his ideas on the helpless dead (TMD 91; see also 389). He does so by distinguishing between two different modes of interpretation: de dicto and de re.Brandom states that interpretation of a philosophical text seeks to establish the claims made in it and to determine what follows from them. This task, however, presupposes a ‘context’ of interpretation (TMD 95).When a text is given a de dicto interpretation, the context is supplied by the author's own commitments. The aim is thus to determine what the author himself would have said in response to questions of clarification, given those commitments (TMD 99).

Semantic concept of existential presupposition

Human Affairs ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiří Raclavský
Keyword(s):  
Present Author ◽  
Semantic Concept ◽  
Van Fraassen ◽  
De Re ◽  
Existential Presupposition ◽  
Semantic Concepts ◽  
De Dicto

AbstractStrawson’s work seems to contain both pragmatic and semantic concepts of presupposition. The former concept has largely been studied by many philosophers and linguists, while the latter has not been properly investigated (van Fraassen being an exception). The present author explicates the semantic concept of existential presupposition in relation to deriving existential statements and distinguishing their de dicto/de re variants (in the rather generalized sense following Tichý).

Techniques in Complex Semantic Fieldwork

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Ryan Bochnak ◽  
Lisa Matthewson
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Discourse Context ◽  
De Re ◽  
De Dicto ◽  
Acceptability Judgment

The main goal of semantic fieldwork is to accurately capture the contribution of natural language expressions to truth conditions and to pragmatic felicity conditions, by interacting with native speakers of the language under investigation. Most semantic fieldwork tasks (including, for example, acceptability judgment tasks, elicited production tasks, and translation tasks) require the researcher to present a discourse context to the consultant. The important questions then become how to present that context to consultants and how to best ensure that the consultant and the researcher have the same context in mind. We argue that phenomena which rely on controlling for interlocutor beliefs are particularly well suited for the storyboard elicitation methodology. This includes “out-of-the-blue” scenarios, which we treat as a special type of discourse context that must also be controlled for. We illustrate these claims by presenting novel storyboards targeting the de re/ de dicto ambiguity and verum marking.

scholarly journals No facts without perspectives

Synthese ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramiro Glauer ◽  
Frauke Hildebrandt
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Causal Theory ◽  
Theory Of Action ◽  
Basic Fact ◽  
Causal Theory Of Action ◽  
De Re ◽  
De Dicto ◽  
Conceptual Confusion

AbstractPerner and Roessler (in: Aguilar J, Buckareff A (eds) Causing human action: new perspectives on the causal theory of action, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 199–228, 2010) hold that children who do not yet have an understanding of subjective perspectives, i.e., mental states, explain actions by appealing to objective facts. In this paper, we criticize this view. We argue that in order to understand objective facts, subjects need to understand perspectives. By analysing basic fact-expressing assertions, we show that subjects cannot refer to facts if they do not understand two types of perspectivity, namely, spatial and doxastic perspectivity. To avoid conceptual confusion regarding different ways of referring to facts, we distinguish between reference to facts de re and de dicto.

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