Multi-action utterances convey critical information about agents' beliefs and intentions with respect to the actions they talk about or perform. Two such utterances may, for example, describe the same actions while the speakers of these utterances hold beliefs about these actions that are diametrically opposed. Hence, for a language interpretation system to understand multi-action utterances, it must be able (1) to determine the actions that are described and the ways in which they are related, and (2) to draw appropriate inferences about the agents' mental states with respect to these actions and action relations. This thesis investigates the semantics of two particular multi-action constructions: utterances with means clauses and utterances with rationale clauses. These classes of utterances are of interest not only as exemplars of multi-action utterances, but also because of the subtle differences in information that can be felicitously inferred from their use. Their meaning is show...

To explain how stimuli cause consciousness, we have to explain causality. We can't trace linear causal chains from receptors after the first cortical synapse, so we use circular causality to explain neural pattern formation by self-organizing dynamics. But an aspect of intentional action is causality, which we extrapolate to material objects in the world. Thus causality is a property of mind, not matter.

ABSTRACT: Most of us have a very firm belief in mental causation; that is, we firmly believe that our own distinctly mental properties are causally efficacious in the production of our behavior. This belief is dominating in contemporary philosophy of mind as a part of the causal explanatory exclusion problem for non-reductive materialists. I do not discuss the exclusion problem; rather, I assess the conception of mental causation that is presupposed in the current debate. I propose that in order to make sense of our firm belief in mental causation we need to operate with a broader conception of it than is normally seen, focusing on common-sense aspects concerning the timing, awareness, control, and tracking of mental causation. However, prominent studies in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience show that mental causation is not as self-evident, robust, and pervasive as our firm belief in it would suggest. There is therefore a tension between the common-sense, broad conception of mental causation and our empirical evidence for mental causation. A full defense of mental causation is not just a matter of securing causal efficacy but also of situating our notion of mental properties in relation to difficult issues concerning awareness, control, and judgment.

This thesis is about the reconciliation of realistic views of rationality with inferential-intentional theories of communication. Grice (1957; 1975) argued that working out what a speaker meant by an utterance is a matter of inferring the speaker’s intentions on the presumption that she is acting rationally. This is abductive inference: inference to the best explanation for the utterance. Thus an utterance both rationalises and causes the interpretation the hearer constructs. Human rationality is bounded because of our ‘finitary predicament’: we have limited time and resources for computation (Simon, 1957b; Cherniak, 1981). This raises questions about the explanatory status of inferential-intentional pragmatic theories. Gricean derivations of speakers’ intentions seem costly, and generally hearers are not aware of performing explicit reasoning. Utterance interpretation is typically fast and automatic. Is utterance interpretation a species of reasoning, or does the hearer merely act as if reasoning? Within the framework of cognitive science, mental processing is understood as transitions between mental representations. I develop a traditional view of rationality as reasoning ability, where this is essentially the ability to make transitions that preserve rational acceptability. Following Grice (2001), I claim that there is a ‘hard way’ and a ‘quick way’ of reasoning. Work on bounded rationality suggests that much cognitive work is done by heuristics, processes that exploit environmental structure to solve problems at much lower cost than fully explicit calculations. I look at the properties of heuristics that find solutions to open-ended problems such as abductive inference, particularly sequential search heuristics with aspiration-level stopping rules. I draw on relevance theory’s view that the comprehension procedure is a heuristic which exploits environmental regularities due to utterances being offers of information (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). This kind of heuristic, I argue, is the ‘quick way’ that reasoning proceeds in utterance interpretation.

Grice (1957, 1975, 1989) argued that communication involves inference and that speaker meaning is grounded in reasons. For Grice (2001), reasoning can be explicit and conscious or intuitive and unconscious. This paper suggests that pragmatic interpretation, even when unconscious, counts as reasoning, where reasoning is a goal-directed activity involving reason-preserving transitions, and that this was Grice’s view. An alternative view is that if pragmatic processes are not conscious (or cannot be brought to conscious awareness) they are not inferential or do not count as reasoning. Some arguments are given in favour of the view I attribute to Grice. 0

I briefly rehearse a general characterization of logicism that includes projects within philosophical logic, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. After a digression in which I survey work in natural language semantics that I claim is very relevant to common sense logicism, I describe a logicist project that attempts to formalize semantic relations among words in natural languages. Introduction This paper has three main goals. I will (1) advocate a more general account of logicism than the one that is current in philosophy of mathematics; (2) motivate a logicist program in an area of natural language semantics that turns out to be closely related to problems in the formalization of common sense; and (3) provide a brief survey of the research tradition in "natural language metaphysics." This tradition, which seeks to provide a broadly logical theory that will account for meaning relations in human languages, is probably best regarded as a subdiscipline of common sense logic...

Abstract: When philosophers defend epiphenomenalist doctrines, they often do so by way of a priori arguments. Here we suggest an empirical approach that is modeled on August Weismann’s experimental arguments against the inheritance of acquired characters. This conception of how epiphenomenalism ought to be developed helps clarify some mistakes in two recent epiphenomenalist positions – Jaegwon Kim’s (1993) arguments against mental causation, and the arguments developed by Walsh (2000), Walsh, Lewens, and Ariew (2002), and Matthen and Ariew (2002) that natural selection and drift are not causes of evolution. A manipulationist account of causation (Woodward 2003) leads naturally to an account of how macro- and micro-causation are related and to an understanding of how epiphenomenalism at different levels of organization should be understood. 1. The Weismann Model August Weismann (1889) is widely credited with disproving the Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In one of his famous experiments, Weismann cut off the tails of newborn mice; when the mice grew up and reproduced,

John McDowell is one of the most influential philosophers writing today. His work, ranging widely from interpretations of Plato and Aristotle to Davidsonian semantics, from ethics to epistemology and the philosophy of mind, has set the agenda for many recent philosophical debates. In recent years, McDowell’s views have been hotly discussed among students and faculty in Münster, too. Therefore, we were very glad when McDowell agreed to give the third Münsteraner Vorlesungen zur Philosophie in 1999. On May 5, McDowell gave a public lecture; on the following two days, he participated in a colloquium where students and faculty from Münster presented brief papers on his philosophy. McDowell listened carefully and responded to questions and criticisms. This volume contains McDowell’s lecture, revised versions of the colloquium papers and McDowell’s written responses to them. I should like to thank John McDowell for coming to lecture in Münster, for participating in the colloquium, and for putting his responses in writing. Discussing his views with him has been stimulation and pleasure for all of us. Next, I want to thank the participants in the colloquium who worked hard to come up with interesting and challenging presentations. Further, thanks are due to Karsten Wantia and Florian Wessels for putting much effort and time in type-setting and designing this volume. And finally, I want ot thank the Ministerium für Schule und Weiterbildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung in Nordrhein-

: I develop a novel representational theory of experience. I begin with some broad considerations on (a version of) the mind-body problem: the problem is that it's hard to see how conscious experiences fit into the causal order of the world; the problem arises because we ordinarily think of conscious experiences "from the inside"; and a solution to the problem would, in accordance with Nagel's (1974) "objective phenomenology," present concepts of conscious experiences "from the outside" which are clearly concepts of the same thing, and clearly concepts of causal things. Subsequent sections develop such a conception. Conscious experiences are ordinarily completely conceived of as states in which things are presented to the mind as being certain ways. Because hallucination without presence to the mind can be subjectively identical to cases of genuine presence to the mind, a conscious experience is a state in which, from one's perceptual perspective, things are present to the mind. Perspe...

this paper are: (i) to define a formal language suitable for analysing certain aspects of action sentences, (ii) to outline a theory of action with sucient precision to formulate plausible truth-conditions for action sentences in the progressive tense, and (iii) to provide a partial analysis of tenses that satisfy basic inferential patterns for action sentences.