Ray Buchanan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3866253 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ray Buchanan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ray |
| FAMILY NAME | Buchanan |
| SIGNATURE | BUCHANAN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5605-257X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 6 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 6 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Underspecification and Communication
It has recently been argued that our use of vague language poses an intractable problem for any account of content and communication on which (i) the things we assert are propositions and (ii) understanding an assertion requires recognizing which proposition the speaker asserted. John MacFarlane has argued that this problem concerning vague language is itself a species of an even more general problem for such traditional accounts—the problem pose…
The essence of the mental
Your belief that Obama is a Democrat would not be the belief that it is if it did not represent Obama, nor would the pain in your ankle be the state that it is if, say, it felt like an itch. Accordingly, it is tempting to hold that phenomenal and representational properties are essential to the mental states that have them. But, as several theorists have forcefully argued (including Kripke (1980) and Burge (1979, 1982)) this attractive idea is se…
Meaning and responsibility
In performing an act of assertion we are sometimes responsible for more than the content of the literal meaning of the words we have used, sometimes less. A recently popular research program seeks to explain certain of the commitments we make in speech in terms of responsiveness to the conversational subject matter. We raise some issues for this view with the aim of providing a more general account of linguistic commitment: one that is grounded i…
Content pluralism
How fine-grained are the contents of our beliefs and other cognitive attitudes? Are the contents of our beliefs individuated solely in terms of the objects, properties, and relations that figure in their truth conditions, or rather in terms of our concepts, or modes of presentation of those objects, properties, and relations? So-called Millians famously maintain the former whereas their Fregean rivals hold the latter. Though much ink was spilled …
Representation and rationality
David Lewis (1974, 1994/1999) proposed to reduce the facts about mental representation to facts about sensory evidence, dispositions to act, and rationality. Recently, Robert Williams (2020) and Adam Pautz (2021) have taken up and developed Lewis's project in sophisticated and novel ways. In this paper, we aim to present, clarify, and ultimately object to the core thesis that they all build their own views around. The different sophisticated deve…
Pragmatic Particularism
For the Intentionalist , utterance content is wholly determined by a speaker’s meaning‐intentions; the sentence uttered serves merely to facilitate the audience’s recovering these intentions. We argue that Intentionalists ought to be Particularists , holding that the only “principles” of meaning recovery needed are those governing inferences to the best explanation; “principles” that are both defeasible and, in a sense to be elaborated, variable …
Pragmatic Particularism
For the Intentionalist , utterance content is wholly determined by a speaker’s meaning‐intentions; the sentence uttered serves merely to facilitate the audience’s recovering these intentions. We argue that Intentionalists ought to be Particularists , holding that the only “principles” of meaning recovery needed are those governing inferences to the best explanation; “principles” that are both defeasible and, in a sense to be elaborated, variable …
Content pluralism
How fine-grained are the contents of our beliefs and other cognitive attitudes? Are the contents of our beliefs individuated solely in terms of the objects, properties, and relations that figure in their truth conditions, or rather in terms of our concepts, or modes of presentation of those objects, properties, and relations? So-called Millians famously maintain the former whereas their Fregean rivals hold the latter. Though much ink was spilled …
Representation and rationality
David Lewis (1974, 1994/1999) proposed to reduce the facts about mental representation to facts about sensory evidence, dispositions to act, and rationality. Recently, Robert Williams (2020) and Adam Pautz (2021) have taken up and developed Lewis's project in sophisticated and novel ways. In this paper, we aim to present, clarify, and ultimately object to the core thesis that they all build their own views around. The different sophisticated deve…
Pragmatic Particularism
For the Intentionalist , utterance content is wholly determined by a speaker’s meaning‐intentions; the sentence uttered serves merely to facilitate the audience’s recovering these intentions. We argue that Intentionalists ought to be Particularists , holding that the only “principles” of meaning recovery needed are those governing inferences to the best explanation; “principles” that are both defeasible and, in a sense to be elaborated, variable …
The essence of the mental
Your belief that Obama is a Democrat would not be the belief that it is if it did not represent Obama, nor would the pain in your ankle be the state that it is if, say, it felt like an itch. Accordingly, it is tempting to hold that phenomenal and representational properties are essential to the mental states that have them. But, as several theorists have forcefully argued (including Kripke (1980) and Burge (1979, 1982)) this attractive idea is se…
Meaning and responsibility
In performing an act of assertion we are sometimes responsible for more than the content of the literal meaning of the words we have used, sometimes less. A recently popular research program seeks to explain certain of the commitments we make in speech in terms of responsiveness to the conversational subject matter. We raise some issues for this view with the aim of providing a more general account of linguistic commitment: one that is grounded i…
Underspecification and Communication
It has recently been argued that our use of vague language poses an intractable problem for any account of content and communication on which (i) the things we assert are propositions and (ii) understanding an assertion requires recognizing which proposition the speaker asserted. John MacFarlane has argued that this problem concerning vague language is itself a species of an even more general problem for such traditional accounts—the problem pose…
Philosophy (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (4 works) · Linguistics (4 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (4 works) · Psychology (3 works) · Cognitive science (2 works) · Law (2 works) · Law (2 works)