Paul Boghossian
Biographic Data
| ID | 3873476 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Boghossian |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Boghossian |
| SIGNATURE | BOGHOSSIAN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 56 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Puzzling Beliefs
Realism and relativism about the normative
I defend normative realism—the claim that there are mind-independent, absolute normative facts—mostly by arguing against its rivals. Against mind-dependent theories of normativity, I argue that at least one highly influential version of such a view, Lewis's dispositional theory of value, is subject to at least three severe problems: the problem of the implausible contingency of value, the problem of ideal conditions, and the problem of lack of co…
Is (Determinate) Meaning a Naturalistic Phenomenon?
This chapter revisits the question whether facts about intentional content can be understood in purely naturalistic terms. In a previous work, 'The Rule-Following Considerations', it was argued that Saul Kripke's Wittgenstein-inspired discussion of following a rule was, pace Kripke's intention, best understood as showing that facts about intentional content resist naturalistic reduction. The message of this chapter is the same, although it differ…
Rules, Norms and Principles
What is inference?
Reply to Otero's “Boghossian's Inference Argument against Content Externalism Reversed”
Response to my critics
Williamson on the A Priori and the Analytic
The concept of genocide
The word ‘genocide’ gets a lot of use these days. When a large number of people are killed, it's not unusual for a debate to ensure about whether the event qualifies as genocide. Recently, the high
Virtuous intuitions
Content and Justification
Content and Justification presents a series of essays by Paul Boghossian on the theory of content and on its relation to the phenomenon of a priori knowledge. Part one comprises essays on the nature of rule-following and its relation to the problem of mental content; on the intelligibility of eliminativist views of the mental; on the prospects for a naturalistic reduction of mental content; and on the currently influential view that meaning is a …
Fear of Knowledge
Relativist and constructivist conceptions of truth and knowledge have become orthodoxy in vast stretches of the academic world in recent times. In his long-awaited first book, Paul Boghossian critically examines such views and exposes their fundamental flaws. Boghossian focuses on three different ways of reading the claim that knowledge is socially constructed--one as a thesis about truth and two about justification. And he rejects all three. The…
The Normativity of Content
I — Paul Boghossian
I—Paul Boghossian Get access Paul Boghossian Paul Boghossian Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 July 2003, Pages 225–248, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8349.00110 Published: 13 August 2015
Constructivist and Relativist Conceptions of Knowledge in Contemporary (Anti-)Epistemology
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 101, Number 1, Winter 2002
Inference and Insight
New Essays on the A Priori
This collection of newly commissioned essays, edited by NYU philosophers Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke, resumes the current surge of interest in the proper explication of the notion of a priori. The authors discuss the relations of the a priori to the notions of definition, meaning, justification, and ontology, explore how the concept figured historically in the philosophies of Leibniz, Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein, and address its ro…
The Transparency of Mental Content
As the surrounding discussion makes clear, Dummett's claim isn't merely the fairly weak thesis that, for any two expressions in a person's repertoire, it must be possible for that person to come to know whether or not they mean the same. Rather, the claim is that it must be possible for that person to come to know such a fact purely introspectively, without the benefit of further empirical investigation--a priori, as I shall also occasionally put…
Sense, Reference and Rule-Following
In a series of important and provocative books, Jerrold Katz has articulated and defended a 'Platonistic Intensionalism' in the theory of meaning. As Katz understands it, this is the view that expressions of a natural language have sense as well as reference, that senses are abstract entities of some sort and that they are the proper objects of study in a theory of meaning for natural language. As both his admirers and detractors would admit, tha…
Physicalist Theories of Color
The dispute between realists about color and anti-realists is ac- tually a dispute about the nature of color properties.The disputants do not disagree over what material objects are like.Rather, they disagree over whether any of the uncontroversial facts about material objects-their powers to cause visual experiences, their dispositions to reflect incident light, their atomic makeup, and so on-amount to their having colors.The disagreement is thu…
The Status of Content
An irrealist conception of a given region of discourse is the I L view that no real properties answer to the central predicates of the region in question. Any such conception emerges, invariably, as the result of the interaction of two forces. An account of the meaning of the central predicates, along with a conception of the sorts of property the world may contain, conspire to show that, if the predicates of the region are taken to express prope…
Colour as a Secondary Quality 1
Hence I think that these tastes, odors, colors, etc., on the side of the object in which they seem to exist, are nothing else than mere names, but hold their residence solely in the sensitive body; so that if the animal were removed, every such quality would be abolished and annihilated. Nevertheless, as soon as we have imposed names on them, particular and different from those of the other primary and real accidents, we induce ourselves to belie…
The Rule-Following Considerations 1
Journal Article The Rule-Following Considerations1 Get access PAUL A. BOGHOSSIAN PAUL A. BOGHOSSIAN Department of Philosophy, University of MichiganAnn Arbor, MI, USA 48109 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, Volume XCVIII, Issue 392, October 1989, Pages 507–549, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/XCVIII.392.507 Published: 01 October 1989
Wittgenstein on Meaning
The Status of Content
An irrealist conception of a given region of discourse is the I L view that no real properties answer to the central predicates of the region in question. Any such conception emerges, invariably, as the result of the interaction of two forces. An account of the meaning of the central predicates, along with a conception of the sorts of property the world may contain, conspire to show that, if the predicates of the region are taken to express prope…
Physicalist Theories of Color
The dispute between realists about color and anti-realists is ac- tually a dispute about the nature of color properties.The disputants do not disagree over what material objects are like.Rather, they disagree over whether any of the uncontroversial facts about material objects-their powers to cause visual experiences, their dispositions to reflect incident light, their atomic makeup, and so on-amount to their having colors.The disagreement is thu…
The Transparency of Mental Content
As the surrounding discussion makes clear, Dummett's claim isn't merely the fairly weak thesis that, for any two expressions in a person's repertoire, it must be possible for that person to come to know whether or not they mean the same. Rather, the claim is that it must be possible for that person to come to know such a fact purely introspectively, without the benefit of further empirical investigation--a priori, as I shall also occasionally put…
Williamson on the A Priori and the Analytic
The concept of genocide
The word ‘genocide’ gets a lot of use these days. When a large number of people are killed, it's not unusual for a debate to ensure about whether the event qualifies as genocide. Recently, the high
Inference and Insight
Response to my critics
Constructivist and Relativist Conceptions of Knowledge in Contemporary (Anti-)Epistemology
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 101, Number 1, Winter 2002
Sense, Reference and Rule-Following
In a series of important and provocative books, Jerrold Katz has articulated and defended a 'Platonistic Intensionalism' in the theory of meaning. As Katz understands it, this is the view that expressions of a natural language have sense as well as reference, that senses are abstract entities of some sort and that they are the proper objects of study in a theory of meaning for natural language. As both his admirers and detractors would admit, tha…
Colour as a Secondary Quality 1
Hence I think that these tastes, odors, colors, etc., on the side of the object in which they seem to exist, are nothing else than mere names, but hold their residence solely in the sensitive body; so that if the animal were removed, every such quality would be abolished and annihilated. Nevertheless, as soon as we have imposed names on them, particular and different from those of the other primary and real accidents, we induce ourselves to belie…
The Rule-Following Considerations 1
Journal Article The Rule-Following Considerations1 Get access PAUL A. BOGHOSSIAN PAUL A. BOGHOSSIAN Department of Philosophy, University of MichiganAnn Arbor, MI, USA 48109 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, Volume XCVIII, Issue 392, October 1989, Pages 507–549, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/XCVIII.392.507 Published: 01 October 1989
Wittgenstein on Meaning
The Status of Content
An irrealist conception of a given region of discourse is the I L view that no real properties answer to the central predicates of the region in question. Any such conception emerges, invariably, as the result of the interaction of two forces. An account of the meaning of the central predicates, along with a conception of the sorts of property the world may contain, conspire to show that, if the predicates of the region are taken to express prope…
Physicalist Theories of Color
The dispute between realists about color and anti-realists is ac- tually a dispute about the nature of color properties.The disputants do not disagree over what material objects are like.Rather, they disagree over whether any of the uncontroversial facts about material objects-their powers to cause visual experiences, their dispositions to reflect incident light, their atomic makeup, and so on-amount to their having colors.The disagreement is thu…
The Transparency of Mental Content
As the surrounding discussion makes clear, Dummett's claim isn't merely the fairly weak thesis that, for any two expressions in a person's repertoire, it must be possible for that person to come to know whether or not they mean the same. Rather, the claim is that it must be possible for that person to come to know such a fact purely introspectively, without the benefit of further empirical investigation--a priori, as I shall also occasionally put…
Sense, Reference and Rule-Following
In a series of important and provocative books, Jerrold Katz has articulated and defended a 'Platonistic Intensionalism' in the theory of meaning. As Katz understands it, this is the view that expressions of a natural language have sense as well as reference, that senses are abstract entities of some sort and that they are the proper objects of study in a theory of meaning for natural language. As both his admirers and detractors would admit, tha…
New Essays on the A Priori
This collection of newly commissioned essays, edited by NYU philosophers Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke, resumes the current surge of interest in the proper explication of the notion of a priori. The authors discuss the relations of the a priori to the notions of definition, meaning, justification, and ontology, explore how the concept figured historically in the philosophies of Leibniz, Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein, and address its ro…
Inference and Insight
Constructivist and Relativist Conceptions of Knowledge in Contemporary (Anti-)Epistemology
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 101, Number 1, Winter 2002
The Normativity of Content
I — Paul Boghossian
I—Paul Boghossian Get access Paul Boghossian Paul Boghossian Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 July 2003, Pages 225–248, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8349.00110 Published: 13 August 2015
Fear of Knowledge
Relativist and constructivist conceptions of truth and knowledge have become orthodoxy in vast stretches of the academic world in recent times. In his long-awaited first book, Paul Boghossian critically examines such views and exposes their fundamental flaws. Boghossian focuses on three different ways of reading the claim that knowledge is socially constructed--one as a thesis about truth and two about justification. And he rejects all three. The…
Content and Justification
Content and Justification presents a series of essays by Paul Boghossian on the theory of content and on its relation to the phenomenon of a priori knowledge. Part one comprises essays on the nature of rule-following and its relation to the problem of mental content; on the intelligibility of eliminativist views of the mental; on the prospects for a naturalistic reduction of mental content; and on the currently influential view that meaning is a …
Virtuous intuitions
Response to my critics
Williamson on the A Priori and the Analytic
The concept of genocide
The word ‘genocide’ gets a lot of use these days. When a large number of people are killed, it's not unusual for a debate to ensure about whether the event qualifies as genocide. Recently, the high
What is inference?
Reply to Otero's “Boghossian's Inference Argument against Content Externalism Reversed”
Is (Determinate) Meaning a Naturalistic Phenomenon?
This chapter revisits the question whether facts about intentional content can be understood in purely naturalistic terms. In a previous work, 'The Rule-Following Considerations', it was argued that Saul Kripke's Wittgenstein-inspired discussion of following a rule was, pace Kripke's intention, best understood as showing that facts about intentional content resist naturalistic reduction. The message of this chapter is the same, although it differ…
Rules, Norms and Principles
Realism and relativism about the normative
I defend normative realism—the claim that there are mind-independent, absolute normative facts—mostly by arguing against its rivals. Against mind-dependent theories of normativity, I argue that at least one highly influential version of such a view, Lewis's dispositional theory of value, is subject to at least three severe problems: the problem of the implausible contingency of value, the problem of ideal conditions, and the problem of lack of co…
Puzzling Beliefs
Epistemology (19 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (10 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Classical Philosophy and Thought (7 works) · Contemporary philosophy (7 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (7 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (7 works) · Mathematics (5 works)