The problem of creeping minimalism threatens the distinction between moral realism and meta-ethical expressivism, and between cognitivism and non-cognitivism more generally. The problem is commonly taken to be serious and in need of response. I argue that there are two problems of creeping minimalism, that one of these problems is more serious than the other, and that this more serious problem cannot be solved in a way that all parties can accept. I close by highlighting some important questions (...) this raises for how to distinguish between theories, and noting some of the troubling consequences it may entail for realism and its rivals, in meta-ethics and beyond. (shrink)

Much thought has been devoted to how metaethical disagreement between moral realism and expressivism can be saved once minimalism starts creeping. Very little thought has been given to how creeping minimalism affects error-theories’ disagreement with their metaethical competitors. The reason for this omission, I suspect, is found in the belief that whilst locating distinctive moral realist and expressivist positions within a minimalist landscape poses a severe challenge, no such difficulties are encountered when differentiating error-theories from moral realism and (...) expressivism. In the first part of this paper, I show that this belief is mistaken: Insofar as moral realists and error-theorists are still taken to disagree, creeping minimalism renders their disagreement moral, but makes these positions metaethically indistinguishable. In the second part of the paper, I present a modified inferentialist solution to the problem of creeping minimalism which seeks to put error-theories back on the metaethical map. Yet, this too comes at a cost, in that it significantly modifies our interpretation of error-theories. Whichever way we turn, then, creeping minimalism not only forces us to re-phrase metaethical positions in a way that is compatible with minimalism, but also requires us to change our very understanding of these positions. (shrink)

Disquotational theories of truth are often criticised for being too weak to prove interesting generalisations about truth. In this paper we will propose a certain formal theory to serve as a framework for a solution of the generalisation problem. In contrast with Horwich’s original proposal, our framework will eschew psychological notions altogether, replacing them with the epistemic notion of believability. The aim will be to explain why someone who accepts a given disquotational truth theory Th, should also accept various generalisations (...) not provable in Th. The strategy will consist of the development of an axiomatic theory of believability, one permitting us to show how to derive the believability of generalisations from basic axioms that characterise the believability predicate, together with the information that Th is a theory of truth that we accept. (shrink)

According to Emma Borg, minimalism is (roughly) the view that natural language sentences have truth conditions, and that these truth conditions are fully determined by syntactic structure and lexical content. A principal motivation for her brand of minimalism is that it coheres well with the popular view that semantic competence is underpinned by the cognition of a minimal semantic theory. In this paper, I argue that the liar paradox presents a serious problem for this principal motivation. Two lines (...) of response to the problem are discussed, and difficulties facing those responses are raised. I close by issuing a challenge: to construe the principal motivation for BM in such a way so as to avoid the problem of paradox. (shrink)

Metaethical minimalism. sometimes called quietism, is the view that first-order moral judgments can be true but nothing makes them true. This article raises three worries for that view. First, minimalists have no good reason to insist that moral judgments can be true. Second, minimalism, in abandoning the requirement that true judgments need to have truthmakers, leads to a problematic proliferation of truths. Third, most versions of minimalism entail a disjointed and therefore unacceptable theory of language and thought.

I develop a view of the common factor between subjectively indistinguishable perceptions and hallucinations that avoids analyzing experiences as involving awareness relations to abstract entities, sense-data, or any other peculiar entities. The main thesis is that hallucinating subjects employ concepts (or analogous nonconceptual structures), namely the very same concepts that in a subjectively indistinguishable perception are employed as a consequence of being related to external, mind-independent objects or property-instances. These concepts and nonconceptual structures are identified with modes of presentation types. (...) Since a hallucinating subject is not related to any such objects or property-instances, the concepts she employs remain empty. I argue that the phenomenology of hallucinations and perceptions can be identified with employing concepts and analogous nonconceptual structures. By doing so, I defend an ontologically minimalist view of the phenomenology of experience that (1) vindicates Aristotelianism about types and (2) amounts to a naturalized view of the phenomenology of experience. (shrink)

Minimalists about truth contend that traditional inflationary theories systematically fail to explain certain facts about truth, and that this failure licenses a ‘reversal of explanatory direction’. Once reversed, they purport that their own minimal theory adequately explains all of the facts involving truth. But minimalists’ main objection to inflationism seems to misfire, and the subsequent reversal of explanatory direction, if it can be made sense of, leaves minimalism in no better explanatory position; and even if the objection were serviceable (...) and the reversal legitimate, minimalists’ adequacy thesis is still implausible. (shrink)

This paper introduces freely improvised joint actions, a class of joint actions characterized by highly unspecific goals and the unavailability of shared plans. For example, walking together just for the sake of walking together with no specific destination or path in mind provides an ordinary example of FIJAs, along with examples in the arts, e.g., collective free improvisation in music, improv theater, or contact improvisation in dance. We argue that classic philosophical accounts of joint action such as Bratman’s rule them (...) out because the latter require a capacity for planning that is idle in the case of FIJAs. This argument is structurally similar to arguments for minimalist accounts of joint action, and this invites a parallel minimalist account, which we provide in terms of a specific kind of shared intentions that do not require plan states. We further argue that the resulting minimalist account is different in kind from the sort of minimalism suggested by developmental considerations and conclude in favor of a pluralistic minimalism, according to which there are several ways for an account of joint action to be minimal. (shrink)

It has been recently argued that the phenomenology of semantic perception casts doubts on Grice’s theory of meaning. I defend the psychological and theoretical plausibility of a form of Gricean minimalism, by setting new boundaries to the semantic-pragmatic distinction. This strategy consists in abandoning the entailment from what is said to what is meant, and advancing a conception of the semantic notion of what is said that departs from speaker-hearers’ intuitions. This proposal has important consequences both concerning the evidence (...) that should be used by philosophers of language when evaluating semantic theories, and the way we should carve up linguistic processing. (shrink)

The paper examines Wright’s attempt to inflate deflationism about truth. It accepts the details of Wright’s argument but contends that it should best be seen as posing a dilemma for the deflationist: either truth is independent of norms of warranted assertibility—in which case it is substantial—or it is not—in which case epistemicism about truth is a consequence. Some concerns about epistemicism are raised in avoiding the second horn. The first is avoided by distinguishing between independence and substantiality and arguing that (...) only the first applies to truth and only the second is worrisome to deflationism. So, despite its sub-title, the following is not a diatribe against Home Rule but a modest defence of deflationism. (shrink)

Evidence is often taken to be “normative” for doxastic agents. What accounts for the normativity of evidence? According to the view that I'll call “evidential minimalism”, there is a close connection between strong evidence for the truth of p and a normative reason to believe p: evidence is either itself a normative reason for belief, or evidence gives rise to such a reason when certain other minimal conditions are met. In this paper, I argue against evidential minimalism. I (...) will argue that there are cases where: (i) an individual S possesses strong evidence E for the truth of p at time t, (ii) all other minimal conditions for the normativity of E are met at t, (iii) S doesn't believe p at t, yet (iv) S isn't open to any form of criticism on account of (i)–(iii) at t. I will then formulate a plausible linking claim connecting openness to criticism and the existence of normative reasons for belief. The minimalist can either accept or reject this linking claim. I will argue that, either way, the minimalist view falters. (shrink)

Can there be objects that are ‘thin’ in the sense that very little is required for their existence? A number of philosophers have thought so. For instance, many Fregeans believe it suffices for the existence of directions that there be lines standing in the relation of parallelism; other philosophers believe it suffices for a mathematical theory to have a model that the theory be coherent. This article explains the appeal of thin objects, discusses the three most important strategies for articulating (...) and defending the idea of such objects, and outlines some problems that these strategies face. (shrink)

This article presents a perspective on syntactic cyclicity in minimalism that is compatible with fundamental ideas in construction–grammar approaches. In particular, I outline the minimalist approach to syntactic structure building and highlight that units of potentially any phrasal size can be atomic items in the syntactic derivation, showing that the opposition between simplex linguistic items (“words”) and more complex ones (“phrases”) in minimalism is in principle as artificial as in many construction–grammar approaches. Based on this perspective on structure (...) building, I focus on the empirical domain of subextraction patterns out of complex subjects, adjuncts, and complements, and I demonstrate that the acceptability patterns in this domain can be explained by a functional approach to syntactic cyclicity: Unacceptable patterns are ruled out not for configurational (and hence syntactic) reasons, but rather they systematically follow from infelicitous interpretations at the syntax–discourse interface. This raises the question of whether syntactic cyclicity is (at least in part) motivated by performance (read: “language-in-use”) constraints, which I consider another area for fruitful interaction between construction–grammar and usage-based accounts on the one hand and minimalism on the other hand. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a criticism to a method for metaontology, namely, the idea that a discourse’s or theory’s ontological commitments can be read off its sentences’ truth- conditions. Firstly, I will put forward this idea’s basis and, secondly, I will present the way Quine subscribed to it. However, I distinguish between two readings of Quine’s famous ontological criterion, and I center the focus on the one currently dubbed “ontological minimalism”, a kind of modern Ockhamism applied to the (...) mentioned metaontological view. I show that this view has a certain application via Quinean thesis of reference inscrutability but that it is not possible to press that application any further and, in particular, not for the ambitious metaontological task some authors try to employ. The conclusion may sound promising: having shown the impossibility of a semantic ontological criterion, intentionalist or subjectivist ones should be explored. (shrink)

In the debate between literalism and contextualism in semantics, Kent Bach’s project is often taken to stand on the latter side of the divide. In this paper I argue that this is a misleading assumption and justify this by contrasting Bach’s assessment of the theoretical eliminability of minimal propositions arguably expressed by well-formed sentences with standard minimalist views, and by further contrasting his account of the division of interpretative processes ascribable to the semantics and pragmatics of a language with a (...) parallel analysis carried out by the most radical opponent to semantic minimalism, i.e., by occasionalism. If my analysis proves right, the sum of its conclusions leaves Bach’s proposal in an invisible region of the literalism/contextualism debate. (shrink)

Although contemporary pragmatists tend to be sympathetic to expressivist accounts of moral, modal and other problematic vocabularies, it is not clear that they have any right to be. The problem arises because contemporary pragmatists tend to favour deflationary accounts of truth and reference, thereby seeming to elide the distinction between expressive and repressentational uses of language. To address this problem, I develop a meta-theoretical framework for understanding what is involved in explanations of meaning in terms of use, and why some (...) but not all such explanations deflationary. Exploiting this framework, I argue that expressivist explanations of problematic vocabularies are really a particular kind of deflationary explanation. It follows that pragmatists can thus take such explanations on board without committing themselves to the distinction between expressive and robustly representational uses of language that articulations of expressivism typically invoke. (shrink)

The Minimalist Program for linguistic theory is Noam Chomsky's boldest and most radical version of his naturalistic approach to language. Cedric Boeckz examines its foundations, explains its underlying philosophy, exemplifies its methods, and considers the significance of its empirical results. He explores the roots and antecedents of the Program and shows how its methodologies parallel those of sciences such as physics and biology. He disentangles and clarifies current debates and issues around the nature of minimalist research in linguistics and shows (...) how the aims and ambitions of the Minimalist Program lie at the centre of the enterprise to understand how the human language faculty operates in the mind and is manifested in the world's languages.Professor Boeckx writes for advanced and graduate students of linguistics and for all those, in fields such as cognitive science and evolutionary biology, who want to know more about current developments in theoretical linguistics. (shrink)

Speech act theory is one of the more lasting products of the linguistic movement in philosophy of the mid−Twentieth century. Within philosophy itself the movement's products did not in general prove so durable. Particularly striking in this respect is the perceived fate of what was one of the most characteristic applications of the linguistic turn in philosophy, namely the view that many traditional philosophical problems are such as to yield to an understanding of the distinctive function of a particular part (...) of language. Most typically, the crucial insight was held to be that despite appearances, the function of the part of language in question is not assertoric, or descriptive, and that the traditional problems arose at least in part from a failure to appreciate this point. Thus problems in moral philosophy were thought to yield to an appreciation that moral discourse is expressive rather than descriptive, problems in the philosophy of mind to an understanding of distinctive r×le of psychological ascriptions, and so on. The philosophical journals of the 1950s are rich with views like these. (No general term for this approach seems to have become widely accepted at the time. I shall call it "non−factualism", for what it denies, most characteristically, is the fact−stating r×le of language of a certain kind.). (shrink)

Inquiry, Volume 57, Issue 3, Page 384-411, June 2014.

Despite the divide between American formalism and theoreticians of minimalism, Barnett Newman’s art received great acclaim from both schools of thought. Attempting to unearth the philosophical preconditions of this strange constellation, this article argues that the closeness between minimalism and formalism is due to their mutual reliance upon phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy. However, their proximity also conveys their distance, since they imply different interpretations and applications of the philosophical schools in question. Such theoretical differences shed light on (...) Newman’s paintings: both minimalism and formalism are right in their accounts – yet not exclusively so. What arguably makes up the distinctive fascination of Newman’s paintings is their incessant oscillation between empty physicality and powerful meaning. (shrink)

Review of Insensitive Semantics, by H. Cappelen and E. Lepore.

Ontological minimalism (or easy ontology) combines realism about first-order existence questions with a deflationary understanding of such existence claims: the concepts of the entities at issue in first-order debates include application conditions, and if these are met, it is a trivial truth that entities of that kind exist. This chapter argues that this view faces serious problems in explaining how entities the existence of which can be guaranteed in this easy way can have other properties as a matter of (...) conceptual necessity. For example, it is a conceptual necessity that the mereological fusion of A and B has A and B as parts. How can this be, given that the application condition of the concept _mereological fusion of A and B_ is simply that A and B exist? Only a substantive, first-order metaphysical claim can bridge this gap. So easy ontology is no easier than any other kind of ontology. (shrink)

I distinguish two kinds of contribution that have been made by recent minimalist accounts of joint action in philosophy and cognitive science relative to established philosophical accounts of shared intentional action. The “complementarists” seek to analyze a functionally different kind of joint action from the kind of joint action that is analyzed by established philosophical accounts of shared intentional action. The “constitutionalists” seek to expose mechanisms that make performing joint actions possible, without taking a definite stance on which functional characterization (...) of joint action is the appropriate one. I elucidate the contrasting methodological underpinnings of these minimalist research programs in accordance with Bechtel and Richardson’s account of the heuristics of decomposition and localization as a research strategy for the study of complex systems. (shrink)

Contextualists and pragmatists agree that knowledge-denying sentences are contextually variable, in the sense that a knowledge-denying sentence might semantically express a false proposition in one context and a true proposition in another context, without any change in the properties traditionally viewed as necessary for knowledge. Minimalists deny both pragmatism and contextualism, and maintain that knowledge-denying sentences are not contextually variable. To defend their view from cases like DeRose and Stanley's high stakes bank case, minimalists like Patrick Rysiew, Jessica Brown, and (...) Wayne Davis forward ‘warranted assertability maneuvers.’ The basic idea is that some knowledge-denying sentence seems contextually variable because we mistake what a speaker pragmatically conveys by uttering that sentence for what she literally says by uttering that sentence. In this paper, I raise problems for the warranted assertability maneuvers of Rysiew, Brown, and Davis, and then present a warranted assertability maneuver that should succeed if any warranted assertability maneuver will succeed. I then show how my warranted assertability maneuver fails, and how the problem with my warranted assertability maneuver generalizes to pragmatic responses in general. The upshot of my argument is that, in order to defend their view from cases like DeRose and Stanley's high stakes bank case, minimalists must prioritize the epistemological question whether the subjects in those cases know over linguistic questions about the pragmatics of various knowledge-denying sentences. (shrink)

Across a series of seminal works, Ruth Millikan has produced a compelling and comprehensive naturalised account of content. With respect to linguistic meaning, her ground breaking approach has been to analyse the meaning of a linguistic term via the function it performs which has been responsible for securing the term’s survival. This way of looking at things has significant repercussions for a number of recent debates in philosophy of language. This paper explores these repercussions through the lens of what is (...) known as semantic minimalism, using the tenets of minimalism to draw out some questions for Millikan’s approach to the semantics/pragmatics divide. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the so-called problem of creeping minimalism, the problem of distinguishing metaethical expressivism from its rivals once expressivists start accepting minimalist theories about truth, representation, belief, and similar concepts. I argue that Dreier’s ‘explanation’ explanation is almost correct, but by critically examining it we not only get a better solution, but also draw out some interesting results about expressivism and non-representationalist theories of meaning more generally.

The logicality of language is the hypothesis that the language system has access to a ‘natural’ logic that can identify and filter out as unacceptable expressions that have trivial meanings—that is, that are true/false in all possible worlds or situations in which they are defined. This hypothesis helps explain otherwise puzzling patterns concerning the distribution of various functional terms and phrases. Despite its promise, logicality vastly over-generates unacceptability assignments. Most solutions to this problem rest on specific stipulations about the properties (...) of logical form—roughly, the level of linguistic representation which feeds into the interpretation procedures—and have substantial implications for traditional philosophical disputes about the nature of language. Specifically, contextualism and semantic minimalism, construed as competing hypotheses about the nature and degree of context-sensitivity at the level of logical form, suggest different approaches to the over-generation problem. In this paper, I explore the implications of pairing logicality with various forms of contextualism and semantic minimalism. I argue that to adequately solve the over-generation problem, logicality should be implemented in a constrained contextualist framework. (shrink)

This paper argues that moral realism must commit to objectivity as a core feature. According to an influential view, a theory qualifies as moral realism if moral claims are literally construed as straightforwardly true, requiring only cognitivism and success theory without objectivity. However, some forms of relativism accept truth-aptness and success theory while rejecting objective truth values, allowing moral propositions to have different truth values in different contexts of assessment. This creates a dilemma: either the notion of “straightforward truth” implicitly (...) requires objectivity – making moral realism robust rather than minimal – or minimal realism cannot properly classify these relativist views as realist or antirealist. Further emphasizing this issue, research on folk metaethics suggests that people may comprehend moral claims in an assessment-sensitive manner. Future research could contribute significantly by arbitrating between competing interpretations of the current data: indexical moral relativism (moral claims express different propositions in different contexts) versus assessment sensitivity (the same proposition can have different truth values in different contexts of assessment). The paper concludes that moral realism must require objectivity not because relativism must reject it, but because some forms can coherently do so – a conclusion that could be strengthened by empirical studies examining how people judge moral disagreement across contexts. (shrink)