Videos by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
Talk for the ECAP10 symposium on Subject Matter, co-organised with Matteo Plebani, which featured... more Talk for the ECAP10 symposium on Subject Matter, co-organised with Matteo Plebani, which featured Stephen Yablo and Arthur Schipper, Matteo and myself.
I point out that the concept of 'subject matter' has tacitly been changed from the former objectual concept roughly synonymous with 'topic' to a propositional concept very close (too close, I think) to 'what is said'. I argue that aboutness theory should go back to the old 'topic' view. 55 views
Papers by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
(2024) Real Responses vs. Judgments. In Yannic Kappes, Asya Passinsky, Julio De Rizzo & Benjamin Schnieder (eds.), Facets of Reality — Contemporary Debates. Contributions of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. Contributions of the 45th International Wittgenstein Symposium, vol. XXX. , 2024
Response-dependent (R-D) properties have a big epistemological advantage: when we are the respond... more Response-dependent (R-D) properties have a big epistemological advantage: when we are the responders, they give us real knowledge of what their bearers can do or cause. But accounts vary substantially with respect to the underlying metaphysics, and the epistemological advantage is easily lost. In this paper, I explain how this occurs in Pettit’s influential account.
I begin by outlining the epistemological motivation for dealing with R-D properties, in particular for some, more demanding, empiricist theories of knowledge. I then explain how dispositional accounts of R-D properties, like Johnston’s, invite in accounts involving judgments, like Pettit’s. In Pettit’s account, responses are effectively judgments of salient similarities between objects, and thereby second-order, so that it is not the properties but our concepts of the properties that are “response-privileging” and thereby ultimately R-D. This account is then extended to all concepts. Pettit thus gives us a R-D genealogy of concepts, but relinquishes the epistemological asset inherent in (first-order) accounts of R-D properties as consisting in (“real”) response events.
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Conference proceedings, 2024
Divine names, i.e. the names religions use to speak of their god(s), pose a special problem to se... more Divine names, i.e. the names religions use to speak of their god(s), pose a special problem to semantics. It is not only disputed whether they are proper names, descriptions, or names of kinds, the dispute between believers and non-believers over the ontological status of their bearers is a further obstacle to offering a single theory that can account for all divine names. But aboutness theory can come to the rescue here. Whatever terms divine names are, they pick out a subject matter, and whereas ontology is relevant to reference, subject matters need no corresponding object in the world. Believers and non-believers can therefore agree on the name bearers' status as topics of their conversation.
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Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 2024
Machery et al.’s 2004 x-phi project has been widely criticised for ambiguities contained in the e... more Machery et al.’s 2004 x-phi project has been widely criticised for ambiguities contained in the expression “talk about”. Interestingly, although “about” plays a prominent part in the debate, aboutness has not been a topic. This paper discusses this aspect. Alas, it must thereby add a further ambiguity to the list, the ambiguity between aboutness and reference, and thus also between subject matter and referent. It explains the distinction between intra-categorical aboutness which makes no ontological demands, and cross-categorical reference which requires the referent to exist. It then analyses the 4-fold embedding contained in Machery et al.’s study and shows how the aboutness-reference distinction bears on it.
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Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 2024
Nelson Goodman’s paper ‘About’ (1961) was a milestone in aboutness theory. Although it has been m... more Nelson Goodman’s paper ‘About’ (1961) was a milestone in aboutness theory. Although it has been much discussed, an interesting fact about it has so far been completely ignored: the important debt it owes to two papers it cites by Gilbert Ryle. With Ryle’s ‘About’ (1933) it shares much more than the title – it, too, offers a three-fold account of different ways a sentence can relate to a subject matter and a separate account for fictitious objects. More importantly, although Goodman’s approach is quite different, the inspiration for the crucial element in his account, ‘differential consequence’, may well have come from a parenthetical suggestion of entailment in Ryle’s ‘About’. The second essential tool Goodman uses, viz. compound predicates which incorporate the (fictitious) object, is also the crucial element in Ryle’s ‘Imaginary Objects’ (also 1933). Goodman turns them into a predicate schema for fictitious subject matters as well as for a nominalist version of his account.
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Grazer Philosophische Studien, Nov 2021
This is our preface to the Book Symposium on Michael Ayers' <Knowing and Seeing> (OUP 2019), publ... more This is our preface to the Book Symposium on Michael Ayers' <Knowing and Seeing> (OUP 2019), published in Grazer Philosophische Studien Vol. 98 (4), 2021. The Book Symposium contains papers by Maria Rosa Antognazza, Menno Lievers, Guy Longworth, Rory Madden, Sofia Miguens & Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum, Mira Magdalena Sickinger, and Charles Travis, and replies by Michael Ayers.
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Grazer Philosophische Studien, 2021
In this article the authors, Sofia Miguens and Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum, identify and analyse poin... more In this article the authors, Sofia Miguens and Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum, identify and analyse points of agreement and disagreement between Michael Ayers and Charles Travis, starting from their views on ‘things before us’. The authors then try to spell out what separates these philosophers in matters concerning perception, knowledge and language. In spite of their both being selfprofessed realists, equally critical of conceptualism and representationalism, Ayers’ empiricism and Travis’ anti-empiricism lead them to different positions in these three areas. It is shown that in the case of Ayers they hinge on “ordinary” objects and a kk principle (knowledge that and how we know), whereas in the case of Travis they are articulated around occasion-sensitivity and anti-psychologism.
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Society and Politics, 2018
This issue is dedicated to consciousness in medieval and early modern philosophy of mind. It aims... more This issue is dedicated to consciousness in medieval and early modern philosophy of mind. It aims to shed new light on the continuities and innovations during the transition from medieval to early modern philosophy of mind. The four papers, by Sonja Schierbaum, Daniel Schmal, Oliver Istvan Toth, and Philipp N. Müller, focus on consciousness and, more specifically, on one of its less frequently considered aspects: memory.
Consciousness and Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, Society and Politics, 2018 Vol. 12 no.2
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Casey O'Callaghan has argued that rather than hearing meanings, we hear phonemes. In this note I ... more Casey O'Callaghan has argued that rather than hearing meanings, we hear phonemes. In this note I argue that valuable though they are in an account of speech perception – depending on how we define 'hearing' – phonemes either don't explain enough or they go too far. So, they are not the right tool for his criticism of the semantic perceptual account (SPA).
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Analysis, Oct 2016
This Critical Notice is about aboutness in logic and language. In a first part, I discuss the ori... more This Critical Notice is about aboutness in logic and language. In a first part, I discuss the origin of the issue and the philosophical background to Yablo's book Aboutness (PUP 2014), which is itself the subject of the second and main part of my paper.
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International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2015
This paper attempts a conceptualisation of authority intended to be useful across all areas where... more This paper attempts a conceptualisation of authority intended to be useful across all areas where the concept is relevant. It begins by setting off authority against power, on the one hand, and respect, on the other, and then spells out S1’s authority as consisting in S2’s voluntary action performed in the belief that S1 would approve of it. While this definition should hold for authority generally, a distinction is made between three different kinds of authority according to what grounds them: personal, acquired and bestowed authority. Authority thus defined is then used as an example to argue that there is a kind of property that is response-dependent (R-D), but, consisting in all and only a response, is ontologically different from both secondary qualities and value judgments. While secondary qualities are interactive in that they depend on both the object and the perceiver and on what they are like, genuinely R-D qualities depend ontologically and metaphysically only on the responder. And while value judgments require a concept, R-D qualities require an action as a response. It is hoped that this metaphysical underpinning might be helpful in the discussion of authority in other areas of philosophy and beyond.
Copyright information: This paper was apparently meant to be free to access (see http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/ah/international-journal-of-philosophical-studies: "On the recommendation of the referees, three runners up papers have also be published, and are also free to access online."). Since it is - again - behind a paywall on the journal's website, I am now posting it here, trusting that this doesn't constitute copyright infringement.
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Beiträge der Österreichischen Ludwig Wittgenstein Gesellschaft 21 (2013)
In her 'Spracherwerb'(2012) Ruth Millikan gives a compelling account of language acquisition base... more In her 'Spracherwerb'(2012) Ruth Millikan gives a compelling account of language acquisition based on our ability to track objects. I argue that, and how, it is undermined by her insistence on equating understanding language utterances and sense perception, point to idealist hazards, and plead against propositionality and for imagism in order to safeguard the account's important potential for giving a comprehensive explication of meaning.
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Drafts by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
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Casey O'Callaghan has argued that rather than hearing meanings, we hear phonemes. In this note I ... more Casey O'Callaghan has argued that rather than hearing meanings, we hear phonemes. In this note I argue that valuable though they are in an account of speech perception – depending on how we define 'hearing' – phonemes either don't explain enough or they go too far. So, they are not the right tool for his criticism of the semantic perceptual account (SPA).
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Prezis by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
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This is a link to a Prezi with a diagrammatic representation of Avicenna's account of intellectua... more This is a link to a Prezi with a diagrammatic representation of Avicenna's account of intellectual cognition which I made for a class. I'm posting it in case it's of any use to anyone.
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Thesis Chapters by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
Doctoral thesis, 2017
The thesis argues that aboutness theory has taken a turn that is unfavourable concerning interdis... more The thesis argues that aboutness theory has taken a turn that is unfavourable concerning interdisciplinary aspects. It begins by outlining three problems - the problem of occurrence, the problem of interestand the problem of degree - that are taken partly from very early philosophical work on aboutness (by Ryle and Putnam), partly from LIS, and partly from linguistics (Mathesius). In a next step, the accounts of Nelson Goodman (1961), David Lewis (1988) and Stephen Yablo (2014) are introduced, analysed with respect to their own merits and concerning the three problems. In this connection, ontological worries are dispelled, partial aboutness is considered, and similarity is discussed with reference to work by Leitgeb (2007) and Paseau (2012, 2015). Work underway by Fine (2017, forthcoming) is also addressed with a view to these problems. It is argued that application of all accounts to areas like LIS, machine translation, natural language processing, etc. is made difficult because they are all developed for individual indicative sentences rather than longer pieces of text. Moreover, the conception of subject matter has increasingly moved away from the idea of a topic towards that of the whole content of a sentence. So in spite of the enormous progress and great usefulness of the recent accounts in other areas (prominently the theory of meaning), there remains important work to be done.
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Texts for a general audience by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
Research blog of the Austrian National Library, 2018
350 years ago John Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language was publ... more 350 years ago John Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language was published. In it, he introduced an artificial language designed to establish a direct link between words and what they stand for, thereby both bypassing the human mind and shielding it from the ambiguities and imperfections of natural language. The idea was to have a language precise enough for science and at the same time able to be taught around the globe.
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Talks by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
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Videos by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
I point out that the concept of 'subject matter' has tacitly been changed from the former objectual concept roughly synonymous with 'topic' to a propositional concept very close (too close, I think) to 'what is said'. I argue that aboutness theory should go back to the old 'topic' view.
Papers by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
I begin by outlining the epistemological motivation for dealing with R-D properties, in particular for some, more demanding, empiricist theories of knowledge. I then explain how dispositional accounts of R-D properties, like Johnston’s, invite in accounts involving judgments, like Pettit’s. In Pettit’s account, responses are effectively judgments of salient similarities between objects, and thereby second-order, so that it is not the properties but our concepts of the properties that are “response-privileging” and thereby ultimately R-D. This account is then extended to all concepts. Pettit thus gives us a R-D genealogy of concepts, but relinquishes the epistemological asset inherent in (first-order) accounts of R-D properties as consisting in (“real”) response events.
Consciousness and Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, Society and Politics, 2018 Vol. 12 no.2
Copyright information: This paper was apparently meant to be free to access (see http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/ah/international-journal-of-philosophical-studies: "On the recommendation of the referees, three runners up papers have also be published, and are also free to access online."). Since it is - again - behind a paywall on the journal's website, I am now posting it here, trusting that this doesn't constitute copyright infringement.
Drafts by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
Prezis by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
https://prezi.com/oezpfqjxiyk7/diagramm-carnap-aufbau/?utm_campaign=share&token=b3bad9df0e00051c737b7d392509bb3e2c95008a52f4db3ccb84c257e70c7e70&utm_medium=copy
Thesis Chapters by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
Texts for a general audience by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
Talks by C. Naomi Osorio-Kupferblum
I point out that the concept of 'subject matter' has tacitly been changed from the former objectual concept roughly synonymous with 'topic' to a propositional concept very close (too close, I think) to 'what is said'. I argue that aboutness theory should go back to the old 'topic' view.
I begin by outlining the epistemological motivation for dealing with R-D properties, in particular for some, more demanding, empiricist theories of knowledge. I then explain how dispositional accounts of R-D properties, like Johnston’s, invite in accounts involving judgments, like Pettit’s. In Pettit’s account, responses are effectively judgments of salient similarities between objects, and thereby second-order, so that it is not the properties but our concepts of the properties that are “response-privileging” and thereby ultimately R-D. This account is then extended to all concepts. Pettit thus gives us a R-D genealogy of concepts, but relinquishes the epistemological asset inherent in (first-order) accounts of R-D properties as consisting in (“real”) response events.
Consciousness and Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, Society and Politics, 2018 Vol. 12 no.2
Copyright information: This paper was apparently meant to be free to access (see http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/ah/international-journal-of-philosophical-studies: "On the recommendation of the referees, three runners up papers have also be published, and are also free to access online."). Since it is - again - behind a paywall on the journal's website, I am now posting it here, trusting that this doesn't constitute copyright infringement.
https://prezi.com/oezpfqjxiyk7/diagramm-carnap-aufbau/?utm_campaign=share&token=b3bad9df0e00051c737b7d392509bb3e2c95008a52f4db3ccb84c257e70c7e70&utm_medium=copy