Gareth Evans

This paper focuses on two enduring features of Gareth Evans’s work. The first is his rethinking of standard ways of understanding the Fregean notion of sense and the second his sustained attempt to undercut the standard opposition between Russellian and Fregean approaches to understanding thought and language. I explore the peculiar difficulties that ‘I’ poses for a Fregean theory and show how Evans’s account of the sense of the first person pronoun can be modified to meet those difficulties.

Gareth Evans, in The Causal Theory of Names, states that the causal theory of reference needs to be expanded to include what he calls multiple "bases". After the initial baptism, the use of the name in the presence of the person can, under the right circumstances, be considered as reinforcing the name in its referent. For those who are in direct contact with the person, the reference for the expression of the name is solved by means of a causal chain that includes people who knew him during the "baptism", or by indexing the person to the name at the time of communication.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.28651.08484

THE CONTENT OF PERCEPTION Analysis of the debate between conceptualism and non-conceptualism.
Il lavoro è stato sviluppato presso l'Università degli Studi di Milano, supervisionato da Paolo Spinicci in qualità di Relatore e da Andrea Zhok in qualità di correlatore.

When Burge uses ‘explication’ (quite often, during the period of interest to me—from the late 70s through to the early 90s, to about the time of ‘Content Preservation’) he means something relatively distinct directed at conceptual clarification and certainly distinct from explanation, he means a parallel form of representation of some material (explicandum) reformed in clarification. In explication’s doing that, as it standardly does, there is a narrowing in the answer as to which materials significantly coordinate. Burge wants to clarify that coordination according to determinations linked with meanings in the abstracted sense cannot be linked with uses coordinating with specifications subject to sorts of rote determinations conventionally applicable to them. This is an example of that limitation corresponding to access to review mentioned above, when Burge wants to guarantee inchoateness, interacting with Burge’s own thesis of common or garden determination in contexts in which hard, external constrictions operate, Burge’s anti-individualistic determinations. Explications usefully rehearse material figured there reviewed as uses but coordinating as contents, in that insulated sense contents are items constituted in that review; uses being subject to hard determinations etc.

This paper is largely exegetical/interpretive. My goal is to demonstrate that some criticisms that have been leveled against the program Gareth Evans constructs in The Varieties of Reference (Evans 1980, henceforth VR) misfire because they are based on misunderstandings of Evans’ position. First I will be discussing three criticisms raised by Tyler Burge (Burge, 2010). The first has to do with Evans’ arguments to the effect that a causal connection between a belief and an object is insufficient for that belief to be about that object. A key part of Evans’ argument is to carefully distinguish considerations relevant to the semantics of language from considerations relevant to the semantics (so to speak) of thought or belief (to make the subsequent discussion easier, I will henceforth use ‘thought’ as a blanket term for the relevant mental states, including belief). I will argue that Burge’s criticisms depend on largely not taking account of Evans’ distinctions. Second, Burge criticizes Evans’ account of ‘informational content’ taking it to be inconsistent. I will show that the inconsistency Burge finds depends entirely on a misreading of the doctrine. Finally, Burge takes Evans to task for a perceived over-intellectualization in a key aspect of his doctrine. Burge incorrectly reads Evans as requiring that the subject holding a belief be engaged in certain overly intellectual endeavors, when in fact Evans is only attributing these endeavors to theorists of such a subject.
Next, I turn to two criticisms leveled by John Campbell (Campbell, 1999). I will argue that Campbell’s criticisms are based on misunderstandings – though they do hit at deeper elements of Evans’ doctrine. First, Campbell reads Evans’ account of demonstrative thought as requiring that the subject’s information link to an object allows her to directly locate that object in space. Campbell constructs a case in which one tomato (a) is, because of an angled mirror, incorrectly seen as being at a location that happens to be occupied by an identical tomato (b). Campbell claims that Evans’ doctrines require us to conclude that the subject cannot have a demonstrative thought about the seen tomato (a), though it seems intuitively that such a subject would be able to have a demonstrative thought about that tomato, despite its location is inaccurately seen. I show that Evans’ position in fact allows that the subject can have a demonstrative thought about the causal-source tomato in this case because his account does not require that the location of demonstratively identified objects be immediately accurately assessed. What is crucial is that the subject have the ability to accurately discover the location. Second, Campbell criticizes Evans’ notion of a fundamental level of thought. I show that this criticism hinges on view of the nature and role of the fundamental level of thought that mischaracterizes Evans’ treatment of the notion.

Keywords: communication, semantics/pragmatics, direct reference theory, singular thoughts, Russell's Principle, Generality Constraint, Husserl, Evans, Perry, twin examples, demonstratives, demonstrative identification, perception, perceptual content

The framework for the papers in this volume is set by the wide-ranging philosophical contributions of Gareth Evans, who died in 1980 at the age of 34. In the papers gathered together in the posthumously published Collected Papers and in The Varieties of Reference Evans made a number of important contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of thought, and philosophical logic. Evans was a far more systematic thinker than is usual in contemporary analytical philosophy and the first part of this introduction gives an overview of his thinking, setting it in the context of four powerful and competing currents in anglo-American philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s. The second part of the introduction summarizes the papers in the collection and provides necessary background to the individual contributions.

Par une sélection de six textes emblématiques traduits en français, l'enjeu du présent volume est d'introduire le lecteur francophone à l'histoire de la controverse sur le contenu conceptuel de la perception et d'interroger la pertinence des débats qu'elle a suscités.
Avec des textes de Tim Crane, Fred Dretske, Gareth Evans, John McDowell, Christopher Peacocke et Charles Travis

Wie denken und sprechen wir eigentlich über einzelne Objekte in Raum und Zeit? Diese Frage rührt gleichermaßen an Grundprobleme der neueren sprachanalytischen Philosophie und der transzendentalen Phänomenologie Husserls. Unter dem Titel 'Konstitutionsproblem' begegnet sie uns dort in folgendem Gewand: Wie bringen wir es zuwege, ein raumzeitliches Objekt über eine Zeitspanne und über eine Reihe von kognitiven Perspektivenwechseln hinweg 'im Sinn' zu behalten? Der Autor unternimmt den Versuch, das Konstitutionsproblem in einer Art und Weise zu verfolgen, die methodisch sowohl für Sprachanalytiker als auch für Phänomenologen akzeptabel ist.

David Lewis (1979) presents a case in which two gods have omniscient propositional knowledge.  But each god fails to know something very basic: which of the two gods it is (520-1).  It thus seems that the content of one’s de se knowledge (hence belief) is not propositional.  Call it the ‘Two Gods’ problem for propositional accounts of de se thought and expression.  This paper argues that Two Gods is no problem for a view under which thoughts (de se or otherwise) have Fregean propositions as their contents, given it includes the account of de se and indexical propositional thought from John McDowell (e.g., 1984) and Gareth Evans (1981; 1982).

High-level panels are institutionalized diplomatic instruments comprising high-profile and respected individuals to address a particular issue. Building on traditional and contemporary institutions in recognizing the Wise or Elderly as diplomats, the African Union Panel of the Wise is one of the five pillars of the African Peace and Security Architecture – and thus peace diplomacy – in terms of Article 11 of the African Union (AU) Protocol establishing the Peace and Security Council. This research analyses the Panel's contribution to African diplomacy by focusing on the Panel's knowledge production; its normative and operational impact; raising awareness and agenda setting; the Panel's innovation in respect of conflict resolution and governance; and the prevention and reduction of conflict in Africa. The research concludes that, despite some contribution to African diplomacy, efforts to prevent and reduce African conflicts have been influenced by the Panel's mandate, processes, and contextual factors. This notwithstanding, the Panel's contribution to an emergent African Peace Diplomacy Architecture is recognised.

Bu yazının esas gayesi, Evans’ın melez gönderim teorisini eleştirmektir. Görülecektir ki, Evans’ın teorisi kimi düşünce-deneylerinde yanlış sonuçlar vermektedir. Yazı, iki bölümden oluşmaktadır. İlk bölümde Evans’ın teorisinin kısa bir sunumunu yaptıktan sonra ikinci bölümde bu teorinin problemlerine işaret edeceğiz.

Do we have to choose between conceptualism and non-conceptualism?

Forthcoming in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies (2015)
Author: Corijn van Mazijk

ABSTRACT
It is today acknowledged by many that the debate about non-conceptual content is a mess. Over the past decades a vast collection of arguments for non-conceptual content piled up in which a variety of conceptions of what determines a state’s content is being used. This resulted in a number of influential attempts to clarify what would make a content non-conceptual, most notably Bermúdez’s classic definition, Heck’s divide into ‘state’ and ‘content’ (non-)conceptualism and Speaks’s ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ non-conceptualism. However, these interpretations, I argue, like the majority of non-conceptualist arguments, rest on a misconception of the conceptualist viewpoint. This has brought about an imbalance of the conceptualism/non-conceptualism dichotomy that has not been properly brought into view. This paper proceeds as follows: I first outline the central tenets of the conceptualist doctrine. Subsequently, I show that most of the main arguments of the past decades for non-conceptual content have little to no bearing on conceptualism. Third, I reveal that the definitions of Bermúdez, Heck and Speaks are unsuited to accommodate this asymmetry. Lastly, I claim that only a pluralistic understanding of these debates can reset the balance between conceptualism and non-conceptualism.

According to actionism (Noë 2010), perception constitutively depends on implicit knowledge of the way sensory stimulations vary as a consequence of the perceiver’s self-movement. My aim in this contribution is to develop an alternative conception of the role of action in perception present in the work of Gareth Evans using resources provided by Ruth Millikan’s biosemantic theory of mental representation.

Available via the following link:
https://academic.oup.com/monist/article/103/4/381/5905781?guestAccessKey=20778f31-6b16-4f51-b084-0f50cb549500
This essay aims to explore the significance of Hilary Putnam’s reflections on the division of linguistic labor by putting them into contrast with those of Gareth Evans. Whereas Putnam’s reflections purport to uncover neglected aspects of the contribution of social environment to the meaning and the reference-fixing of conceptual terms, Evans’s reinterpretation of the division of linguistic labor results in obliterating its antisubjectivist and instrumentalist dimension. The crux of the disagreement between Putnam and Evans on the significance of the division of linguistic labor lies in Evans endorsing, while Putnam rejects, the principle of discrimination—a generalization of what Evans calls “Russell’s principle.”

Gareth Evans’ account of Identification-freedom (IF), which he develops in Chapters 6 and 7 of The Varieties of Reference (henceforth VR) is almost universally misunderstood.  My exegesis of Evans’ account — like any non-trivial exegesis — goes somewhat beyond anything Evans overtly says. That Evans did not explicitly put the pieces together in the way I suggest they fit no doubt contributes to the widespread misunderstanding of his views. But I am confident that once my interpretation is on the table it will be post hoc obvious that it really is the correct interpretation Evans’ account.

This paper is about first-person thoughts—thoughts about oneself that are expressible through uses of first-person pronouns (for example, ‘I’). It is widely held that first-person thoughts cannot be shared. My aim is to postpone rejection of the more natural view that such thoughts about one- self can be shared. I sketch an account on which such thoughts can be shared and indicate some ways in which deciding the fate of the account will depend upon further work.

The objectives of the present paper are, firstly, to question the conception according to which propositional constituents are exhausted by the assignment of referential contents. Secondly, to argue that introducing the notion of mediational content is useful to provide a theory of meaning for expressions of a natural language. In order to achieve those objectives, I address the following issue: in what sense are mediational contents relevant to the determination of truth-conditions and to compose assertions?

A substantial revision (correction/modification) of the interpretation of Husserl's notion of a "quasi-subject without positing" presented in this contribution is to be found in "Husserl über Existenz und Existenzurteile" (2023).
Correction: On p. 10, line 6, (= p. 78, line 1, in the published version), "those of the aspects under which" must be replaced by "that component of the aspects under which".
Abstract: Which form does the propositional content take when a given speaker sincerely utters a sentence in order to assert a singular existential statement? Bernard Bolzano and Edmund Husserl, when commenting on Bolzano’s proposal, have proposed thought-provoking answers to this question. In Section 2 I sketch Bolzano’s proposed analysis. Then I briefly describe Husserl’s early conception of “logical reflection” and draw upon it to explain why Husserl, around 1900, subscribed to Bolzano’s proposal
(Section 3). Following this, I reconstruct and consider in detail
Husserl’s later discussion of that proposal and his own mature theory of
singular existential statements as manifested in a 1917/18 lecture series (Section 4). In my reconstruction, I make recourse to Husserl's idea of quasi-reference and Perry's notion of a mental file (what Husserl calls "individual notion [Eigenbegriff]" in the case of proper names).

Trabalho apresentado na SAF 2013 - XIV Semana dos anlunos da pós-graduação em filosofia da PUC-Rio, posteriormente publicado na Analógos XIV, revista dos anais do evento.
Resumo: O principal objetivo deste texto é chamar atenção para os principais problemas impostos pelo fenômeno da dinâmica dos pensamentos, mostrando também por que é importante fornecer uma boa explicação para ele. Utilizar-se-á a discussão acerca da dinâmica cognitiva feita por comentadores como David Kaplan e Gareth Evans.

This  paper  is  interested  in  the  relationship  between  language  and  reality.  The  associated metaphysical claims are never overtly expressed by the authors in the works discussed here as being in attempt to study this relationship, maybe because it is taken as a simple given. In any case, this is the attempt of this paper: to create a rough framework to evaluate this relationship at some depth. This paper looks specifically at Gareth Evans’ criticisms of Saul Kripke’s “Naming and Necessity” in  a  paper  called  “The  Causal  Theory  of  Names”. Evans  divides  his  work  into  criticisms  and foundation-laying (Section I) and then some of his own subsequent theory building (Section II). To refine the  scope of  this  argument,  the  focus  is  entirely  on Section I,  since even  this  is  a  lot of  discuss.  An important early note is that Evans uses a Millian rubric of dividing everything into what a speaker denotes and what the name itself denotes. He uses this division to construct his criticisms for theories, and while I will not explicitly use this, much of his derived criticisms stem from here.

In "Understanding Demonstratives", Gareth Evans bites the bullet regarding Rip van Winkle cases in cognitive dynamics: the fact that Rip sleeps for twenty years and completely loses track of time means he is unable to retain his original belief that "Today is a fine day". In this paper, the author argues that Evans need not bite this bullet because there are resources in his account of the cognitive dynamics involved in belief retention developed in The Varieties of Reference to successfully confront the challenge posed by the Rip van Winkle case. In particular, when we combine the two central elements of Evans's cognitive dynamics-the skill of keeping track of one's spatio-temporal location in addition to memory-it is possible to arrive at the conclusion that it is indeed possible for Rip to retain and re-express his original belief.

Es un hecho que podemos tener pensamientos acerca de objetos materiales; podemos formar pensamientos demostrativos como el expresado por la oración “Eso es fastidioso” (refiriéndonos a un objeto que estamos percibiendo). Y también es un hecho que podemos formar este pensamiento porque tenemos experiencia perceptual de cierto objeto. Esto es, podemos asumir como un hecho que tener experiencia perceptual de un objeto es condición necesaria para la formación del pensamiento demostrativo en cuestión. La pregunta que me interesa abordar es: ¿cómo un sujeto forma esta clase de pensamientos? Es decir, ¿en virtud de qué hecho la experiencia perceptual pone al sujeto en la posición adecuada para tener o formar un pensamiento de esta clase? Mi objetivo en este texto es presentar una posible respuesta a estas preguntas.

Talk, held at the GAP.5 conference "Argument und Analyse" in Bielefeld, Sept. 2003, under the title "Über den Bezug von 'ich'". Most of this material was used in chs. 2-3 of my book "Subjektivität, Intersubjektivität, Personalität" (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter 2006).
Abstract: Wittgenstein und Anscombe haben beide das „Dogma“ in Zweifel gezogen, daß der Ausdruck „ich“ in allen (Wittgenstein) bzw. auch nur in einigen (Anscombe) Fällen als Bezeichnung von etwas fungiert - sei dieses Etwas nun ein Mensch aus Fleisch und Blut, eine immaterielle Seele à la Descartes oder irgendetwas anderes. Wittgenstein ging es dabei speziell um den Gebrauch des Wortes „ich“ im Rahmen der Selbstzuschreibung eines gegenwärtigen Erlebnisses. Anscombes Argument unterliegt keiner derartigen Beschränkung. Im Anschluß an einige einleitende Bemerkungen über den Ich-Begriff nehme ich beide Gedankengänge kritisch unter die Lupe. Zu diesem Zweck präsentiere ich u.a. eine neuartige Rekonstruktion des Anscombschen Arguments für die These, daß „ich“ generell nicht bezeichnet. Abschließend plädiere ich für die These, daß „ich“ auf ein essentiell leibliches Bewußtseinssubjekt referiert.

In “Transparency, Belief, Intention” Alex Byrne argues that transparency — our ability to form beliefs about some of our intentional mental states by considering their subject-matter, rather than on the basis of special psychological evidence — involves inferring “from world to mind”. In this reply I argue that this cannot be correct. I articulate an intuitive necessary condition for a pattern of belief to count as a rule of inference, and I show that the pattern involved in transparency does not meet that condition. As a result, I conclude that transparency does not involve inference.

It is not well known that in his Göttingen period (1901-1916) Edmund Husserl developed a kind of direct reference theory, anticipating, among other things, the distinction between referential and attributive use of a definite description, which was rediscovered by Keith Donnellan in 1966 and further analysed by Saul Kripke in 1977. This paper defends the claim that Husserl's idea of the mental act given voice to in a speech act sheds new light on that distinction and particularly on cases where semantic referent and speaker's referent diverge. It is argued that when embedded in a dynamic theory of intentionality, the idea of giving-voice-to allows for a pragmatic (as opposed to a purely semantic) analysis of such cases. In section 1 an example involving a referentially used description is presented, and the view that descriptions that can be used both attributively and referentially are thus ambiguous is criticized. Section 2 is concerned with Husserl's discussion of a case where someone seems to demonstratively refer to something that he mistakes for something else. On the basis of this discussion, a dynamic conception of the intentional content (and referent) of the mental act given voice to in a speech act is developed. Section 3 applies this neo-Husserlian conception to the example described in section 1. Finally, it is shown how this conception serves to elucidate the referential/attributive distinction.

La questione animale, com’è emerso dall’articolo di Andrea Raimondi e dalle interviste ai Professori Mormino e Zucchi pubblicati su Spazio Filosofico, è un tema che nasconde dietro ad un’etichetta apparentemente semplice, molte domande etiche, morali e tanti problemi che spaziano dall’antropologia filosofica alla filosofia della mente.
Esiste secondo me un interrogativo che sottende a tutta la questione animale, ad ogni suo ambito e ad ogni suo aspetto, ovvero quello di cogliere il rapporto che si instaura tra l’uomo e l’animale. Questa ‘operazione complessa’ è però tanto ricca quante sono le sfaccettature del dibattito sull’animalismo. In questo articolo propongo di indagare se sia possibile trovare un nesso tra gli schemi che noi umani abbiamo di percepire il nostro mondo e le modalità che hanno gli animali di relazionarsi all’ambiente nel quale sono immersi. Se una correlazione è possibile, si deve capire di che genere essa sia e come essa agisca sulla nostra e sulla loro esperienza del mondo sensibile.

What capacities for discrimination must a subject possess in order to entertain singular thoughts? Evans has suggested that a subject must be able to discriminate his referent from all other entities in order to be able to do so; what he calls Russell's Principle. Evans' view has few followers, and he has been repeatedly accused of presenting no argument in its favour. In this paper, I present what I take to be Evans' argument. I suggest that he has been misinterpreted as introducing Russell's Principle for the purpose of fixing reference. Rather, he introduces it in order to ensure that our conceptual capacities have the functional complexity to allow for objective thought. I suggest that the logical types of our thought are constituted by their inferential potential and argue that, even though singular thought may be possible without the satisfaction of Russell's Principle, singular thought that forms part of an objective world view is not.

To explain fundamental aspects of human thinking like its systematicity and productivity we need an account of how thoughts – mental acts and states with propositional content – can ‘consist of parts’ with subpropositional content. Concepts as they are investigated here are nothing but (some of) these ‘parts’ of thoughts. The Representational Theory of Mind (RTM) takes concepts and thoughts to be mental representations – material bearers of content with a syntactic form and a specific content – in a ‘language of thought’. Concepts can then be understood as being literally parts of thoughts just as words are parts of sentences. In this paper I try to develop the main lines of an alternative account of concepts. According to this account – that has been hinted at by Peter Geach and Gareth Evans – concepts are mental abilities that are actualized in mental acts like judgments. I try to show that on this basis systematicity and productivity can be explained without invoking mental represetations.

A partir de una discusión de la gramática lógica de Davidson para oraciones de acción, propongo una caracterización funcional de la predicación y la referencia como estructuras semánticas. En contradicción con Davidson y apoyado por sugerencias de Strawson, Evans y Chomsky sostendré que la distinción entre oraciones de acción y otras oraciones no reside en la introducción de un nuevo tipo de objetos de referencia que permitan la aplicación de predicados especiales. Dichas oraciones, sostendré, son casos paradigmáticos de una nueva clase de predicación aplicada a los objetos a los que nos referimos cotidianamente. De acuerdo con esta nueva concepción, los fenómenos de referencia y predicación están indisolublemente asociados con patrones de inferencia y no con valores semánticos obtenidos por aplicación de secuencias de satisfacción.

To make a case for non-conceptualism, Heck (2007) turns to an apparent dichotomy between linguistic and iconic representations. According to Heck, whereas linguistic representations have conceptual content, the content of iconic representations is non-conceptual. Although we deeply sympathize with Heck’s representationalist shift, we argue that it does not tip the balance in favor of non-conceptualism. Based on the case of cartographic systems, we criticize Heck’s dichotomous distinction between linguistic and iconic representations. Firstly, we argue that, despite being non-linguistic, maps are not iconic as they are composed of semantically arbitrary elements that play different syntactic roles. Upon this, we claim that maps have a predicative structure. Secondly, we argue that maps satisfy the generality constraint and have conceptual content by having a predicative structure. Finally, based on the previous conclusions, we argue that, despite their differences, maps and sentences can logically interact with each other through heterogeneous inferences. These considerations challenge the view that conceptual content and inferential processes necessarily involve linguistic representations. They also provide a new perspective for thinking about maps, their semantics and syntax, and their interaction with linguistic systems.

Gareth Evans a déclaré que la théorie causale de la référence doit être élargie pour inclure ce qu'il appelle des « bases multiples ». Après le baptême initial, l'utilisation du nom en présence de la personne peut, dans les bonnes circonstances, être considérée comme renforçant le nom dans son référent. Pour ceux qui sont en contact direct avec la personne, la référence pour l'expression du nom est résolue au moyen d'une chaîne causale qui inclut les personnes qui l'ont connue lors du « baptême », ou en indexant la personne au nom au moment de la communication.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.27380.37763