Publications

Formal methods for representing the characteristic features of organic development and growth make it possible to map the large-scale teleological structure of organic activity. This provides a basis for semantically evaluating, or providing a theory of meaning for, talk of organic activity as purposive. For the processes of organic generation and growth are subjunctively robust under a variety of influences characteristic for the kind or species in question, and these subjunctive conditions can be displayed in a two-dimensional array. After motivating and introducing this array, I use its two dimensions to partially account for features of the purposiveness characterizing two sets of exemplars of the plant and animal kingdoms: fern and cacti, and cheetah and gazelle. The result is a formal framework for interpreting talk of organic activity as purposive, able to be adapted to a range of research traditions in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of biology. 

Recent and ongoing research on human reasoning, both in philosophy and in the sciences, foregrounds the significance of the social practice of argumentation as a basis for human rationality (recent booklength treatments include Dutilh Novaes 2021, Koreň 2021, Mercier and Sperber 2018, Rouse 2015 and Manuscript, and Tomasello 2014 and 2019). In this essay, I approach this research from two angles: one on the foundation of social practices in mental states of shared intentionality, and the other on the phenomenon of human cognition qua discursive. In doing so, I illustrate that the study of modal logic offers the possibility of deepening this research.

I present a planning semantics sufficient to model the semantic functions of two modal operators:  we shall and we ought.  Both operators shift the context of evaluation for a sentence from a mind-world interpretation, specified in terms of possible worlds, to a world-mind interpretation specified in terms of multi-perspectival plans of action ranging across the membership of a community.  This provides a tidy way of representing the Kantian thought, which Wilfrid Sellars took himself to be spelling out, that instrumental reason and the deontic or moral frame of mind are alike species of a genus of practical rationality, and that both involve considering how to act from different points of view.  It turns out, however, that in order to model the deontic modalities as having a strong and a weak force, it is necessary to distinguish the deontic “ought” from the intentional “shall” in ways that Sellars was not sufficiently sensitive to.  For deontic world-mind intentionality requires a capacity to choose a course of action under a single-minded attitude, and with this notion of single-mindedness the distinction between the strong modal force of ought and the weak force of may can be drawn.  Doing so pays dividends, for on this basis it is possible to account for a central tenet of Kant’s view of practical reason.  This notion of single-mindedness, embedded in a planning semantics with the right formal structure, can explain how a course of action arrived at on the basis of an instrumental practical syllogism—and so expressed with a claim about what one shall do on the basis of what one has reasoned—can also count as an exercise of deontic cognition in the recognition of what reason prescribes one ought to do.  The ability to give such a tidy explanation of the unified character of rational world-mind intentionality, as manifest in instrumental reason and moral cognition, illustrates both the importance of formal methods in philosophical speculation, and the ingenuity and insight that enlivened the philosophies of Kant and Sellars.

This essay uses an examination of Sellars’ account of practical rationality – and, in particular, of the relationship between deontic judgment and shared intentionality – as a basis for framing a view of linguistic meaning (and by analogy human cognition) that includes distinct semantic mechanisms accounting for the representational intentionality of description, the motor intentionality of agency, and the intralinguistic intentionality of reflexive cognition. The semantic resources of model theory are used to account for the two world-regarding varieties of meaning, and those of proof theory are used to account for reflexive intralinguistic meaning. Model theory and proof theory thereby afford a framework for reconstructing the pre-Carnapian notions of denotation and connotation as two compatible dimensions of linguistic meaning, permuted through an understanding of cognition as involving representational, agentive, and reflexive/self-conscious moments – analogous to the three moments of the reflex arc of neural activity, and the transcendental ideas of the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. In the process of articulating the view, I argue that our rational responsiveness to the idea of the Good can be accounted for without supposing that we represent the Good in the way we represent the environment and our places in it. 

Despite increasing interest in shared intentionality in both philosophy and the sciences over the last three decades, there has been little comparison of philosophical with empirical accounts of the phenomenon. At the same time, both philosophical and scientific investigations into shared intentionality as a ground of our cognition have developed into widespread research programs during this period. This has laid the groundwork for a productive conversation, across the sciences and humanities, about the nature of human cognition qua discursive or rational. In this essay, I map some of the conceptual terrain such a conversation would cover, and I consider some of the extant efforts to build explanatory bridges across research and conversational contexts—using the resources of one domain of understanding to help structure our understanding of another—to the benefit of both philosophical and scientific approaches to the study of human cognition.

I use a distinction between single-minded and indifferent choice attitudes, modeled across maximally determinate plans of action, as a basis for interpreting deontic claims – about what ought, ought not, and may be done – as expressing a mode of relation between mind and world that gives voice to the exercise of practical rationality. At the same time, I use maximally determinate possible worlds to model descriptive claims in order to understand them as involving a mode of relation between mind and world that manifests our theoretical rationality. The result is of interest to both linguists looking for a formal treatment of deontic modality that captures the role prescriptive mental states play in our lives, and philosophers interested in substantive questions about action-guiding and representational mental states as exercises of practical and theoretical rationality.

This article compares two recent expressivist proposals for the deontic modalities: one advanced in proof theory, and the other in model theory. Questions of adequacy are raised for the proof-theoretic proposal, which either do not arise or can be answered by the model-theoretic proposal. At the end of the article, it is proposed that proof theory and model theory may offer complementary, rather than competing, accounts of meaning – the former concerned with intralinguistic relations, and the latter with language-world relations, analogous to the pre-Carnapian distinction between connotation and denotation.

Despite growing appreciation in recent decades of the importance of shared intentional mental states as a foundation for everything from divergences in primate evolution, to the institution of communal norms, to trends in the development of modernity as a socio-political phenomenon, we lack an adequate understanding of the relationship between individual and shared intentionality.  At the same time, it is widely appreciated that deontic reasoning concerning what ought, may, and ought not be done is, like reasoning about our intentions, an exercise of practical rationality.  Taking advantage of this fact, I use a plan-theoretic semantics for the deontic modalities as a basis for understanding individual and shared intentions.  This results in a view that accords well with what we currently have reason to believe about the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of norm psychology and shared intentionality in human beings, and where original intentionality can be understood in terms of the shared intentionality of a community.

Discursive cognition of the sort that accompanies the grasp of a natural language involves an ability to self-govern by framing and following rules concerning what reason prescribes.  In this essay I argue that the formal features of a planning semantics for the deontic and intentional modalities suggest a picture on which shared intentional mental states are a more primitive kind of cognition than that which accompanies the ability to frame and follow a rule, so that deontic cognition—and the autonomous rationality attending the ability to speak a natural language—might be understood as an evolutionary development out of the capacity to share intentions.  In the course of defending this picture, I argue that it is supported by work in social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and primatology concerning the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of norm psychology and shared intentionality in human beings.

This essay contextualizes the contributions to the volume by 1) considering them against the background of recent developments in philosophy and the sciences focused on understanding the social foundations of human cognition, and 2) situating this work within a line of intellectual development in the history of philosophy centered on understanding human beings as norm-governed rational animals.

Inquiry into the metaphysics of essence tends to be pursued in a realist and model-theoretic spirit, in the sense that metaphysical vocabulary is used in a metalanguage to model truth conditions for the object-language use of essentialist vocabulary.  This essay adapts recent developments in proof-theoretic semantics to provide a nominalist analysis for a variety of essentialist vocabularies.  A metalanguage employing explanatory inferences is used to individuate introduction and elimination rules for atomic sentences.  The object-language assertion of sentences concerning essences are then interpreted as devices for marking off structural features of the explanatory inferences that, under a given interpretation, constitute the contents of the atoms of the language.  On this proposal object-language essentialist vocabulary is mentioned in a proof-theoretic metalanguage that uses a vocabulary of explanation. The result is a nominalist interpretation of essence as a modality, understood in the grammatical sense as a modification of the copula, and a view of metaphysical inquiry that is closely connected to the explanatory commitments present in first-order inquiry into things like sets, chemicals, and organisms. 

This essay is part of a larger project aimed at making sense of rational thought and agency as part of the natural world.  It provides a semantic framework for thinking about the contents of: 1) descriptive thoughts and sentences having a representational or mind-to-world direction of fit, and which manifest our capacity for theoretical rationality; and 2) prescriptive and intentional sentences having an expressive or world-to-mind direction of fit, and which manifest our capacity for practical rationality.  I use a modified version of Allan Gibbard’s hyperstate semantics, employing both maximally determinate possible worlds and maximally determinate plans of action, as a basis for providing a unified understanding of moral judgments and expressions of individual and collective intentionality – they one and all give voice to our ability as rational agents to adopt the perspectives of various individuals within a community and consider how we would behave were we in their positions.  In the course of spelling out the view I draw on and criticize ideas that Wilfrid Sellars advanced in the middle of the 20th century, while employing the tools of contemporary modal logic and model-theoretic semantics to give perspicuous formulation to his thought that the moral judgment ‘one ought to do A’ should be understood in terms of the collective intention ‘we shall do A’, where the pronoun denotes the unrestricted class of rational agents and the ‘ought’ is in some sense unconditionally binding.

In this paper I develop Paul Redding’s suggestion that Peircean abduction and Hegel’s discussion of the syllogism can be seen as a working out of Kant’s treatment of the reflecting power of judgment, particularly concerning its role in conceptual change.  After some historical background I regiment a use of singular terms, kind terms, and predicates across Hegel’s three syllogistic figures and reconstruct an account of comprehension and extension for this system suggested by Peirce.  In doing so I show that reasoning according to the ampliative syllogistic figures affects the content of these three classes of terms in precise ways.   I close with a treatment of inference by analogy (associated by Hegel with the third syllogistic figure) as an exercise of reflection, and I discuss two cases in the history of science, one in astronomy and the other in biology, where a reflective exercise associated with analogical inference revised our understanding of the domain in question.  

This essay addresses one of the open questions of proof-theoretic semantics:  how to understand the semantic values of atomic sentences.  I embed a revised version of the explanatory proof system of Millson and Straßer (2019) into the proof-theoretic semantics of Francez (2015) and show how to specify (part of) the intended interpretation of atomic sentences on the basis of their occurrences in the premises and conclusions of inferences to and from best explanations.

Many philosophers working today on the normativity of language have concluded that linguistic activity is not a matter of rule following.  These conversations have been framed by a conception of linguistic normativity with roots in Wittgenstein and Kripke.  In this paper I use conceptual resources developed by the classical American pragmatists and their descendants to argue that punctate linguistic acts are governed by rules in a sense that has been neglected in the recent literature on the normativity of language.  In the course of arguing for this conclusion I defend a Kantian conception of rationality as rule-obeying activity, and I argue that this conception is compatible with a naturalistic understanding of ourselves as rational beings governed by rules of thought and action.

Beginning from Hegel's notion of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) as a mode of consciousness governed by the norms of a historical community, this essay examines the role of education in shaping contemporary communities of autonomous people.  It does so by defending a version of the idea that an educator has, among her other tasks, the role of helping her students appreciate the values that are shared across her community.  In the course of the examination I relate this idea to trends in the European Enlightenment, and I draw on research concerning political polarization in Europe and North America today and its impact on the academy.  In the process I argue that the modern university educator has the task of cultivating in her students an attitude of critical inquiry whose results are not coerced by the social conditions under which that inquiry takes place, and I offer some pedagogical proposals for the university educator facing the situation we are today.

At the close of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Richard Rorty lays out a contrast between what he calls 'systematic' and 'edifying' philosophical anthropologies.  Whereas the systematic philosopher aims to speak for the ages, the edifying philosopher addresses herself to issues of her day, often by way of shattering conventional idols.  Rorty sees these two approaches as mutually exclusive.  The aim of this paper is to defend a conception of philosophy as both systematic and edifying in the relevant senses.  I first respond to Rorty's argument that Wilfrid Sellars' account of picturing, as an isomorphic relation between the world and states of the central nervous system, involves an illicit 'mind as mirror' metaphor.  I then lay out some of the philosophical anthropology that motivates Sellars' account of picturing, and I connect this anthropology to philosophical and scientific work undertaken in Europe and America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  On this basis I argue that we are left with a (systematic) project handed down to us by earlier generations, and that in taking up this project we are in the (edifying) business of creating new ways of thinking about ourselves as part of the natural world. 

Reflecting on the months leading up to and following the 2016 United States presidential election, in an essay published in January of 2017 I argued that the left/right dichotomy of the Democrats and the Republicans was no longer carving at a joint of American politics (Stovall, 2017).  Instead, it seemed a more salient political division in the U.S. was that between what I called the urban globalists and the non-urban nationalists.  This essay situates the apparent conflict between urban globalism and non-urban nationalism in the context of a development in European self-understanding owed to German idealism.  I will articulate this self-understanding by relating it to the period of the European Enlightenment, and in the process I will argue that a theory of collective intentions may point the way toward a more thorough understanding of the phenomena that lie behind the growing opposition between nationalist and globalist tendencies in Europe and the United States today. 

An adequate semantics for generic sentences must stake out positions across a range of contested territory in philosophy and linguistics. For this reason the study of generic sentences is a venue for investigating different frameworks for understanding human rationality as manifested in linguistic phenomena such as quantification, classification of individuals under kinds, defeasible reasoning, and intensionality. Despite the wide variety of semantic theories developed for generic sentences, to date these theories have been almost universally model-theoretic and representational. This essay outlines a range of proof-theoretic analyses for characterizing generics. Particular attention is given to an expressivist proof-theory that can be traced to 1) work on logical syntax that Carnap undertook prior to his turn toward truth-conditional model theory in the late 1930s, and 2) research on sequent calculi and natural deduction systems that originate in work from Gentzen and Prawitz.

For over a century there has been a protracted effort in American philosophy to use Darwinian explanatory resources in order to make certain leading ideas in German idealism naturalistically intelligible.  I trace some of the nineteenth and twentieth century contours of this effort.  In doing so I outline an understanding of ourselves as norm-laden persons in a natural world.  As a consequence, philosophical inquiry—understood in C.S. Peirce’s sense as the practice of the ‘normative sciences’ of aesthetics, logic, and ethics—can be understood as the self-conscious and rational exercise of natural and socially-conditioned capacities to sense, think, and act.  This leaves us with a project, by no means completed, to frame categories through which to understand the socio-historical development of the notions of beauty, truth, and goodness as a process continuous with the natural evolution of the nervous system in its sensory, central, and motor moments. 

In this paper I argue that Darwin's On the Origin of Species can be interpreted as the culmination of an extended exercise of what Kant called ‘the reflecting power of judgment’ that issued in a form of reasoning that Hegel associates with inference by analogy and that Peirce associates with hypothesis and later assimilates to abduction.  After some exegetical and rationally reconstructive work, I support this reading by 1) showing that Darwin’s theory of natural selection gave us a way of understanding the purposive character of organic generation and growth that does not rely on an analogy with intentional agency, and 2) outlining some of the uses to which this new understanding was put in reasoning about mind and society by American intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century.  In the process I hope to shed some light on the relationship between mechanistic and purposive explanation in judgments of nature. 

I provide an analysis of Hegel's interpretation of the faith exemplified in Abraham's journey to Mt. Moriah to sacrifice his son.  I do so by looking at changes in Hegel's discussion of this episode in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion that were given over the last decade of his career.  In the process of tracing the contours of the development of Hegel's thinking on this issue I argue that his social philosophy, on which persons are first and foremost creatures of rational self-determination, is informed by his understanding of logic and metaphysics, and I suggest some of the rationalist and romantic elements animating Hegel's thought remain viable today.

This paper articulates an Aristotelian theory of professional virtue and provides an application of that theory to the subject of engineering ethics.  The leading idea is that Aristotle's analysis of the definitive function of human beings, and of the virtues humans require to fulfill that function, can serve as a model for an analysis of the definitive function or social role of a profession, and thus of the virtues professionals must exhibit to fulfill that role.  In the course of laying out my account I argue that the virtuous professional is the successful professional, just as the virtuous life is the happy life for Aristotle.  I close by suggesting that a virtue ethics approach toward professional ethics can enrich the pedagogy of professional ethics courses and help foster a sense of pride and responsibility in young professionals.

This paper addresses a reading of Hegel's metaphysics made by Tom Rockmore in Hegel, Idealism, and Analytic Philosophy, and in doing so offers an alternative.  Whereas Rockmore sees Hegel's project as metaphysically anti-realist, and so squarely at odds with most contemporary appropriations of his work, I argue that metaphysical realism is a commitment Hegel requires in order to overcome the Kantian reliance on an unknowable thing-in-itself.  This metaphysically realist reading of Hegel clarifies some of the more puzzling sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and it offers insight into the structure of Hegel's philosophy writ large, particularly concerning the relationship between the Phenomenology's closing discussion of Absolute Knowing and Hegel's views on logic, the natural world, and society.