Kagaku tetsugaku Vol. 49(2016) No. 1
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

    The causal theory of action, which has been the standard theory of action, presupposes that reasons for action are an agentʼs mental attitudes (e.g. beliefs and desires) and claims that they are the cause of the action. However, in this paper I argue that reasons for action are not the agentʼs mental attitudes but their object (e.g. facts, states of affairs, or propositions), inspired by the idea that reasons must be capable of justifying the action as well as explaining it, and that what has this normative force is not mental items, but something objective. I also solve a problem that derives from cases in which the agent believes things falsely.

    This paper aims to analyze the content expressed by a belief report, which is a sort of assertions, in terms of Conceptual Role Semantics (CRS). CRS focuses on normative aspects of assertions called “conceptual roles.” According to CRS, the conceptual role of an assertion, which is a pair of entitlement and commitment of the assertion, is nothing but its semantic content. Since CRS is holistic, this paper focuses on the relevant notion of whole. In this paper, the individualistic notion of whole (narrow content theory) and the social notion of whole (wide content theory) are compared by analyzing belief reports. I will argue that the wide content theory is a better alternative than narrow content theory.

    In our daily lives, we assign some value to various things. For example, we say, ‘this picture is dynamic', ‘his clothes are unfashionable' and ‘she is brave'. In these cases, we experience the value of these things. In this study, I examine the nature of such value experiences. I argue that some value experiences are cognitively penetrated perceptual experiences and that what penetrates into them is emotion. In other words, owing to the evaluative component of emotion, which affects perceptual systems, perceptual experiences can represent things as having some value to us. Furthermore, I propose that this cognitive penetration model of value experience supports the particularistic view of evaluative judgement.

    Gentzen remarked that one of the aims of his 1935/36 consistency proofs for first-order arithmetic was to give a “finitist” interpretation for the implication-formulas in first-order arithmetic. He imposed the following requirement on such an interpretation: a “finitist” interpretation for the implication-formulas must be able to avoid the circularity of implication that was urged by himself. However, Gentzen did not present his “finitist” interpretation explicitly. Moreover, he gave no argument for its non-circularity. In this paper, first we formulate an interpretation for the implication-formulas in first-order arithmetic by using Gentzen’s 1935 consistency proof. Next, we argue that this interpretation avoids the circularity urged by Gentzen.

    “The Full Picture of Frege’s Philosophy” (Keiso Shobo, 2012) by Kazuyuki Nomoto gives a detailed account of Gottlob Frege’s life devoted to a failed attempt to develop mathematics formally and entirely from scratch based upon his logicism and his semantical understanding of mathematical entities. In the present paper, I review the book and recommend it as a challenging and inspiring book to anyone who wishes to understand the modern meaning of Frege’s philosophy.