Alvin Goldman has proposed various versions of reliabilism, trying to resolve its counter-intuitive consequences. In this paper, I critically analyze some of them, and find all of them unsatisfactory, especially in their treatment of the relationship between external world and reliability. My proposal is to incorporate an internalistic aspect into reliabilism, by revising Goldman's notion of 'normal worlds'. This notion is too relativistic to be used as a basis of epistemic justification, but adding some more conditions may make it more useful. I propose the notion of 'the most successful set of normal worlds' as a replacement, which avoids difficulties with both externalism and individualistic internalism.

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This paper deals with Frege's stipulation in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik I section 10, in which he gives way out of Julius Caesar Problem. There it seems as if he restricted the problem to the case of the truth values, so some consider Frege not wrestling with it squarely in Grundgesetze. But in the second footnote of the section he says clearly that it is possible to adopt his stipulation to the cases of any objects given us independently of the course of values. I will show that his account is correct and it is able to find out a consistency model in which both the stipulation and Quine's axiom of the existence of non-class objects presented in Mathematical Logic hold. With this result I suppose that we are able to take a good understanding for interpretation of that footnote.

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The aim of this paper is to show that some form of direct realism concerning vision is false. Section 1 defines what it is to see things directly and identifies naïve realism as the target of criticism. Section 2 criticizes naïve realism by arguing that we cannot phenomenally be conscious of three dimensional shapes of physical objects, and also explains how we see physical objects and why we are naïve realists before starting philosophical thinking. The final section concludes with some remarks about the character and limits of my argument against direct realism.

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Does interpretationism leave any place for irrationality? At first sight, it seems it does not. Since interpretation requires the interpreter to assume that the subject being interpreted is rational (the principle of charity), it seems to follow that we can understand the subject only as a rational being, or otherwise the subject will have to be taken as non-rational and not really a subject at all (the paradox of irrationality). In this paper, however, I shall argue that interpretationism can understand irrationality as irrationality through the analysis of the structure of rationality.

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Chomsky claims that linguistics will become part of biology and that truths about language can be given in terms of facts about the brain. While allowing that psycholinguistic structures may be objects of science, I argue that any account of language must involve more than descriptions of the states of individuals. This implies that many linguistic truths cannot be reduced to neurobiological facts, or even captured on the psychological level within Chomsky's framework. Chomsky's rebuttals to arguments of this sort are examined, but found wanting. This leads to anomalous monism and doubts about whether propositionally construed entities will find analogues in brain science.

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In this paper I focus on the roles of proprioception and of perception in forming the cognitive picture of ourselves as physical agents in the world. Our proprioceptive awareness is plausibly characterized in terms of its distinctive epistemic unmediatedness and constancy, and this fact may seem to support the view that the primary core of our self-conception is constituted by our proprioceptive self-awareness, not by ordinary modes of self-perception. I criticize some main arguments for this view, and suggest that the proper understanding of the significance of proprioception needs the appreciation of its intricate involvement with our perceptual bodilyawareness. I conclude with the remark that the notion of basic action should be restored on this epistemological footing.

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How do we refer to individuals? In this paper, in the first, I will make clear what "meaning" is. Then, I will argue that a kind of proper noun has no meaning, with the result that we will reach the following question: Why can we refer to individuals by proper nouns without meaning? In the end, I will put forward a theory of direct reference.

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In speech act theory, there has been a tendency to concentrate investigations on the single utterance of a sentence. In my opinion, this tendency seems to originate based on a tacit and unproven premise: namely, an illocutionary force should dwell in each single utterance. In this paper, first, I take up the texts of Austin and Searle as examples, and try to show how this premise was smuggled into the theory. Then I argue that there are cases where we do an illocutionary act not by making a single utterance, but by making a group of utterances ("conversational sequence"). Through these examinations, I conclude that the premise in question is to be replaced by an alternative one: Sometimes-or maybe fundamentally -an illocutionary force dwells in a conversational sequence.

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The fact that our Universe is fine-tuned for life is widely believed to be evidence in favor of the world-ensemble hypotheses, only if the observational selection effect is taken into account. But in Ito's recent book this type of reasoning is criticized as illusory due to the inverse gambler's fallacy, and the observational selection effect is denied its supposed theoretical value. We show that Ito's analogical examples are irrelevant and his arguments are mathematically wrong. There are actually some philosophical insights the observational selection effect would bring, concerning not only the world-ensemble cosmology but also the nature of consciousness, self, identity, and especially the causal theory of reference.

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