D.Davidson argued that shared conventions learned in advance are not essential for the success of communication. In this paper, holding the validity of his contention in suspense, I argue that linguistic conventions play essential roles when communication fails. In everyday communication, when discrepancies are detected between what the speaker intended to inform the hearer and what the hearer actually understood, it becomes necessary to determine whether the speaker or the hearer caused the communication failure. For in everyday communication, the hearer often changes her position based on her misunderstanding about the intention of the speaker, and it is sometimes too late when the hearer realizes the speaker's true intention. In such cases, it is necessary to determine who is responsible for the hearer's loss. What the speaker said, which is determined by linguistic conventions, arbitrates the conflict between them. From the fact that shared conventions mainly relate to the evaluation aspect of communication, it follows that the speaker and the hearer need not learn shared linguistic conventions in advance of the conversation, and have only to learn them later, when failures are detected among past communication.

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    In Categories and On Interpretation, Aristotle develops his view on the relation between language and the real world. However, there exist in Japanese words conflicting with the idea. This paper argues that each of the four formal classes of lexically meaningful elements of Japanese defined on their combinability with the nominative case and the tense markers consistently corresponds to the divisions of reality, and shows that the relation of words to the world cannot be predicted from their use in a sentence. Under this analysis, Aristotle's idea, which is based on the “omoma-rhema” distinction, from which the universal “noun-verb” distinction originates, is thrown into a question

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    The Somatic Marker Hypothesis (SMH) proposed by A. R. Damasio has brought forward a new framework for understanding our decision-making based on the latest findings of neuroscience, and holds that emotion is an essential factor in any decision-making. However, the “Iowa Gambling Task” (IGT), which is the evidence to confirm the hypothesis, has unclear points about how to interpret its results. The present paper makes clear the interpretative problem of the IGT results, suggests some additional tasks to solve the problem, and then, clarifies the contents of SMH.

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    The Blinking Qualia Argument is the argument presented in Mizumoto (2006), which is to establish that zombies are impossible a priori. In this paper I will defend the argument from the actual and possible criticisms. Since such criticisms mainly focus on the premise “If qualia blinks, the subject can notice the qualia blinking,” I will give arguments to specifically defend that premise. This will bring into light the critic's misunderstandings on the argument, and more generally, typical misunderstandings surrounding the debates over the possibility of zombies, concerning the very concept of qualia.

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    This paper is concerned with a well-known problem concerning the retention of propositional knowledge. Although most of what we currently believe ourselves to know originates in the past, we usually do not know how we originally acquired that knowledge. But then, on what grounds can we still know it? In this paper, I outline two different types of approaches to the problem in light of notable epistemic theories, and then examine difficulties faced by them.

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    Modal realism is an ontological claim according to which there exist many possible worlds just like our actual world. Since it is so hard to believe, modal realism has only a few advocates. However, it is well known that alternative theories have serious problems. It is one of the central issues of metaphysics to find a persuasive way to reject modal realism.
    In this paper, I will suggest that it could be accomplished with help of metaontology-one of the topics of metaphysics which has recently discussed intensely. I will show how we could argue against modal realism from the metaontological point of view.

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    This proposal for Philosophy of Science Society Japan and its members presents recommendations toward improvement of logic education, outline of logic curriculum to be shared among community, and requisite components of logical skills and knowledge for philosophers of each field. It also provides information on the past workshops on logic education by PSSJ as well as a summary of ASL guideline and ASL inquiry on logic education (1995).

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