Funds and positions in philosophy should be awarded through systems that are reliable, objective, and efficient. One question usually taken to be relevant is how many publications people have in a group of well‐respected journals. In the context of significant competition for jobs and funding, however, relying on quantity of publications creates a serious downside: the oft‐lamented demand that we publish or perish. This article offers a systematic review of the problems involved in contemporary academic philosophy, and argues that the resulting situation is bad not just for individual philosophers but also for philosophy itself: we are not working as a discipline to as high a standard as we might. The article then suggests some potential solutions, including some more detailed considerations around what seems a particularly promising option: a professional code of conduct for philosophers.
Propositional attitude sentences, such asJohn believes that snow is white, are traditionally taken to express the holding of a relation between a subject and what 'that'-clauses like 'that snow is white' denote, i.e. propositions. On the traditional account, propositions are abstract, mind-and language-independent entities. Recently, some have raised some serious worries for the traditional account and thought that we were mistaken about the kind of entities propositions are. Over the last ten years there has then been a boom of accounts of propositions in terms of (types of) mental acts (Burge 2007;Hanks 2011; Soames 2010). But Friederike Moltmann (2013;2014) has recently suggested that in accounting for attitudes we should forget about mindand language-independent entities and (types of) acts and follow Twardowski (1912) in focusing instead on attitudinal objects, which are the products of our mental life. In this paper, I will focus on some semantic problems that any product-based account seems to face. Moreover, I will show that product-based accounts may be also criticised on ontological grounds. My conclusion will be that we lack a reason to think that in accounting for propositional attitudes we should focus on the alleged products of our mental lives. Keywords products; propositional attitudes; substitutivity; denotation; Moltmann DOI:10.1002/tht3.146 Propositional attitude sentences, such as John believes that snow is white, are traditionally taken to express the holding of an attitudinal relation between a subject and what 'that'-clauses like 'that snow is white' denote, i.e. propositions. On the traditional account, propositions are abstract, mind-and language-independent entities that have truth-conditions. Recently, some have raised some serious worries for the traditional account and thought that we were mistaken about the kind of entities propositions are. Over the last ten years there has then been a boom of accounts of propositions in terms of mental acts: according to these approaches, what John believes is not a mind-and
According to sententialism, ‘Otto said that I am a fool’ expresses the holding of a relation between Otto and the sentence ‘I am a fool’. Sententialism is generally considered doomed, but I will show that a suitably developed sententialist account can surmount the many objections that have been raised. I will also show how important it is to have a fairer attitude towards sententialism. For if sententialist accounts are recognised as real options, it should also be recognised that the conclusion, drawn by many, that sentences such as the report above force us to introduce Kaplanian monsters is unwarranted.
When it comes to empty names, we seem to have reached very little consensus. Still, we all seem to agree, first, that our semantics should assign truth to (one reading of) negative singular existence statements in which an empty name occurs and, second, that names are used in such statements. The purpose of this paper is to show that ruling out that the names are mentioned is harder than it has been thought. I will present a new metalinguistic account for negative singular existence statements in which an empty name occurs, and I will show that the account can deal both with the objections to the traditional metalinguistic account and with other objections that seem to target my new proposal.
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