In retrospecting ‘Two Dogmas’ I find myself overshooting the mark by twenty years. I think back to college days, 61 years ago. I majored in mathematics and was doing my honors reading in mathematical logic, a subject that had not yet penetrated the Oberlin curriculum. My new love, in the platonic sense, was Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica.

I was taken with the clear, clean incisiveness of its formulas. But this was not true of its long introduction to volume 1, nor of some of the explanatory patches of prose that were interspersed through the three volumes. In those pages and passages the distinction between sign and object, or use and mention, was badly blurred. Partly in consequence, there was vague recourse to intensional properties, or ideas, under the disarmingly technical name of propositional functions. These ill-conceived mentalistic notions paraded as the philosophical foundation for the clean-cut classes, truth functions, and quantification that would have been a far better starting point in their own right.

There are a number of semantic predicates which we intuitively employ when we talk about pictures. Pictures which illustrate episodes from the life of Jesus refer to him. An illustration of a Tasmanian Tiger in a zoological catalogue denotes the class of Tasmanian Tigers. Some of the things we say concerning pictures are true in them; e.g., it is true in Rembrandt’s ‘Changing of the Night Watch’ that a guard wears a helmet; it is false in Rembrandt’s painting that one of the guards is female; and it is neither true nor false in the painting that the guards had eggs for breakfast. Rather than talk of what is true I false in paintings, we can speak of what they depict; e.g., Rembrandt’s painting depicts a man wearing a helmet, and it does not depict a female guard. Nor does it depict what the guards had for breakfast. In order to distinguish between what is excluded by a painting’s content — e.g., the presence of a female guard — from what is just not depicted by it — e.g., what the guards had for breakfast — it is important to be able to speak of what is true or false in pictures. Such presystematic talk is both intelligible and useful. Nevertheless, there are pitfalls associated with it. The concept of truth belongs to a family of semantic concepts which also includes entailment. Are the logical consequences of propositions which are ‘true in’ a picture also ‘true in’ it? An affirmative answer to this question conflicts with intuition. That a guard wears a helmet entails that a guard wears a helmet or the moon is made of cheese. Intuitively, this latter proposition is not ‘true in’ Rembrandt’s picture. Further, propositions have infinitely many equivalent formulations. That a guard wears a helmet is equivalent to the proposition that either a guard wears a helmet and the moon is made of cheese or a guard wears a helmet and the moon is not made of cheese. Is this latter formulation of the proposition that a guard wears a helmet ‘true in’ Rembrandt’s picture? Such questions suggest that the concept of ‘true in,’ while sharing some properties of the concept of truth, needs to be distinguished from it. In addition to talk of what pictures refer to/ denote, and propositions which are true/false/neither in them, we classify some pictures by reference to their semantic properties. ]as trow’s duck-rabbit which Wittgenstein cites is an example of an ambiguous picture. Robert Stevens’ picture of a tidal pool which looks like a detailed study of part of the human anatomy is a visual pun.

Aristotle is often credited with views about practical reasoning, desire, and action collectively referred to as the theory of the practical syllogism.Some commentators are skeptical about the existence of any such general theory, but most would agree that a theory of some sort is outlined in the De Motu Animalium and that it influences Aristotle’s account of akrasia in the icomachean Ethics.

This paper will begin by describing the most important ideas in the De Motu Animalium discussion of the practical syllogism. The ideas are simple but I think that their implications and philosophical importance have not been appreciated. I will suggest that the practical syllogism is Aristotle’s model for the rational explanation of action. Other commentators have made this claim, but I think that it can be given a very precise sense. Aristotle thinks that an action can be rationally explained if the agent acts in response to the strength of the reasons that he sees for acting. The practical syllogism is an argument that expresses the reasons in favor of the action, so if the agent acts for those reasons the action is explained by the practical syllogism. The second part of the paper considers the work that the practical syllogism does in Aristotle’s account of akrasia. I will argue that in akrasia—at least in the most extreme kind of akrasia—the agent acts intentionally to satisfy a desire but the action cannot be explained by a practical syllogism. Aristotle distinguishes between explanation by the motivational strength of desires and explanation by a practical syllogism. The last part of this paper comments on David Charles’s interpretation of Aristotle’s views about desire, practical reason, and akrasia. Charles discusses the traditionally disputed questions in a provocative way, and more importantly his suggestions fit together into a complex and philosophically sophisticated reading of Aristotle. I disagree with his most important claims, but I can best explain and defend my own interpretation by contrasting it with his.

In his 1963 essay ‘Supererogation and Offence: A Conceptual Scheme for Ethics,’ Roderick Chisholm describes a category of human acts which he calls ‘offences’:

In the world of practical affairs the rights of individuals and the prerogatives of communities often lie in tension. Collectives pursue cultural aims at the expense of the minorities in their midst. Individuals assert their freedoms and deploy their wealth in ways that are inimical to the public interest. There is not one country in the world where some variation of this theme is not being played out. Recognizable communities clash with individuals, just as surely as other individuals do.

In the appendix to Psychosemantics, entitled ‘Why There Still has to be a Language of Thought,’ Jerry Fodor offers several arguments for the language of thought thesis. The LOT, as articulated by Fodor, is a thesis about propositional attitudes. It comprises the following two claims: (1) propositional attitudes are relations to meaning-bearing tokens — for example, to believe that P is to bear a certain relation to a token of a symbol which means that P; and (2) the representational tokens in question are quasi-linguistic — in particular, they have the constituent structure appropriate to a language.

Alan Hazen has claimed that Buridan’s theory of truth does not escape semantic paradox.