نشریه اندیشه فلسفی
پیاپی 10 (بهار 1402)

According to conciliationist (reductionist) argumentations in epistemology of disagreement, disagreement with an epistemic peer, due to epistemic symmetry, reduces the confidence in the justification. But many religious believers are not willing to take the existence of epistemic peer disagreement. They think that they have different evidence for their religious beliefs and, hence, aren’t really epistemic peers with their opponents. They present private evidence, especially religious experiences, as a symmetry breaker. For this reason, some reductionists have argued to defend the reductionist position. In this article, we examine the responses of the reductionists to this challenge. In one of these answers, it is added an “alternative explanation or story” to the conditions of epistemic peer and claimed that the true epistemic peer under full disclosure should takes into account private evidences or experiences and gives a good story or explanation about why such experiences aren’t as efficacious as the religious person might think. We show that the “alternative explanation” presented by reductionists is not readily available in the most of the religious disagreements.

An example of Rorty's confrontation with the analytical philosophy is his opposition to Davidson's attempt to propose a semantic theory based on truth. According to an anti-metaphysical approach to Truth, Rorty believes that the use of the phrase "p is true" is simply to confirm a claim that we consider ourselves or others justified in making. Although Davidson is against the metaphysical approach to truth, based on a Tarskian truth definition, he believes that a notion of truth more robust than Rorty will admit is required to propose a theory about meaning. Rorty's Wittgensteinian response to Davidson is that not only the conversation between the speaker and the interpreter is not conditional on knowing a theory of meaning based on truth, but the attempt to say something more than what we can say about truth leads us to the confusions of the metaphysical tradition. This article, referring to Davidson's writings, shows that Davidson's effort to propose a semantic theory based on truth inevitably leads him to express metaphysical interpretations.

Temporal experiences are experiences that represent the temporal aspects of the world. Phenomenologically, our temporal experiences directly and immediately belong to temporal properties. This obvious phenomenological truth leads to a paradox with the addition of other premises. Three models have been presented to explain the possibility of direct perceptual experience of temporal properties to solve this paradox. These models are the snapshot or atomic model, extensionalism, and retentionalism. The snapshot model or atomism is that perceptual experiences are only instantaneous or short-term conscious events that occur in succession, and their succession is explanatory and adequate for temporal experience. We will first describe the paradox of temporal experiences and the approach of temporal experience models, try to explain the criticisms of the atomic model and their rejection, and finally show the explanatory adequacy of the succession of atomic experiences for the temporal experience.

Tarski’s theory of truth was first introduced in “The concept of truth in formalized languages.” In this paper, we introduce Tarski’s truth theory in detail, based on the mentioned article, and make its account clear about the main questions that he faced. Also, we argue that accepting Tarski’s theory of truth entails Platonism in mathematics.

Neo-Fregean metaontology is one of the most controversial metaontologies in recent decades. Regarding this metaontology as a deflationary metaontology such as quantifier-variance or maximalism prevails nowadays. But, if we consider Frege's views and the consequent metaontology, it will be obvious that there isn’t any relation between Fregean metaontology and deflationary metaontologies. Hence, interpreting neo-Fregean metaontology in the light of Fregean metaontology categorizes it in the class of serious metaontologies. In this reading, the crucial point is that the metaontological language is the logical core of natural language rather than mere natural language. Notwithstanding that this reading is consistent, it has implications for neo-Fregean methodology, namely, that neo-Fregean metaontology's function is metaphysical - in the determination of the category of abstract objects - and epistemological - in justification of our knowledge about these objects – but not ontological.

In Speech Acts, John Searle dealt with the analysis of literal meaningful utterances, but in Expression and Meaning, he generalizes his theory to meaning and uses it to account for performing and understanding nonliteral utterances where the speaker means something other than what he is saying. Thus, Searle’s question about indirect speech acts is how a speaker might say something and mean it, but he also means something else. For this purpose, the area of directives is the most useful to Searle. The presence of decency in acts in the category of directive is Searle’s main motivation for researching indirect speech acts. Still, most examples are found in the acts in the category of commissive and not in the acts in the category of directive. At the same time, Searle’s approach does not conform to the usual explanatory paradigms; it’s somewhat like an epistemological analysis of perception. Thus, this article aims to review, analyze, and critique Searle’s approach.