Philosophical critics standardly read behaviorism as a program for defining the concepts of folk psychology in equivalent behavioral terms. This is a misreading. Behaviorism is a program for getting rid of ill-defined mentalistic terms in favor of better defined behavioral idiom. In short, it is a program not for conceptual analysis but for verbal reform. Therefore, criticizing behaviorists for failing to define mentalistic concepts is like criticizing opponents of the Spanish Inquisition for failing to define witchcraft.

There are many reasons to assume that the contents expressible by declarative sentences are generally truth-evaluable. This assumption of global truth-evaluability, however, appears to conflict with the view that the contents of some sentences do not admit of truth or falsehood for lack of objectivity of their subject matter. Could there be a notion of truth on which the truth-evaluability of a content does not rule out the non-objectivity of its subject matter?In this paper, I discuss Crispin Wright's criterion of (...) Cognitive Command as a criterion for objectivity. This criterion faces the Problem of A Priori Error. I reject Wright's response to that problem and propose to solve the problem by relativising truth. This move allows for the possibility of contents that are truth-evaluable yet non-objective. (shrink)

It is controversial whether a property can both be dispositional and causally efficacious. Mackie and Armstrong hold that dispositions can be causes, Prior, Pargetter and Jackson argue that they cannot. However, all parties of the debate agree on two ideas: 1) The dispositional properties at issue are macroscopic, and in principle reducible to a microscopic reduction base. 2) Only the microphysical base properties are causally efficacious. The disagreement is about whether the macroscopic disposition inherits this efficacy by being identical to (...) its reduction base (Armstrong) or is epiphenomenal because not identical to its reduction base (Prior, Pargetter and Jackson). I challenge thesis 2, which seems plausible only if one conflates two senses of the word “basis” that can be clearly distinguished thanks to the predicate/property distinction. I show that the categorical basis of a disposition need not be its microscopic reduction basis. This allows me to defend the idea that macroscopic dispositional properties can be distinct from their microscopic base properties and nevertheless efficacious. Part of the importance of this topic lies in its bearing on the nature of mental properties: If I am correct about macroscopic dispositions in general, it becomes plausible to argue that mental properties of a subject are dispositional properties which are nevertheless causally efficacious for the subject's actions. (shrink)

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