09 APhEx num 9, anno 2014

The text offers a Critical Review of "Gli oggetti che popolano il mondo. Ontologia delle relazioni" by Maria Grazia Turri. The author critically reflects on the book by considering its methodologies, its arguments, and its relation with other books of the same type and on the same subject.

Pre-analytical insights at the guide of our linguistic practices, along with some semantic theories, suggest that the referential particles of a given language bear fully defined relations with the objects of the world. In particular, any term, be it a name or a predicate, refers only to its denotation or to the elements of its extension. Nevertheless, some philosophers argued that reference is indeterminate. According to them, denotations of names and extensions of predicates cannot be determined by any fact of the matter. In this work, two arguments supporting the inscrutability of reference and related criticisms are described. Furthermore, the main ontological, metaphysical and epistemological implications of the inscrutability of reference are addressed.

Diego Zucca’s book offers a systematic treatise of metaphysical, semantical and phenomenological aspects of perceptual experience, oriented toward the constitution of a unitary view on the subject: the outcome is a specific variety of intentionalism – a variety according to which perceptual experience is fundamentally representational and relational.In the first section of my critical notice I describe the content of the five parts of the book and I place it in the context of the contemporary philosophy of perception. In the second section I make two critical remarks: first, I argue that Zucca’s brand of relationalism is essentially informed by the role that he attributes to distal causes in the individuation of perceptual experiences, and that this does not put him in a position to address the challenges presented by disjunctivism (2.1, 2.2). Second, I argue that the responses offered by Zucca to Travis’s argument against perceptual content are not entirely satisfactory (2.3)

Many philosophers have argued that belief has an aim. This aim has been traditionally identified with truth. With such a claim these philosophers designate a specific property constitutive of belief characterizing the peculiar relation between this mental state and truth. This property would be able to distinguish beliefs from other types of mental states and to explain a series of other characteristics of beliefs such as, for example, the impossibility to believe at will and the absurdity of asserting so called Moorean sentences (such as “I believe it’s raining but it’s not raining”). In the present contribution I provide an introduction and a discussion of the thesis according to which belief has an aim. I first consider the claim that belief aims at truth. I introduce the main features ascribed to this property, I present several aspects of belief that the aim is supposed to explain and I consider the differences between this and other properties of belief concerning the relation between this mental state and truth. Then I introduce some interpretations of the thesis that belief aims at truth. Finally I outline the main lines of the debate between those who argue that the aim of belief is truth and those who argue that this aim is knowledge.

The concept of logical consequence is crucial for logic and for its philosophical construal. The aim of this work is to provide a technically accessible introduction to this concept showing the grounding intuitions and two most important formal characterizations: the tarskian approach and the approach based on the concept of proof. Then, I’ll take into account some problems connected with the logical pluralism and its possible philosophical justification.