Academic literature on the topic 'Deflationism about representation'

How can we distinguish between quasi-realist expressivism and normative realism? The most promising answer to this question is the “explanation” explanation proposed by Dreier (2004), Simpson (2018), and others: the two views might agree in their claims about truth and objectivity, or even in their attributions of semantic content to normative sentences, but they disagree about how to explain normative meaning. Realists explain meaning by invoking normative facts and properties, or representational relations between normative language and the world, the thought goes, while expressivists appeal instead to desire-like mental states in their explanations of meaning. However, I argue that, if we adopt a deflationary approach to representation and other related notions, there need be no such explanatory divide between expressivism and anything recognizable as a plausible notion of normative realism. Any alleged explanatory criterion for realism will either be incompatible with deflationism, or it will fail to capture some standard versions of normative realism. I conclude that, in a deflationary framework, expressivism is compatible with genuine realism.

The present dissertation analyses the relationship between the concept of scientific representation and the concept of structure. In particular, it aims at laying bare if and to what extent the concept of structure could be fruitfully integrated into the philosophical analysis of scientific representation.

The radically enactive, embodied view of cognition (REC) holds that cognition is not always and everywhere grounded in the manipulation of contentful representations. Arguments for REC have assumed that its opponents defend a substantive notion of representation—a notion that entails the existence of content-carrying mental states. This paper considers the prospects of representationalism of a different stripe—one that prefers deflated notions representation. For example, deflationists hold that talk of mental representations might just be a kind of convenient labeling that does not commit theorists to any substantive claims about the explanatory work done by psychosemantic properties. Taking the deflationary option thus undercuts the crucial motivation for positing mental representations in the first place. This chapter argues that, should the deflationist arguments prove warranted, they provide reason to hold that some forms of cognition are contentless, à la REC.

This chapter explores what is at stake in debates about expressivism and pragmatism. The background is that deflationism about truth and other semantic terms makes it difficult to make sense of old oppositions between realism on the one hand and expressivism or pragmatism on the other. The chapter sees the issue in terms of a desire for naturalistic explanation, or ‘perspicuous representation’ of what we are doing with various parts of discourse and how different elements in discourse contribute variously to its structure. Drawing on work by Jonathan Bennett and Donald Davidson, it sketches an approach to understanding the arrival of fully-fledged linguistic capacities, in terms of the practices and doings that they make possible.

“The True” is a central norm of journalism that cannot be reduced to something else: opinion, consensus, social force, power, or demographic identity. There are no “alternative” facts, though there are alternative interpretations of facts. The evolution of social media platforms has made collective pursuit of the ideal of “The True” more difficult and complex in our time. Following Frege, the chapter argues that journalists should nevertheless pursue the norm of “The True” as a central, irreducible, and irreplaceable norm. It surveys debates over “The True” from Frege through the pragmatists, social constructivists, deconstructionists, deflationists. In the end, we side with those who refuse to eliminate “The True”: Frege, Wittgenstein, Quine, Putnam, Diamond and others. Nevertheless we should be realistic about the struggle involved in unfolding and revealing it. The struggle for appropriate representation, acknowledgement of “The True,” is a central target of journalism, as it is also in everyday life.