The "tree in the quad" by Caldwell Hall. © Michael Hobbs, used with permission.
Suppose we travel to the Oracle to settle whether there is an external world of material objects. There, we receive a disheartening report: our experiences are caused not by material objects, but rather by a malicious demon intent on deceiving us.. This testimony would surprise and dismay us. We would say things like “Tables don’t really exist!” and “We don’t have bodies after all!”
But this initial shock would pass. And after several minutes, we would go back to saying things like “There is an apple in the kitchen” or “The bus arrives soon” just as we always had. This is because we would still have to address the concerns of ordinary life.
This raises a puzzle. Ordinarily, when we receive evidence that we think contravenes our judgment that P, we abandon our judgment that P. But in the above thought experiment, we revert back to our judgments about objects.
Why? One might think that we are irrationally ignoring the evidence, or that our object terms have changed meanings, or that we are merely pretending that objects exist. But what the puzzle really shows, I argue, is that our object terms do not have the semantic role of referring to items in the mind-independent external world. I defend a version of idealism---edenic idealism---on which object terms refer to items in the manifest world presented in experience. I show how edenic idealism avoids the worries besetting other idealist systems.
Similar puzzles arise in many areas of our discourse. In my research, I identify forms of language that are not threatened by empirical evidence or theoretical arguments in ways that we typically expect. In each case, I argue that our mistaken epistemological assumptions are the result of mistaken semantic assumptions about our ordinary linguistic expressions. Examples I consider include judgments about ordinary objects, laws of nature, properties, causation, existence, and grounding.
But this initial shock would pass. And after several minutes, we would go back to saying things like “There is an apple in the kitchen” or “The bus arrives soon” just as we always had. This is because we would still have to address the concerns of ordinary life.
This raises a puzzle. Ordinarily, when we receive evidence that we think contravenes our judgment that P, we abandon our judgment that P. But in the above thought experiment, we revert back to our judgments about objects.
Why? One might think that we are irrationally ignoring the evidence, or that our object terms have changed meanings, or that we are merely pretending that objects exist. But what the puzzle really shows, I argue, is that our object terms do not have the semantic role of referring to items in the mind-independent external world. I defend a version of idealism---edenic idealism---on which object terms refer to items in the manifest world presented in experience. I show how edenic idealism avoids the worries besetting other idealist systems.
Similar puzzles arise in many areas of our discourse. In my research, I identify forms of language that are not threatened by empirical evidence or theoretical arguments in ways that we typically expect. In each case, I argue that our mistaken epistemological assumptions are the result of mistaken semantic assumptions about our ordinary linguistic expressions. Examples I consider include judgments about ordinary objects, laws of nature, properties, causation, existence, and grounding.