This book is about what happens when two people meet. Its main aim is to present an account of intersubjectivity. Most contemporary explanations of intersubjectivity fall into two main categories... Show moreThis book is about what happens when two people meet. Its main aim is to present an account of intersubjectivity. Most contemporary explanations of intersubjectivity fall into two main categories: theory theory and simulation theory. This book seeks to undermine the picture of intersubjectivity taken for granted by these accounts, and instead shows what social sense-making looks like from a pragmatic point of view. It proposes that intersubjectivity is enabled through a large range of second-person practices: (i) embodied practices allow us to employ various innate or early developing capacities that constitute a base-line for social understanding, (ii) embedded practices enable us to understand others within a broader social and pragmatic context, and (iii) narrative practices provide us with stories about self and other in order to further fine-tune and sophisticate our intersubjective interactions. Show less
The main question that I address in my thesis is how we can best conceive the contrast between a priori and empirical truths. My response is realist and naturalist in character: I suggest that the... Show moreThe main question that I address in my thesis is how we can best conceive the contrast between a priori and empirical truths. My response is realist and naturalist in character: I suggest that the essential feature of a priori truths is that they consist in the obtaining of some realistically understood conditions in the domain of representations within human heads, rather than in the obtaining of those conditions that they typically purport to be about. This representationist constual cannot be reconciled with the received referentialist understanding of truth. Accordingly, my thesis can be seen as a case against standard referentialism about truth. After a detailed exposition and appropriate generalisation of Benacerraf__s dilemma about mathematical truth, I argue for two major claims. First, I demonstrate that among the most striking characteristics of our paradigm a priori beliefs about causally inert entities there are some, which cannot be suitably explained from a referentialist perspective, so that perspective must be wrong. Second, I argue that if we adopt an alternative, use-theoretic notion of truth, then the suggested representationist construal of apriority can meet all major explanatory adequacy conditions, and thus qualifies as a viable characterisation of the subject. Show less
