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The most important questions we ask are normative questions. And the most fundamental normative questions are couched in terms of reasons: What do I have reason to do? and What do I have reason to believe? Although not always explicitly about reasons, I take it that much of normative philosophy at least implicitly offers first order normative answers to such questions. But stepping back, we can ask what these questions and answers are about - what are reasons anyway? This dissertation addresses those meta-normative questions, questions about the conceptual structure, semantics, ontology and epistemology of reasons. In the inquiry to come, chapters 1 and 2 consider the conceptual structure and core semantics of reasons. I argue that all reasons-internal reasons grounded in motivational states, external reasons connected to morality, epistemic reasons for belief, whatever--share the same conceptual structure and core semantics, so they all will stand or fall together when it comes to questions of reason truths and facts. In chapters 3-5 I argue that reason discourse has realist purport because reason judgments feature cognitive and belief-like attitudes about the way the world is, normatively speaking. To vindicate normativity's realist purport would require an ontology of favoring relations flowing from considerations in the world to actions and attitudes of various agents. So in chapters 6 and 7 I consider such an ontology. Unfortunately, favoring relations do not fit into the emerging naturalized view of the world. To make matters worse, based on the kinds of reasons we accept, there are no good reasons for admitting non-natural favoring relations in to the ontology. Reasons cannot bear their own survey. As a result, this dissertation culminates in a revisionary semantics, discussed in chapter 8, whereby I suggest we all adopt a fictive stance toward propositions about any kind of reason. In the end, we can preserve reason discourse and its characteristic roles in our lives so long as we are disposed to avow irrealism about reasons in critical contexts.

Within linguistics, the dominant truth-conditional approach to semantics belongs to the Tarskian, model-theoretic tradition. Theories in this tradition offer an abstract, mathematical description of the truth conditions of natural language expressions in terms of their correspondence with the world. This thesis takes issue with existing modeltheoretic accounts of quantification on the basis that the specific abstract relations that they describe could not plausibly be models of natural language-to-world relations. Recent decades have seenmuch philosophical interest in naturalistic theories of reference and mental content. In one sense, these theories address the above concern by trying to identify something naturalistic for semantic correspondence to consist in, such as causalhistorical chains or ceteris paribus laws. In another sense, they fail to address the problem, since no account is given of either the semantic structure or the truth conditions of even the tiniest fragment of a natural language. Crucially, it is far from clear that modeltheoretic semantics, in anything like its present form, can accommodate the solutions proposed by naturalistic theories of content. If correspondence truth and naturalism are both to be retained, a new theory is needed. I begin by arguing that the class nominalism underlying model-theoretic semantics is unsuited to this naturalistic project, and propose that a variant of Armstrong’s realist metaphysic, incorporating Donald Baxter’s theory of aspects, provides the ideal ontology. I revise and extend Baxter’s theory for a more complete and precise account of the instantiation of properties and relations, and show that the theory of aspects allows for an appealing treatment of both numbers and general facts. Against the background of this realist metaphysic, and drawing on insights from naturalistic theories of mental content, I propose an original theory of mentally represented semantic structures and their truth-conditional analysis. Within this framework, I treat the core semantic phenomena of predication, negation, conjunction, and disjunction, and devote considerable attention to relations. I also develop a detailed theory of quantification, which includes a fully naturalistic account of both universal quantification and numerals.

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Praca doktorska - Uniwersytet Wrocławski. / Summary in German. Bibliography: p. 132-137.

Thèse--Universit́e de Paris. / "Bibliographie": p. [259]-270.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kent State University, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed June 17, 2009). Advisor: Frank Ryan. Keywords: Dewey, Peirce, James, Shook, non-reflective, experience, naturalism, instrumentalism. Includes bibliographical references (p. 148).

Inaug.-diss. - Rostock. / Lebenslauf. Bibliography: p. 85-94.

Thesis--Sorbonne. / Bibliographical references included in footnotes.

"Substantially the same as ... (the author's doctoral dissertation: The impact of French naturalists and psychologists on August Strindberg's plays of the 1880's and early 1890's ... (with)--additional material." / Bibliography: p. [178]-186.