Intentionality, Teleofunction, Adaptation, Normativity john.f.post@vanderbilt.edu || Home Place "From Is to Ought: Another Way" (182K) -- especially §§2-5 with regard to normativity, adaptation and proper function. Revised and expanded, 10/1/01. "Method, Madness, and Normativity" To appear in Philo, 2003 Abstract. The method in question is conceptual analysis. The madness comes of its privileging received usage over theories that would revise our concepts so as to conform to the phenomena, not the other way around. The alternatives to capture-the-concept include revisionary theory-construction as practiced not only in the sciences but in some philosophies. I present a revisionary theory of an important kind of normativity -- the normativity involved in a biological adaptation's being for this or that -- which theory, I argue, undermines the received objections to there being any such normativity objectively in the world. So too for other kinds of normativity, including the moral, insofar as the objections to their objectivity have the same form and presuppositions. "Review of Millikan, White Queen Psychology," for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 58 (1998), 233-237. "Teleofunction, Natural Selection and Counterfactuals" "Sense and Supervenience" Philo, 4 (2002), pp. 123-137 Abstract. Alleged counter-examples based on conceptual thought-experiments, including those involving sense or content, have no force against physicalist supervenience theses properly construed. This is largely because of their epistemological status and their modal status. Still, there are empirical examples that do contradict Kim-style theses, due to the latter's individualism. By contrast, non-individualist supervenience, such as "global" supervenience, remains unscathed, a possibility overlooked by Lynne Baker, as is clear from a physicalist account of sense in the case of non-human biological adaptations that are for producing things about affairs in the world. "Breakwater: The New Wave, Supervenience and Individualism" Delivered at the Symposium on Psychoneural Reduction, University of Mississippi, February 27, 1999 "'Global' Supervenient Determination: Too Permissive?" In Essays on Supervenience, ed. Elias Savellos and Ümit Yalçin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 73-100 §1. Introduction §2. Individualism and Supervenient Determination §3. Individualism and Propertyhood §4. The Minuteness Charge §5. Varieties of Globality/Locality §6. Focused Determination Review of Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays For Philosophy of Science, vol 62 (1995), 338-340. Home Place || john.f.post@vanderbilt.edu