Content and Justification Philosophical Papers

Content and Justification presents a series of essays by Paul Boghossian on the theory of content and on its relation to the phenomenon of a priori knowledge. Part one comprises essays on the nature of rule-following and its relation to the problem of mental content; on the intelligibility of eliminativist views of the mental; on the prospects for a naturalistic reduction of mental content; and on the currently influential view that meaning is a normative notion. Part two includes three widely discussed papers on the phenomenon of self-knowledge and its compatibility with externalist conceptions of mental content. Part three concerns the classical, but ill-understood, phenomenon of knowledge that is based upon knowledge of meaning or conceptual competence. Finally, part four turns its attention from general issues about mental content to an account of a specific class of mental contents. It contains two widely discussed papers on the nature of color concepts and color properties.

Paul A. Boghossian gained his PhD from Princeton University in 1987. He is Silver Chair of Philosophy at New York University. His research interests are in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language and in epistemology. He is the author of numerous works on a variety of topics, including color, rule-following, eliminativism, naturalism, self-knowledge, a priori knowledge, analytic truth, realism, relativism, the aesthetics of music and the concept of genocide.