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Adriano Palma (Editor) Castañeda and His Guises. Essays on the Work of Hector-Neri Castañeda Philosophische Analyse / Philosophical Analysis Philosophische Analyse / Philosophical Analysis | Ed. by Hochberg, Herbert / Hüntelmann, Rafael / Kan- zian, Christian / Schantz, Richard / Tegtmeier, Erwin series_number Castañeda and His Guises | Essays on the Work of Hector-Neri Castañeda Adriano Palma (Editor) CoopPartner imprint ISBN e-ISBN Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibli- ografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Druck und Bindung: Duck & Co, Ortsname Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Foreword The texts collected here singled out some guises in Hector-Neri Castañeda’s work. Regrettably none among the contributors selected to look at the histori- cally based parts of his views. He saw his own work as continuous with Plato, Leibniz, Kant, and Eberhard. The immediate occasion was the reunion of some of his students, discuss- ants, and opponents in a meeting at the University of Urbino. Many of the oral presentations were reworked by their authors and are now chapters of the present volume. Others, unable to be present, submitted written work. At least one of the presentations was eliminated by its author, viz. myself. The reason being that I thought it more useful to bring together some strands of Castañeda’s work with what I take to be interesting empirical developments terms of metaphysical themes. This became the 1st chapter of the present volume. J. Michael Dunn and Paul D. Eisenberg, both colleagues and friends of Hec- tor, generously gave some of their time to provide what the editor called a chorus, now the 2nd chapter. Some of the participants at Urbino had to succumb to time pressure and other commitments. Without the expertise in computer matters and everything having to do with the forms of publishing of Doctor Michele Paolini Paoletti, no volume’s contents would be graspable by anyone. To him and everyone else who gave time, en- ergy, and patience, my gratitude is hereby expressed. adriano palma, 2014 Contents Adriano Palma - H-NC and his ambiguous Guises, or, by way of introduction 1 Chorus: Hector-Neri Castañeda. A Conversation about Hector by Two of his Colleagues: J. Michael Dunn and Paul Eisenberg 15 Nevia Dolcini - A “kind of glue”: Castañeda on Fiction 19 Dale Jacquette -Practitions in Castañeda’s Deontic Logic 29 Tomis Kapitan - Castañeda: System, Substance, and Style 47 Gregory Landini - Clark’s Paradox of Castañeda’s Guises: A Brief Memoir 67 Charles McCarty - Arithmetic, Convention, Reality 85 Francesco Orilia – Metaphysical realism and Castañeda’s Minimal Transcendental Realism 99 William J. Rapaport, Michael W. Kibby – Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition: from Algorithm to Curriculum 109 Erwin Tegtmeier - Grossmann’s Descriptions and Castañeda’s Guises 153 Giuseppe Varnier – Quasi-Indexicals, Kaplanian Monsters, and Self-Consciousness 163 Alberto Voltolini - Contingent Sameness and Necessary Identity 189 Index of Names 209 Adriano Palma H-NC and his ambiguous Guises, or, by way of introduction1 Hector-Neri Castañeda� (1924-1991) was my teacher at Indiana University. The first time I went to the department in Sycamore Hall in 1981 he wasn’t there. Aspects of his personality permeated the place without the bearer of the aspects being anywhere to be found. Soon it was clear to me how powerful his absence was in shaping even the discussions around the coffee room. Later on I took classes with him, read his papers, and found them fascinating and perplexing at the same time. Here I try to explain to myself what the fascination is and what the perplexity is. The fascination is with the sweeping tone and scope of the theories. Enter- ing analytical philosophy one was told to beware of grand views, to hope at best for some idea of what scope “not” had in such and such a construction, and at least to have a clue as to why the determiner “the” if analyzed by Russell is a “paradigm of philosophy2.” Castañeda was a product of both a British and an American philosophical training; nonetheless the setting of his work was very different from everyone else. It was philosophy as a systematic enterprise, reaching every fold of a collapsed conceptual canvas in need of restoration. An intriguing form of art in its baroque details required a special method; in other words “the method adequate for investigating both the most general structures of the world one finds oneself in and the most pervasive patterns of one’s experience and thinking of that world3.” The baroque layering is visible in many passages: “In short, the philosophical search for the large patterns of the world and of experience is a complex manifold of activities that fall into one or other of the following five levels: || 1 The texts here collected are in part the contributions to the Hector’s day in Urbino Italy, in the summer of 2011, remembering the 20th anniversary of H-NC’s death. Thanks are hereby expressed to dr. V. Raspa for help in organizing the day. Other contributions came from those who could not be present. To everyone my sincere thanks. 2 Frank Plumpton Ramsey, R. B. Braithwaite (Ed.), The Foundations of mathematics and other logical essays, Routledge 2001, p. 263. 3 Hector-Neri Castañeda, “On Philosophical Method”, Noûs, 14 (1980), p. 13. The method is one among many since the stages of a philosophical construction are sym-philosophical first and then dia-philosophical and each stage may require different methods. Hector was fond of forging words that challenged the average reader. For instance the method is, for convenience, called empirical semantico-syntactical structuralism. 2 | H-NC and his ambiguous Guises, or, by way of introduction (a) protophilosophy: the methodical collection and examination of data so as to distill problems and criteria of theoretical adequacy; (b) symphilosophy, or standard theoretical philosophy; here fall the diverse theorizations in which philosophers have normally engaged in their endeavors to illuminate certain sets of data; (c) diaphilosophy, only very rarely adumbrated, which consists of the search for those structural invariances across fully developed (sym)philosophical theories; (d) hypophilosophy, the isolation of those proto-phenomena Wittgenstein spoke about, which determine the concepts that, given what we and the world are, we have actually evolved for structuring our forms of life; (e) metaphilosophy, the discussions of philosophical method, whatever the level of the problems”4. The results were giant theoretical treatises all centered on contents of thought. Contents of thought were individuated in an extremely fine grained way via their linguistic expression. The four main areas of his work are deontic logic, the theory of action, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language5. The three central themes of H-NC6’s work are the structure of morality, metaphysics, and something we would call now a theory of cognition. The key insights are the notion of practition7, the discovery and the development of Guise Theory, and the investigation of indexicality8. I turn my attention to the latter two with a brief comment on Guises and a longer one on indexicality. My interest here is to frame the questions that caught my attention in those years. || 4 Hector-Neri Castañeda, “Philosophical Method and the Theory of Predication and Identity”, Noûs, 12 (2) (May, 1978), pp. 192-193. 5 The historical interests focused on Plato, Leibniz and Kant. 6 The initials stand for the name of Hector-Neri Castañeda. 7 Practitions have in action theory and deontic reasoning the role propositions have in directly truth-evaluable contents. See Jacquette, below. 8 Note that it is guided by worries about philosophical and psychological concerns more than by the semantical theorizing dominating, e.g., Kaplan’s approach. See, e.g. H.-N. Castañeda, “He*: A study in the logic of self-consciousness”, Ratio, 8 (2) (1966), pp. 130–157.