Content and Justification : Philosophical Papers

This volume presents a series of influential essays by Paul Boghossian on the theory of content and on its relation to the phenomenon of a priori knowledge. The essays are organized under four headings: the nature of content; content and self-knowledge; knowledge, content, and the a priori; and colour concepts.

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 colour concepts, and colour properties.