This paper argues that individual rational judgment, of the kind required for rational justification in empirical knowledge or morals, is in fundamental part socially and historically based, although this is consistent with realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and with strict objectivity about basic moral principles. To judge fully rationally that one judges, and thus to justify one’s judgment rationally, requires recognizing one’s inherent fallibility and hence our mutual interdependence for assessing our own and each others’ judgments and their justification. This provides a pragmatic account of rational justification which dispatches the distinction between “rational” and “historical” knowledge.

The most important challenge to the deflationary views of truth is the success argument. Kitcher defends this argument by demanding that a proper account of successful action should explain why one and the same action can be not only psychologically pertinent but also effectively pertinent, and by arguing that correspondence truth is required to meet this explanatory demand. In this paper, I argue that a proper account of successful action should explain why an agent’s action is an appropriate means to attain his goal, and that a deflationist can meet Kitcher’s explanatory demand by this appropriate-means requirement.

Concept-individuating possession conditions constitute one of the fundamental, albeit rather unattended, polemical territories between Fregean and anti-individualistic standpoints. In this paper, I outline a compatibilist theory of cognitive value that encompasses both anti-individualistic and individualistic possession conditions. I argue that this general approach to the compatibility of Fregean and anti-individualistic accounts of concept possession suffices to call into question the claims that cognitive value must have deference and transparency among its fundamental features.

This paper suggests that reference to phenomenal qualities is best understood as involving iconicity, that is, a passage from sign-vehicle to object that exploits a similarity between the two. This contrasts with a version of the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ that takes indexicality to be central. However, since it is doubtful that phenomenal qualities are capable of causally interacting with anything, indexical reference seems inappropriate. While a theorist like David Papineau is independently coming to something akin to iconicity, I think some of the awkwardness that plagues his account would be remedied by transitioning to a more inclusive philosophy of signs.