Karl Bergman: Incoherence, referential and Fregean

The Research Seminar Series in Philosophy invites you to a seminar with Karl Bergman, Barcelona and Uppsala, ”Incoherence, referential and Fregean”.

Abstract:

Incoherence, also known as structural irrationality, consists in the obtaining or failure to obtain of certain relations among the propositional contents of a subject's attitudes. For instance, it is incoherent to believe in a proposition P and also believe its negation not-P. But there are two main kinds of content discussed in the literature: referential and Fregean content. Which of them is the notion of content at issue in incoherence? The question is of some importance, for if the answer is "referential content," it will turn out that many more people are incoherent than would have otherwise been the case—for instance, people in Frege cases who attribute contradictory properties to the same object represented under different modes of presentation. Prevailing internalist intuitions about rationality favor the Fregean answer, but is there an argument in defense of this line? In this paper, I argue that such arguments are hard to come by. I examine the two most promising arguments and show that both lead the Fregean to a dilemma: Either they must acknowledge that the argument is inconclusive, or they must embrace the counterintuitive conclusion that incoherence is impossible.

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