Table Of ContentAdriano Palma (Editor)
Castañeda and His Guises. Essays on the Work of Hector-Neri Castañeda
Philosophische Analyse / Philosophical Analysis
Philosophische Analyse /
Philosophical Analysis
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Ed. by Hochberg, Herbert / Hüntelmann, Rafael / Kan-
zian, Christian / Schantz, Richard / Tegtmeier, Erwin
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Castañeda and
His Guises
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Essays on the Work of Hector-Neri Castañeda
Adriano Palma (Editor)
CoopPartner
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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 vol-
ume.
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 cho-
rus, 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 expe-
rience 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:
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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.
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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.
