Kent Bach (born 1943) is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University.
He argues his thesis by first invoking several classic puzzles which have confounded philosophers of language since the time of Frege.
The first type of puzzle is a variation on the classic problem of the substitution of co-referential terms in the context of attitude attributions.
Given these basic assumptions how is it possible that the truth value of a sentence in the context of an attribution can change - that is, how is semantic opacity possible?
Consequently, Frege's theory "denies semantic innocence" and this makes it ring somewhat counterintuitive.
Kripke's puzzle arises from the fact that Peter takes Paderewski to be two different individuals: one a statesman and the other a pianist.
Attempts have been made to resolve the Paderewski puzzle by suggesting that the "that"-clauses involved are not sufficiently specific and that if all contextually relevant information were provided in detail, then we could eventually determine exactly what it is that Peter believes and disbelieves.
But let us suppose that Peter hears a recording of Paderewski playing Mozart and is impressed with the performance.
“contextualist platitude” does not preclude the “older picture of language and communication” and “a fairly standard semantic-pragmatic distinction.” Pragmatic considerations and context do not contribute to the content of what is said.
“We need the level of locutionary act and, correlatively, a strict, semantic notion of what is said in order to account for (the content of) what a speaker does in uttering a sentence independently of whatever communicative intention (if any) he has in uttering it and regardless of how the content of that intention may depart from the semantic content of the sentence.” [2] In his paper, "A Rationale for Reliabilism," Bach weighs in on the debate between internalist and externalist theories of justification by introducing a distinction between justified belief and justified believers.
Bach would argue that, under normal circumstances, the belief “there is an apple on the table” will be formed without reflection on the process by which that belief was formed since the reasoning process of the agent that sees the apple is working under the assumption that seeing something means it is there.
Bach presents his own theory as to what constitutes justified belief which he calls the “taking-for-granted principle.” This principle holds that: it appearing to one that p justifies directly inferring that p provided that (a) it does not occur to one that the situation might be out of the ordinary, and (b) it probably would occur to one that the situation might be out of the ordinary.
[6]In his Review of Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, Bach takes Jerry Fodor to task for his criticisms of lexical semantics and polysemy.
Whether or not the differing interpretations of "fast" in these sentences are specified in the semantics of English, or are the result of pragmatic inference, is a matter of debate.
What makes Fodor's view of concepts extremely difficult to digest for many critics is simply his insistence that such a large, perhaps implausible, number of them are primitive and undefinable.