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This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the factors that influenced Gareth Evans's philosophical work. Specifically, his work is viewed against the backdrop of four powerful and competing currents in the philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s — two were rooted in Oxford, Evans's intellectual home throughout his career, while two originated in the very different philosophical climate of North America. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter focuses on two enduring features of Gareth Evans's work. The first is his rethinking of standard ways of understanding the Fregean notion of sense, and the second his sustained attempt to undercut the familiar opposition between Russellian and Fregean approaches to understanding thought and language. It begins with some general comments on the Fregean approach to thought and language, identifying three different explanatory tasks that the notion of a thought is called upon to perform. The chapter also explores the distinctive difficulties that indexical expressions in general, and ‘I’ in particular, pose for Fregean approaches to thought and language. The chapter then goes on to consider Perry's proposal to deal with these difficulties by fractionating the notion of a thought so that there is no single thing that performs the three functions identified earlier in the chapter. The chapter then considers Evans's own account of the sense of ‘I’. It is argued that it is a requirement upon an account of the sense of ‘I’ that it respect the symmetry constraint, so that what I say in a given context using ‘I’ should be the same as what you might say in that same context using ‘you’. A development of Evans's account that meets the symmetry constraint is proposed.

This chapter addresses and revises a foundational feature of Kant's epistemology, namely the Transcendental Deduction. It shows how Kant's argument attempts to prove that the objective unification of a sensible manifold (achieved through the categories) and the objective unity of self-consciousness (or, as Kant sometimes terms it, the ‘pure’ or ‘original unity’ of ‘apperception’) are reciprocally dependent. One cannot have the one without the other. Kant's arguments on these lines (in the revised ‘B’-version of the Critique of Pure Reason) are analyzed critically. His basic position is then reconstructed in a more viable form. This involves three stages that make use of ideas from Gareth Evans and Shaun Gallagher. Special attention is paid to the role of the categories and productive imagination in the ontogenesis of experience.

This chapter argues that Evans was unsuccessful in his attempts to establish that in order to have the idea of an objective world one must also have the idea of a spatial world. It doubts his suggestion that the Kantian thesis cannot be defended without showing that the idea of space is implicitly involved in the very idea of existence unperceived. A different and better approach was suggested by Kant in the first Critique. According to Kant, it is the perception of space rather than the idea of space that should be seen as necessary for objective experience. The chapter considers the respects in which this version of the Kantian thesis fares better than Evans's account of the link between space and objectivity. It rejects Kant's idealist explanation of this link. It outlines an explanation that does not depend on Kant's idealism.

This chapter considers two general approaches to epistemic acquaintance are considered. The first builds on the idea that discriminability—of objects, thoughts, or truth-conditions—is necessary for singular thought. In this category we focus on the well-known view of Gareth Evans, which fleshes out what he calls Russell’s Principle: ‘to have a singular thought about an object, one must know which object one is thinking about.’ On the second kind of approach, singular thought requires only knowing the existence of the object of thought. The authors argue that neither approach provides a plausible condition on reference or singular thought.

This chapter evaluates Evans's very influential one-page article ‘Can there be vague objects?’ It argues that Evans's purpose was to demonstrate, by means of a reductio ad absurdum proof, that there cannot fail to be a fact of the matter as to whether an object a is identical to an object b. It questions the validity of the proof by comparing it with another notorious ‘proof’ of a metaphysically contentious doctrine, the Barcan–Kripke proof of the necessity of identity.

A central theme in The Varieties of Reference (VR) is the project of reconciling two ideas frequently treated as incompatible — the idea that singular terms are Russellian, on the one hand, and the idea that they have Fregean senses, on the other. Evans freely acknowledged that it was John McDowell who originally proposed to ascribe Fregean sense to Russellian singular terms. This chapter assesses Evans's claim in the first chapter of VR that this was in fact Frege's considered view of singular terms, despite his apparent willingness to ascribe sense to empty names. It agrees with Evans that the Russellianism discernible in the early Frege remains ‘submerged’ in Frege's later thought, rather than being definitively discarded. It is true that Frege does seem explicitly to countenance the possibility of sentences with empty names expressing genuine thoughts, suggesting that we can understand what is going on here by analogy with fictional discourse. But this is fundamentally incompatible with how Frege understands thoughts.

Evans was committed to the following views: there are or could be both descriptive and Russellian names in a language; these are semantically very different; and interpretation relies upon the appropriate T-theorems. This chapter argues that these views are in tension with the fact that the T-theorems do not differentiate between Russellian and descriptive names. It develops this objection and show how, on Evans's behalf, it can be met. It explains the origins of Evans's view that no names are both non-descriptive and non-Russellian.

This chapter argues that if intended coreference involves picking out the same referent, the same extension in the world of discourse, then it does not describe the class of coconstruals that existing theories of (intended) coreference address, or that they should address. It contends that there exist dependent identity readings which are not coreference readings. The chapter makes the case against the usefulness of both intended reference, and hence intended coreference, with minimal appeal to technical notions in linguistics.

This chapter explores how we think about conscious perceptual experience, both our own and that of others. It begins by considering the first-person case, that in which a thinker judges that he himself sees. The case falls within a general area to which Gareth Evans made original, important, and influential contributions, notably on the self-ascription of belief. After considering the first-person case and some of the epistemic and metaphysical ramifications of the treatment offered, the chapter goes on to compare it with Evans's account. It then discusses the relation between first-person and third-person ascription and to the explanation of some developmental phenomena. It concludes with a discussion of the extension of the model presented to the self-ascription and other-ascription of action and intentionality.

It’s common to think that demonstrations require something (that exists) that’s demonstrated. If, because of hallucination, there is no object, then the demonstration—and what’s said—is seen by some to fail to express anything. One can pretend (in the case where one is aware that one is hallucinating) that one is pointing at something, and others can pretend to understand what the hallucinator is talking about. This chapter shows that this way of thinking about hallucinations is wrong by developing at length a series of thought experiments that show how natural and cogent demonstrations are in hallucinatory contexts. Gareth Evans’s careful discussion of this matter is analyzed. Pretence approaches to singular hallucinatory talk are undercut by the external discourse demand, and by quantifying-in requirements on that discourse. The chapter also discusses how identity conditions for hallucinated objects can be cogent, and the argument from hallucination.

This chapter explores the contours of bill of rights debates and outcomes in Australia. The first part of the chapter demonstrates that, similarly to the situation in other Westminster democracies, pressure for a bill of rights has been emerged from the 1960s from a constituency of civil liberty and social equality seekers, given added political saliency by the postmaterialization of the Australian economy and society. The second part then explores the puzzle of why, uniquely, no such initiatives have proved successful. An explanation based on the alleged special weakness of background pressure for such a reform is rejected. Instead, it is argued that two features of Australian politics have blocked the supply of a bill of rights in this case. Firstly, Australia's strong institutional fragmentation compared at least with the United Kingdom and New Zealand have raised the bar which elite supporters of a bill of rights have to surpass in order to bring this project to fruition. Secondly, and more importantly, during relevant periods of its history, Australia has lacked a clear political trigger providing elites and others with an immediate impetus for change. The chapter closes with a brief consideration of the prospects for bill of rights genesis, following the return of the Rudd Labor Government in 2007.

This chapter addresses some of the central issues raised by Evans's paper ‘Molyneux's question’, exploring how Evans's approach to Molyneux's question is informed by his account of the content of conscious perceptual experience, as developed in The Varieties of Reference. It takes issue with Evans's account of the content of perceptual experience, and in particular with what he sees as its conflation of subpersonal information processing content and personal-level experiential content.

This chapter discusses Gareth Evans's 1978 argument disproving the existence of indeterminate identity. On a simple analysis it appeals to the invalid contrapositive version of Leibniz's Law; on a deeper analysis it presumes incorrectly that the formula expresses the property of being indeterminately identical with a. The proof is an RAA of the hypothesis that that formula expresses a property. This is akin to the ‘paradoxes’ of naïve set theory, due to the fact that identity is defined in terms of global quantification over all properties. A test for whether a formula ‘?x’ expresses a worldly property is whether it satisfies the principle that joint satisfaction and dissatisfaction of the formula makes a ‘Definite Difference’ in the identity of the objects in question.

This chapter discusses the indefinite identity problem posed by the ship of Theseus puzzle. It provides an alternative solution to the puzzle that will prove that the ORIGINAL is identical with the REPLACEMENT. It also analyses the applicability of the argument devised by Gareth Evans and Nathan Salmon to the problem of indefinite identity. The Evans-Salmon argument is a reductio designed to show that reasonable assumptions about identity together with the assumption that the ORIGINAL is identical with the REPLACEMENT lead to a contradiction.

Gareth Evans proposed, as a constraint on thought, that anyone, to entertain any given thought, must be able to entertain a particular (thinker-relative) system of them. This chapter argues that our thinking is not constrained by the generality constraint. So there is no legitimate philosophical work that constraint can do. The constraint seems plausible only when an over-simple picture of which capacities are in play in grasp of a thought is given. Insofar as our grasp of a particular thought to the effect that a is F involves grasp of what it is for a thing to be F, it also requires exercise of a further sort of capacity which Evans ignores, and which may be present with respect to a given thought to the effect that a is F, while missing for another thought to the effect that b is F (where a and b may, or may not, be distinct). The chapter then considers Wittgenstein's idea about systems. For Wittgenstein, a system of thoughts has certain roles to play in conferring the content they have on each of its members. It may well be that systems are needed to play such roles, and hence that any thought must be understood in terms of some system of thoughts to which it belongs. If the plausibility of the generality constraint derives in part from that of Wittgenstein's idea, it is important that the two ideas are not the same.

A number of influential positions in the philosophy of perception are grounded in the idea that the sensory image is raw and unprocessed. Dretske holds that sensation is analogue: he neglects neurophysiological evidence for data extraction and overlooks the role of attention. Goodman=s inference from the ‘density‘ of sensation to its unprocessed character ignores the process of analogue conversion, or supplementation, as he calls it. Some philosophers argue that sensation has no structure: in fact, it possesses something parallel to syntactic structure. Other philosophers argue, on the contrary, that sensation must be conceptually articulated, but insist that such articulation must be ‘spontaneous‘: it is shown that some level of spontaneity is indeed found in sub-personally generated sensory concepts. Finally, it is argued that, pace Richard Heck, sensation provides us with a means by which to construct a descriptive vocabulary for sense features.