Pragmatics, Misc

There are several linguistic phenomena that, when examined closely, give evidence that people speak through characters, much like authors of literary works do, in everyday discourse. However, most approaches in linguistics and in the philosophy of language leave little theoretical room for the appearance of characters in discourse. In particular, there is no linguistic criterion found to date, which can mark precisely what stretch of discourse within an utterance belongs to a character, and to which character. And yet, without at (...) least tentatively marking the division of labor between the different characters in an utterance, it is absolutely impossible to arrive at an acceptable interpretation of it. As an alternative, I propose to take character use seriously, as an essential feature of discourse in general, a feature speakers and listeners actively seek out in utterances. I offer a simple typology of actions in discourse that draws on this understanding, and demonstrate its usefulness for the analysis of a conversation transcript. (shrink)

The material account of indicative conditionals faces a legion of counterexamples that are the bread and butter in any entry about the subject. For this reason, the material account is widely unpopular among conditional experts. I will argue that this consensus was not built on solid foundations, since these counterexamples are contextual fallacies. They ignore a basic tenet of semantics according to which when evaluating arguments for validity we need to maintain the context constant, otherwise any argumentative form can be (...) rendered invalid. If we maintain the context fixed, the counterexamples to the material account are disarmed. Throughout the paper I also consider the ramifications of this defence, make suggestions to prevent contextual fallacies, and anticipate some possible misunderstandings and objections. (shrink)

This paper advances the following criticisms against the received view of implicatures: (1) implicatures are relations of pragmatic implication and not attempts to convey particular speaker meanings; (2) conversational implicatures are non-cancellable; (3) generalised conversational implicatures and conventional implicatures are necessary to preserve the cooperative assumption employing a conversational maxim of conveyability; (4) implicatures should be divided into utterance implicatures and assumption implicatures, not speaker implicatures and sentence implicatures; (5) trivial implicatures are genuine implicatures; (6) Grice’s theory of conversation cannot (...) explain most of his examples of particularised conversational implicatures; (7) the apparent attempts of explicit cancellation of implicatures are apologies, not attempts to avoid misunderstandings. (shrink)

The material account proposes that indicative conditionals are material, but it is widely believed that this account cannot be applied to subjunctive conditionals. There are three reasons for this consensus: (1) the concern that most subjunctive conditionals would be vacuously true if they were material, which seems implausible; (2) the inconsistency with Adams pair, which suggests that indicative and subjunctive conditionals have different truth conditions; and (3) the belief that the possible world theories are a superior alternative to the material (...) account. In this paper, I will argue against (1) by showing that the counterintuitive aspects of vacuously true conditionals can be explained away in a consistent manner, regardless of whether they are indicative or subjunctive. I will support this argument by demonstrating that the positive arguments for the material account of indicatives also apply to subjunctives. I will counter (2) by explaining the Adams pair as logically equivalent conditionals that may be appropriate at different times, depending on the speaker’s epistemic situation. Finally, I will challenge (3) by arguing that the possible world account faces insurmountable issues and that a comprehensive material account of both indicatives and subjunctives is ultimately a more elegant solution. (shrink)

Together, the code and inferential models of communication are often thought to range over all cases of communication. However, their prevailing versions seem unable to fully explain what I call underdeterminacy without ostension. The latter is constituted by communication where stimuli that are not (nor appear to be) produced with communicative or informative intentions nevertheless communicate information underdetermined by the relevant codes. Though the prevailing accounts of communication cannot fully explain how communication works in such cases, I suggest that some (...) version of the inferential model can—if we allow it to extend to non‐ostensive, non‐intentional behaviors. (shrink)

I propose an account of the speech act of prediction that denies that the contents of prediction must be about the future and illuminates the relation between prediction and assertion. My account is a synthesis of two ideas: (i) that what is in the future in prediction is the time of discovery and (ii) that, as Benton and Turri recently argued, prediction is best characterized in terms of its constitutive norms.

Joint attention occurs when two (or more) individuals attend together to some object. It has been identified by psychologists as an early form of our joint engagement, and is thought to provide us with an understanding of other minds that is basic in that sophisticated conceptual resources are not involved. Accordingly, it has also attracted the interest of philosophers. Moreover, a very recent trend in the psychological and philosophical literature on joint attention consists of developing the suggestion that it holds (...) partially in virtue of communication: it is because we share our thoughts or feelings about an object that our individual attention becomes joint. This paper unpacks the communicative suggestion in a way that accounts for joint attention's basicness. (shrink)

I summarize several of the main claims, arguments, and innovations in Stojnić's 2021 book. I then take issue with her foundational view, on which both the context of a conversation and the contents of context-sensitive expressions are wholly fixed by the history of a conversation together with grammatical rules.

Speakers assert in order to communicate information. It is natural, therefore, to hold that the content of an assertion is whatever information it communicates to its audience. In cases involving uncertainty about the semantic values of context-sensitive lexical items, moreover, it is natural to hold that the information an assertion communicates to its audience is whatever information audience members are in a position to recover from it by assuming that the proposition it semantically determines is true. This sort of picture (...) corresponds to an influential and widely endorsed theory of assertoric content: diagonalism. I begin by arguing that, despite its intuitive appeal, diagonalism should be rejected because it conflicts with our intuitive judgments about the circumstances in which the contents of speakers’ assertions would be true or false. I then show that the failure of diagonalism requires us to either abandon a familiar way of thinking about information and rational assertion or hold that the content of an assertion is not always the information it communicates. I suggest that we choose the latter horn of this dilemma — assertoric content is better characterized in terms of the commitments speakers undertake than in terms of the information they communicate. (shrink)

A speaker’s use of a sentence does more than contribute a content to a conversation. It also expresses the speaker’s attitude. This essay is about which attitude or attitudes are expressed by using an interrogative sentence to ask a question. With reference to eight lines of data about how questions are circulated in conversation, it is argued that a desire to know the question’s answer(s) is expressed.

A conviction had by many Christians over many centuries is that natural language is inadequate for describing God. This is the doctrine of divine ineffability. Apophaticism understands divine ineffability as it being justified or proper to negate statements that describe God. This paper develops and defends a version of apophaticism in which the negation involved is metalinguistic. The interest of this metalinguistic apophaticism is two-fold. First, it provides a philosophical model of historical apophaticisms that shows their rational coherence. Second, metalinguistic (...) apophaticism enables a minimal understanding of ineffability that is independently plausible given its minor commitments. (shrink)

Moore’s paradox, the infamous felt bizarreness of sincerely uttering something of the form “I believe grass is green, but it ain’t”—has attracted a lot of attention since its original discovery (Moore 1942). It is often taken to be a paradox of belief—in the sense that the locus of the inconsistency is the beliefs of someone who so sincerely utters. This claim has been labeled as the priority thesis: If you have an explanation of why a putative content could not be (...) coherently believed, you thereby have an explanation of why it cannot be coherently asserted. (Shoemaker 1995). The priority thesis, however, is insufficient to give a general explanation of Moore-paradoxical phenomena and, moreover, it’s false. I demonstrate this, then show how to give a commitment-theoretic account of Moore Paradoxicality, drawing on work by Bach and Harnish. The resulting account has the virtue of explaining not only cases of pragmatic incoherence involving assertions, but also cases of cognate incoherence arising for other speech acts, such as promising, guaranteeing, ordering, and the like. (shrink)

A lot of subordinating speech has moved online, which raises several questions for philosophers. Can current accounts of oppressive speech adequately capture digital hate? How does the anonymity of online harassers contribute to the force of their speech? This paper examines online abuse and argues that standard accounts of licensing and accommodation are not up to the task of explaining the authority of online hate speech, as speaker authority often depends on the community in more ways than these accounts suggests. (...) Instead I argue that online abusive speech is best understood as collective subordinating speech acts, as their authority is drawn from an ad hoc collective. I argue that anonymity and shared language offer online abusers a path to a type of group-authority that explains the harm their speech is capable of. I close by suggesting that similar considerations are in play for IRL subordinating speech, and that online abuse helps to reveal key features of subordinating speech across mediums that are under-emphasized in the existing literature. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 4, Page 413-449, Fall 2023.

Generic generalisations like ‘Opioids are highly addictive’ are very useful in scientific communication, but they can often be interpreted in many different ways. Although this is not a problem when all interpretations provide the same answer to the question under discussion, a problem arises when a generic generalisation is used to answer a question other than that originally intended. In such cases, some interpretations of the generalisation might answer the question in a way that the original speaker would not endorse. (...) Rather than excising generic generalisations from scientific communication, I recommend that scientific communicators carefully consider the kinds of questions their words might be taken to answer and try to avoid phrasing that might be taken to provide unintended answers. (shrink)

‘I know his name.’ ‘I know something about him.’ ‘I know him.’ Consider how these uses of ‘know’ differ. The first two instances of know, seem to point to knowledge about something. Yet in the latter claim, the subject of the assertion is not a singular fact, but another person. I call these knowledge claims interpersonal knowledge. In the following paper, I provide an account for these interpersonal knowledge claims which employs the Conversational Contextualist view of language by synthesizing Allan (...) Gibbard’s Norm-Expressivist account for ‘good’ with an account of knowledge based in social epistemology. Under my theory ‘knowing someone claims’ amount to endorsements of our beliefs; as such, there is no truth-apt interpersonal knowledge. What is occurring is a self-assessment of our relationship to another person, based on our non-cognitive attitude towards the fact that we should know them. Therefore interpersonal knowledge claims are self-affirmations that assert we are doing what we believe we should, in an attempt to embody our perceived relationship with another person. -/- . (shrink)

This paper is about guessing: how people respond to a question when they aren’t certain of the answer. Guesses show surprising and systematic patterns that the most obvious theories don’t explain. We argue that these patterns reveal that people aim to optimize a tradeoff between accuracy and informativity when forming their guess. After spelling out our theory, we use it to argue that guessing plays a central role in our cognitive lives. In particular, our account of guessing yields new theories (...) of belief, assertion, and the conjunction fallacy—the psychological finding that people sometimes rank a conjunction as more probable than one of its conjuncts. More generally, we suggest that guessing helps explain how boundedly rational agents like us navigate a complex, uncertain world. (shrink)

An argumentation profile is defined as a methodological instrument for analyzing argumentative discourse considering distinct and interrelated dimensions: the types of argument used, their quality, and the emotions triggered. Walton’s theoretical contributions are developed as a coherent analytical and multifaceted toolbox for capturing these aspects. Argumentation schemes are used to detect and quantify the types of argument. Fallacy analysis and the assessment of the implicit premises retrieved through the schemes allow evaluating arguments. Finally, the frequency of emotive words signals the (...) most common emotions aroused. This method is illustrated through a corpus of argumentative tweets of three politicians. (shrink)

The detection of hate speech and fake news in political discourse is at the same time a crucial necessity for democratic societies and a challenge for several areas of study. However, most of the studies have focused on what is explicitly stated: false article information, language that expresses hatred, derogatory expressions. This paper argues that the explicit dimension of manipulation is only one – and the least problematic – of the risks of political discourse. The language of the unsaid is (...) much more dangerous and incomparably more difficult to detect, hidden in different types of fallacies and inappropriate uses of emotive language. Through a threefold coding scheme based on the instruments of argumentation theory and pragmatics, a corpus of argumentative tweets published by 4 politicians (Matteo Salvini, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Joseph Biden) within 6 months from their taking office (corresponding to the official end of their election campaign) is analyzed, detecting the types of argument, the fallacies, and the uses and misuses of “emotive words.” This coding results in the argumentation profiles of the speakers, which are compared statistically to show their different implicit strategies and deceptive tactics. (shrink)

Douglas Walton’s work is extremely vast, multifaceted, and interdisciplinary. He developed theoretical proposals that have been used in disciplines that are not traditionally related to philosophy, such as law, education, discourse analysis, artificial intelligence, or medical communication. Through his papers and books, Walton redefined the boundaries not only of argumentation theory, but also logic and philosophy. He was a philosopher in the sense that his interest was developing theoretical models that can help explain reality, and more importantly interact with it. (...) For this reason, he proposed methods that have been used for analyzing different types of dialogical interactions, and modeling procedures for regulating them. (shrink)

This paper considers one of the most significant and controversial attempts to account for the meaning of pejoratives as lexical items, namely Hom and May’s. After outlining the theory, we pinpoint sets of pejorative sentences that come out true on their account and for which the question as to whether they are compatible with the view advocated by them (so-called Moral and Semantic Innocence) remains open. Helping ourselves to the standard model-theoretical framework Hom and May (presumably) work in, we prove (...) they are compatible with the view. Given that the issues of both the moral import of pejoratives and the practical effects of their utterance are not settled by the proof, we then highlight unwelcome moral and pragmatic implications for some of the pejorative sentences under scrutiny, thereby showing that the view, broadly understood, is not as morally and semantically innocuous as it is meant to be. (shrink)

A large body of research has found that people judge bad foreseen side effects to be more intentional than good ones. While the standard interpretation of this Side-Effect Effect takes it to show that the ordinary concept of intentionality is influenced by normative considerations, a competing account holds that it is the result of pragmatic pressure to express moral censure and, thus, that the SEE is an experimental artifact. Attempts to confirm this account have previously been unsuccessful, but Lindauer and (...) Southwood :181–186, 2021) present a study that appears to provide support for it, by cancelling the SEE. We are not convinced. Here, we detail three studies testing their interpretation. The results indicate that it is the purported cancellation, rather than the SEE, that is an experimental artifact. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to approach Stanley Fish’s anti-foundationalist argument whose clear formulation is found in the development of his literary theory. For this reason, we will start by, first, introducing Fish's literary theory, and, second, it is explored some aspects of Fish’s theories and their bonds with anti-foundationalism.

Grammatical theories of Scalar Implicatures make use of an exhaustivity operator exh, which asserts the conjunction of the prejacent with the negation of excludable alternatives. We present a new Grammatical theory of Scalar Implicatures according to which exh is replaced with pex, an operator that contributes its prejacent as asserted content, but the negation of scalar alternatives at a non-at-issue level of meaning. We show that by treating this non-at-issue level as a presupposition, this theory resolves a number of empirical (...) challenges faced by the old formulation of exh (as well as by standard neo-Gricean theories). The empirical challenges include projection of scalar implicatures from certain embedded environments (‘some under some’ sentences, some under negative factives), their restricted distribution under negation, and the existence of common ground-mismatching and oddness-inducing implicatures. We argue that these puzzles have a uniform solution given a pex-based Grammatical theory of implicatures and some independently motivated principles concerning presupposition projection, cancellation and accommodation. (shrink)

Vocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Claiming that a phonation (...) is so distracting as to prevent uptake of the semantic content of an utterance associated with it is an extreme reaction, especially when accompanied by demands for women to change their phonation. We argue that this reaction limits women's communicative autonomy. We analyze the extreme reaction to female vocal fry, which we characterize as a non-content-based response, from the perspectives of philosophy of language, feminist epistemology, and linguistics. We argue that when fry is heard as annoying and distracting, it is because the hearer interprets the speaker as echoing an utterance from a position of authority to which she is not entitled. We show that this reaction encodes conscious or unconscious sexist attitudes toward women's voices. (shrink)

The sentence "The boss fired the employee who is always late" invites the defeasible inference that the speaker is attempting to convey that the lateness caused the firing. We argue that such inferences cannot be understood in terms of familiar approaches to extrasemantic enrichment such as implicature, impliciture, explicature, or species of local enrichment already in the literature. Rather, we propose that they arise from more basic cognitive strategies, grounded in processes of coherence establishment, that thinkers use to make sense (...) of the world. Attention to such cases provides a richer and more varied landscape of extrasemantic enrichment than has been appreciated to date. (shrink)

The present paper argues that there is a knowledge norm for conversational implicature: one may conversationally implicate p only if one knows p. Linguistic data about the cancellation behavior of implicatures and the ways they are challenged and criticized by speakers is presented to support the thesis. The knowledge norm for implicature is then used to present a new consideration in favor of the KK thesis. It is argued that if implicature and assertion have knowledge norms, then assertion requires not (...) only knowledge but iterated knowledge: knowing that you know that you know that... you know. Such a condition on permissible assertion is argued to be plausible only if the KK thesis is true. (shrink)

Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Linguistic and theoretical issues,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. This first volume intends to contribute to the dialogue between philosophers and linguists, trying to broaden the boundaries of this discipline defined by the crucial notions of context and verbal action. To this purpose, the contributions are collected in an order that reflects the core and the frontiers of pragmatics, the former constituted by (...) the classical and more philosophical topics as quantifiers, semantic intentions and semantics, and common knowledge, and the latter exploring areas such as the relationship between pragmatics and other fields, such as argumentation and discourse analysis. Between these two poles of theoretical developments, we can find new theoretical challenges to some basic pragmatic problems, such as pure indexicals, deferred reference, polysemy, explicatures and indirect reports. (shrink)

In the literature, the pragmatic dimension of metaphors has been clearly acknowledged. Metaphors are regarded as having different possible uses, and in particular, they are commonly viewed as instruments for pursuing persuasion. However, an analysis of the specific conversational purposes that they can be aimed at achieving in a dialogue and their adequacy thereto is still missing. In this paper, we will address this issue focusing on the distinction between the explanatory and persuasive goal. The difference between explanation and persuasion (...) is often blurred and controversial from a theoretical point of view. Building on the analysis of explanation in different theories and fields of study, we show how it can be conceived as characterized by a cognitive and a pragmatic dimension, where the transference of understanding is used pragmatically for different dialogical goals. This theoretical proposal will be applied to examples drawn from the medical context, to show how a pragmatic approach to explanation can account for the complexity of the cases that can be found in actual dialogical contexts. -/- . (shrink)

Acceptable analyticities, i.e. contradictions or tautologies, constitute problematic evidence for the idea that language includes a deductive system. In recent discussion, two accounts have been presented in the literature to explain the available evidence. According to one of the accounts, grammatical analyticities are accessible to the system but a pragmatic strengthening repair mechanism can apply and prevent the structures from being actually interpreted as contradictions or tautologies. The proposed data, however, leaves it open whether other versions of the meaning modulation (...) operation are required. Novel evidence we present argues that a loosening version of the repair mechanism must be available. Our observation concerns acceptable lexical contradictions that cannot be rescued if only a strengthening version of the pragmatic strategy is available. (shrink)

This essay attempts to extend the exercise in normative pragmatics undertaken by Robert Brandom to include consideration of the logical relations between the practices of making of claims involving the use of the first-person-singular pronoun (‘I-talk’) and the making of claims involving the second-person-singular pronoun (‘You-talk’). The first part of the essay makes the case that the implicit response found in Brandom’s work affirms the pragmatic independence of I-talk from You-talk, such that it is possible to conceive of a discursive (...) practice involving people using the first person-singular pronoun but not the second-person. The second part argues this response is mistaken, as there are reasons internal to Brandom’s own project that require pragmatic interdependence of I-talk and You-talk. The upshot of this exercise is normative pragmatics is thus that there can be no ‘I’ without a ‘You’. (shrink)

In some sentences, demonstratives can be substituted with definite descriptions without any change in meaning. In light of this, many have maintained that demonstratives are just a type of definite description. However, several theorists have drawn attention to a range of cases where definite descriptions are acceptable, but their demonstrative counterparts are not. Some have tried to account for this data by appealing to presupposition. I argue that such presuppositional approaches are problematic, and present a pragmatic account of the target (...) contrasts. On this approach, demonstratives take two arguments and generally require that the first, covert argument is non-redundant with respect to the second, overt argument. I derive this condition through an economy principle discussed by Schlenker (2005). (shrink)

In his last book, Le complexe des trois singes. Essai sur l’animalité humaine (2017), the French philosopher Étienne Bimbenet accuses “sensocentric” (« pathocentristes ») animal ethics of committing a performative contradiction: according to Bimbenet, these theories of animal rights — among which he focuses on the case of Zoopolis (2011) by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka — would undermine themselves by means of declaring reason a “non-essential” feature of human beings, while at the same time those theories themselves can only (...) be understood as a highly rational human endeavour. As we will try to point out, the alleged performative contradiction does not actually take place. First of all, Donaldson and Kymlicka only describe reason as “non essential” when it comes to describing moral patients, not moral agents, and particularly not moral theoreticians. In the second place, Zoopolis presents itself explicitly as an effort in “articulating moral reasons” — not as a renouncement of reason as such. (shrink)

[Author's note: although this paper is written in Korean, it is archived here in the hope of bringing it to the attention of a wider audience including scholars of pragmatics and of Korean linguistics.] Recently, Korean linguists and philosophers of language have engaged in discussions on the meaning and usage of the Korean determiner ‘uri’ as in such phrases as ‘uri manura [our wife]’ which might seem strange given the monogamous marital institution of Korea. The aim of this paper is (...) to provide a new interpretation of such expressions as ‘uri manura’. To that end, various proposals concerning the meaning and usage of the determiner ‘uri’ in those expressions will be critically examined first. Then it will be argued that ‘uri manura’ is a polite form of ‘nae manura [my wife]’ and is used when one needs, or wants, to speak in a polite tone in deference to the hearer or the wider audience. The upshot will be that the ubiquitous use of ‘uri’ in Korean is not due to the collectivist nature of the Korean society, as has often been claimed, but rather results from the linguistic embodiment of the Confucian tradition in Korea that values courteous words and behavior. (shrink)

Bare plural generic sentences pervade ordinary talk. And yet it is extremely controversial what semantics to assign to such sentences. In this paper, I achieve two tasks. First, I develop a novel classification of the various standard uses to which bare plurals may be put. This “variety data” is important—it gives rise to much of the difficulty in systematically theorizing about bare plurals. Second, I develop a novel account of bare plurals, the radical account. On this account, all bare plurals (...) fail to express propositions. The content of a bare plural has to be pragmatically “completed” by a speaker in order for her to make an assertion. At least the content of a quantifier expression has to be supplied. But sometimes, the content of a sentential operator or modal verb is also supplied. The radical account straightforwardly explains the variety data: Speakers’ communicative intentions vary wildly across different contexts. (shrink)

我的论点是，这里突出的故意表（理性、思想、思想、语言、个性等）或多或少地准确地描述了我们思考和行为的方式，因此它不包括仅仅是哲学和心理学，但一切（历史，文学，数学，政治等）。特别要注意，故意和理性，因 为我（连同西尔，维特根斯坦和其他人）认为它，包括有意识的审议语言系统2和无意识的自动前语言系统1的动作或反射。 我提供了一个关键的调查，两个最杰出的学生的行为在现代的一些主要发现， 路德维希·维特根斯坦和约翰·西尔，关于故意的逻辑结构（思想、语言、行为），以维特根斯坦的基本发现为出发点——所有真正的"哲学"问题都是一样的——关于在特定上下文中使用语言的困惑，因 此所有解决方案都是相同的——研究如何在问题语境中使用语言，使其真理条件（满意条件或 COS） 是明确的。基本问题是，一个人可以说什么，但一个人不能意味着（状态明确的COS）任何任意的话语和意义只有在非常具体的上下文中才可能。我从现代两种思想体系（被推广为"思维快，思维慢"） 的角度分析各种著作，采用新的意向表和新的双系统命名法。我表明，这是一个强大的启发式描述行为。 因此，如果一个人采取正确的观点，所有行为都是密切相关的。现象幻象（遗忘我们的自动化系统1）是通用的，不仅延伸到整个哲学，而且贯穿整个生命。我确信，如果乔姆斯基、奥巴马、扎克伯格和教皇被告知他们患有与黑 格尔、胡塞尔和海德格尔同样的问题，他们将会难以置信（或者，他们只与毒品和性瘾君子在程度上有所不同，他们的动机是通过心室和核积体来刺激他们的前皮质（和其他100种化学品），这显然是事实。虽然现象学家只浪 费了很多人的时间，但他们却在浪费地球和他们后代的未来。 .

Claramente nem eu nem ninguém jamais leremos qualquer parte substancial desta enorme tomada, então discutirei o único artigo que mais me interessa e que acho que fornece o quadro necessário para entender todos os outros. Estou falando de Ludwig Wittgenstein 'W. Mesmo que eu tentasse discutir os outros, eu não passaria a primeira página, pois todos os problemas aqui surgem imediatamente em qualquer discussão de comportamento. Diferenciação de pragmáticos e semântica não faz sentido em grande parte. É defensável que este (...) trabalho "Desenvolvimentos do contextualismo de Wittgenstein" possa ser legendado, mas é claro que este termo foi inevitavelmente corrompido pelos filósofos. Pode-se então dizer que pragmáticos e semânticas são partes ou coextensivo com epistemologia e ontologia e psicologia descritiva do pensamento de alta ordem (Estrutura Lógica da Racionalidade de Searle) ou que descrevem como usamos ruídos em contextos específicos para lhes dar significado - ou seja, uso verdadeiro ou falso (proposicional). A adição do trabalho de Wittgenstein/Searle à pesquisa de pensamento moderno fornece uma estrutura para pragmáticos, semânticas e todos os outros comportamentos humanos. Aqueles que querem uma estrutura completa até o momento para o comportamento humano do ponto de vista moderno de dois sistemas podem consultar meus livros Talking Monkeys 3rd ed (2019), Estrutura Lógica da Filosofia, Psicologia, Mente e Linguagem em Ludwig Wittgenstein e John Searle 2a ed (2019), Suicide Pela Democracy 4ª ed (2020), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), The Logical Structure of Consciousness (2019, Understanding the Connections Between Science, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Politics and Economics (2020), Illusaos Utopias Suicidas no século 21 6ª ed (2020), Observações sobre Impossibilidade, Incompletude, Paraconsistência, Indecidabilidade, Aleatoriedade, Computação, Paradoxo e Incerteza em Chaitin, Wittgenstein, Hofstadter, Wolpert, Doria, da Costa, Godel, Searle, Rodych Berto, Floyd, Moyal-Sharrock e Yanofsky (2019) e outros. (shrink)

Ich behaupte, dass die Tabelle der Intentionalität (Rationalität, Bewusstein, Geist, Denken, Sprache, Persönlichkeit usw.), die hier prominent dargestellt wird, mehr oder weniger genau beschreibt oder zumindest als Heuristik dient, wie wir denken und uns verhalten, und so umfasst sie nicht nur Philosophie und Psychologie, aber alles andere (Geschichte, Literatur, Mathematik, Politik etc.). Beachten Sie insbesondere, dass Intentionalität und Rationalität, wie ich (zusammen mit Searle, Wittgenstein und anderen) es sehen, sowohl bewusst deliberative linguistische System 2 als auch unbewusste automatisierte prälinguistische System (...) 1 Aktionen oder Reflexe umfasst. Ich mache einen kritischen Überblick über einige der wichtigsten Ergebnisse von zwei der bedeutendsten Studenten des Verhaltens der modernen Zeit, Ludwig Wittgenstein und John Searle, über die logische Struktur der Intentionalität (Geist, Sprache, Verhalten), als Ausgangspunkt wittgensteins grundlegende Entdeckung – dass alle wirklich "philosophischen" Probleme die gleichen sind – Verwirrungen darüber, wie Sprache in einem bestimmten Kontext zu verwenden, und so sind alle Lösungen gleich – blickend, wie Sprache in dem Kontext verwendet werden kann, um die Wahrheitsbedingungen (Bedingungen der Zufriedenheit oder COS) sind klar. Das Grundproblem ist, dass man alles sagen kann, aber man kann keine willkürliche Äußerung und Bedeutung bedeuten (geben, die man klar coS für) willenweise nur in einem ganz bestimmten Kontext möglich ist. Ich analysiere verschiedene Schriften von und über sie aus der modernen Perspektive der beiden Systeme des Denkens (popularisiert als "schnell denken, langsam denken"), mit einer neuen Tabelle der Intentionalität und neue duale Systeme Nomenklatur. Ich zeige, dass dies eine starke Heuristik für die Beschreibung von Verhalten ist. Somit ist jedes Verhalten eng miteinander verbunden, wenn man den richtigen Standpunkt einnimmt. Die phänomenologische Illusion (Vergessen unseres automatisierten Systems 1) ist universell und erstreckt sich nicht nur über die gesamte Philosophie, sondern über das ganze Leben hinweg. Ich bin sicher, dass Chomsky, Obama, Zuckerberg und der Papst ungläubig wären, wenn man ihnen sagen würde, dass sie unter dem gleichen Problem wie Hegel, Husserl und Heidegger leiden (oder dass sie sich nur in gewissem Maße von Drogen- und accumbensSexsüchtigen unterscheiden, indem sie durch Stimulation ihrer Frontalkortik durch die Lieferung von Dopamin (und über 100 anderen Chemikalien) über das ventrale Tegmentum und den Kern motiviertwerden, aber es ist klar. Während die Phänomenologen nur viel Zeit verschwendeten, verschwenden sie die Erde und die Zukunft ihres Nachkommen. (shrink)

Это мое утверждение, что таблица преднамеренности (рациональность, сознание, ум, мысль, язык, личность и т.д.), что особенное здесь описывает более или менее точно, или, по крайней мере, служит эвристическим для, как мы думаем и ведом, и поэтому она охватывает не только философию и психологию, но все остальное (история, литература, математика, политика и т.д.). Обратите внимание, особенно, что преднамеренность и рациональность, как я (наряду с Сирл, Витгенштейн и другие) просматривать его, включает в себя как сознательное совещательной лингвистической системы 2 и бессознательного автоматизированной (...) прелингвистической системы 1 действия или рефлексы. Я предоставляю критический обзор некоторых из основных выводов двух самых выдающихся студентов поведения современности, Людвиг Витгенштейн и Джон Сирл, о логической структуре преднамеренности (ум, язык, сознание, поведение), принимая в качестве отправной точки фундаментальное открытие Витгенштейна, что все действительно "философские" проблемы одинаковы- путаницы о том, как использовать язык в определенном контексте, и поэтому все решения одинаковы, глядя на то, как язык может быть использован в контексте вопроса, так что его истина условия (Условия удовлетворенности или COS) ясны. Основная проблема заключается в том, что можно сказать что-нибудь, но нельзя означать (государство ясно COS для) любое произвольное высказывание и смысл возможен только в очень конкретном контексте. Я анализирую различные писания и о них с современной точки зрения двух систем мышления (популяризировал как "мышление быстро, думая медленно"), используя новую таблицу преднамеренности и новых двойных систем номенклатуры. Я показываю, что это мощная эвристика для описания поведения. Таким образом, все поведение тесно связано, если вы принимаете правильную точку зрения. Феменологическая иллюзия (забвение нашей автоматизированной системы 1) является универсальной и распространяется не только на всю философию, но и на протяжении всей жизни. Я уверен, что Хомский, Обама, Цукерберг и Папа был бы недоверчивым, если бы сказали, что они страдают от той же проблемы, как Гегель, Husserl и Хайдеггер, (или что они отличаются только в степени от наркоманов и наркоманов в мотивации стимуляции их лобной кортики путем доставки допамина (и более 100 других химических веществ) через вентральный tegum и ядра. В то время как меноменологи только потратили много времени людей, они растают землю и будущее своего потомка. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualism in the style of Lewis (1996) maintains that ascriptions of knowledge to a subject vary in truth with the alternatives that can be eliminated by the subject’s evidence in a context. Schaffer (2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2015), Schaffer and Knobe (2012), and Schaffer and Szabo ́ (2014) hold that the question under discussion or QUD always determines these alternatives in a context. This paper shows that the QUD does not perform such a role for "know" and uses this (...) result to draw a few lessons about the metasemantics of context- sensitivity. (shrink)

In searching for life in extraterrestrial space, it is essential to act based on an unequivocal definition of life. In the twentieth century, life was defined as cells that self-replicate, metabolize, and are open for mutations, without which genetic information would remain unchangeable, and evolution would be impossible. Current definitions of life derive from statistical mechanics, physics, and chemistry of the twentieth century in which life is considered to function machine like, ignoring a central role of communication. Recent observations show (...) that context-dependent meaningful communication and network formation (and control) are central to all life forms. Evolutionary relevant new nucleotide sequences now appear to have originated from social agents such as viruses, their parasitic relatives, and related RNA networks, not from errors. By applying the known features of natural languages and communication, a new twenty-first century definition of life can be reached in which communicative interactions are central to all processes of life. A new definition of life must integrate the current empirical knowledge about interactions between cells, viruses, and RNA networks to provide a better explanatory power than the twentieth century narrative. (shrink)

In non‐literal uses of language, the content an utterance communicates differs from its literal truth conditions. Loose talk is one example of non‐literal language use (amongst many others). For example, what a loose utterance of (1) communicates differs from what it literally expresses: (1) Lena arrived at 9 o'clock. Loose talk is interesting (or so I will argue). It has certain distinctive features which raise important questions about the connection between literal and non‐literal language use. This paper aims to (i.) (...) introduce a range of novel data demonstrating certain overlooked features of loose talk, and (ii.) develop a new theory of the phenomenon which accounts for these data. In particular, this theory is motivated by the need to explain minimal pairs such as (2)-(3): (2) Lena arrived at 9 o'clock, but she did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly. (3) ?? Lena did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly, but she arrived at 9 o'clock. (2) and (3) agree in their truth conditions. Yet they differ in felicity. As such, they constitute a problem for any account which hopes to predict the acceptability of the loose use of a sentence from its truth conditions and the context of utterance alone. Instead, it will be argued, to explain loose talk phenomena we must posit an additional layer of meaning outstripping truth conditions. This layer of meaning is shown to exhibit a range of properties, all of which point to its being semantically encoded. Thus, if correct, the theory provides a new example of how semantic meaning must extend beyond literal, truth‐conditional content. (shrink)

El presente artículo busca hacer una revisión del concepto de verdad como fundamento del conocimiento científico: desde el pragmatismo de William James y Jürgen Habermas hasta las nociones pragmáticas de Charles -/- Sanders Peirce, con la intención de mostrar los rasgos pertinentes -/- e insuficiencias de cada postura. De manera complementaria, se -/- buscará dar cuenta de los niveles: pragmático (semiótico-filosófico) -/- y pragmatista (psicológico), en los que funciona dicho concepto -/- dentro de la filosofía peirciana. Finalmente, tal esbozo teórico (...) nos permitirá establecer una -/- definición operativa de verdad como condición trascendental, y -/- que resulte menos problemática para representar el conocimiento -/- científico. (shrink)

Twitter is an instrument used not only for sharing public or personal information, but also for persuading the audience. While specific platforms and software have been developed for analyzing macro-analytical data, and specific studies have focused on the linguistic dimension of the tweets, the argumentative dimension of the latter is unexplored to this date. This paper intends to propose a method grounded on the tools advanced in argumentation theory for capturing, coding, and assessing the different argumentative dimensions of the messages (...) posted on Twitter, focusing on the types of argument communicated, the quality of their premises, and the fallacies committed – including the use of unshared presuppositions and emotive words. This method is applied to a corpus of 843 tweets published by the Italian Minister of the Interior, Mr. Matteo Salvini, from the date of his appointment to the beginning of his campaign for the European elections. The quantitative data provide general indications for detecting the strategies that characterize the argumentative profile of Salvini, which are then analyzed qualitatively. (shrink)

Metaphors can be used as crucial tools for reaching shared understanding, especially where an epistemic imbalance of knowledge is at stake. However, metaphors can also represent a risk in intercultural or cross-cultural interactions, namely in situations characterised by little or deficient common ground between interlocutors. In such cases, the use of metaphors can lead to misunderstandings and cause communicative breakdowns. The conditions defining when metaphors promote, and hinder understanding have not been analyzed in detail, especially in intracultural contexts. This study (...) proposes an analysis of metaphors identified within an Italian corpus of diabetes care interviews. Through a coding scheme capturing the types and the probative weights of the linguistic evidence that can be used to detect misunderstandings, the communicative effectiveness of metaphors is indirectly assessed. The quantitative and qualitative analyses show a positive correlation between metaphor use and problematic understanding. A more detailed scrutiny of the interlocutors’ roles and topics of the metaphors points out that most of the problematic metaphors are used by patients, while most of the problematic ones used by providers concern non-clinical matters. These results can be explained as resulting from incorrect presumptions of common ground between the interlocutors. (shrink)

There is a difference between the conditions in which one can felicitously use a ‘must’-claim like and those in which one can use the corresponding claim without the ‘must’, as in 'It must be raining out' versus 'It is raining out. It is difficult to pin down just what this difference amounts to. And it is difficult to account for this difference, since assertions of 'Must p' and assertions of p alone seem to have the same basic goal: namely, communicating (...) that p is true. In this paper I give a new account of the conversational role of ‘must’. I begin by arguing that a ‘must’-claim is felicitous only if there is a shared argument for the proposition it embeds. I then argue that this generalization, which I call Support, can explain the more familiar generalization that ‘must’-claims are felicitous only if the speaker’s evidence for them is in some sense indirect. Finally, I propose a pragmatic derivation of Support as a manner implicature. (shrink)

The first group of articles attempt to give some insight into how we behave that is reasonably free of theoretical delusions. In the next three groups I comment on three of the principal delusions preventing a sustainable world— technology, religion and politics (cooperative groups). People believe that society can be saved by them, so I provide some suggestions in the rest of the book as to why this is unlikely via short articles and reviews of recent books by well-known writers. (...) -/- America and the world are in the process of collapse from excessive population growth, most of it for the last century and now all of it due to 3rd world people. Consumption of resources and the addition of 4 billion more ca. 2100 will collapse industrial civilization and bring about starvation, disease, violence and war on a staggering scale. Billions will die and nuclear war is all but certain. In America this is being hugely accelerated by massive immigration and immigrant reproduction, combined with abuses made possible by democracy. Depraved human nature inexorably turns the dream of democracy and diversity into a nightmare of crime and poverty. The root cause of collapse is the inability of our innate psychology to adapt to the modern world, which leads people to treat unrelated persons as though they had common interests. This, plus ignorance of basic biology and psychology, leads to the social engineering delusions of the partially educated who control democratic societies. Few understand that if you help one person you harm someone else—there is no free lunch and every single item anyone consumes destroys the earth beyond repair. Consequently social policies everywhere are unsustainable and one by one all societies without stringent controls on selfishness will collapse into anarchy or dictatorship. Without dramatic and immediate changes, there is no hope for preventing the collapse of America, or any country that follows a democratic system. Hence my concluding essay “Suicide by Democracy”. (shrink)

Lying is standardly distinguished from misleading according to how a disbelieved proposition is conveyed. To lie, a speaker uses a sentence to say a proposition she does not believe. A speaker merely misleads by using a sentence to somehow convey but not say a disbelieved proposition. Front-and-center to the lying/misleading distinction is a conception of what-is-said by a sentence in a context. Stokke (2016, 2018) has recently argued that the standard account of lying/misleading is explanatorily inadequate unless paired with a (...) theory where what-is-said by a sentence is determined by the question under discussion or QUD. I present two objections to his theory, and conclude that no extant theory of what-is-said enables the standard account of the lying/misleading distinction to be explanatorily adequate. (shrink)