Many philosophers believe that the extensions of evaluative terms and concepts aren’t unified under non-evaluative similarity relations and that this “shapelessness thesis” (ST) has significant metaethical implications regarding non-cognitivism, ethical naturalism, moral particularism, thick concepts and more. ST is typically offered as an explanation of why evaluative classifications appear to “outrun” classifications specifiable in independently intelligible non-evaluative terms. This paper argues that both ST and the outrunning point used to motivate it can be explained on the basis of more general (...) factors that have nothing in particular to do with being evaluative. If so, there is no reason to expect ST to carry the sorts of metaethical implications that get attributed to it. I also show that my main argument is robust across certain complications that are raised by the context-sensitivity of many evaluative terms but have so far been ignored in discussions of ST and related matters. (shrink)

Frank Jackson’s famous Knowledge Argument moves from the premise that complete physical knowledge is not complete knowledge about experiences to the falsity of physicalism. In recent years, a consensus has emerged that the credibility of this and other well-known anti-physicalist arguments can be undermined by allowing that we possess a special category of concepts of experiences, phenomenal concepts, which are conceptually independent from physical/functional concepts. It is held by a large number of philosophers that since the conceptual independence of phenomenal (...) concepts does not imply the metaphysical independence of phenomenal properties, physicalism is safe. This paper distinguishes between two versions of this novel physicalist strategy –Phenomenal Concept Strategy (PCS) – depending on how it cashes out “conceptual independence,” and argues that neither helps the physicalist cause. A dilemma for PCS arises: cashing out “conceptual independence” in a way compatible with physicalism requires abandoning some manifest phenomenological intuitions, and cashing it out in a way compatible with those intuitions requires dropping physicalism. The upshot is that contra Brian Loar and others, one cannot “have it both ways.”. (shrink)

In this paper, we will defend a particular version of the timeless solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. Our strategy is grounded on a particular temporal framework, which models the flow of time and a libertarian understanding of freedom. The propositions describing a certain act by an agent have an indeterminate truth value until the agent makes her choice; therefore, they become true or false when a decision is made. In order to account for this change (...) of truth value, a multiple frame structure is introduced in which every frame presents a privileged time, with its past and the possible alternative futures, which are still open. God atemporally knows all the frames and the truth values of propositions with respect to each one. Since divine knowledge of what an agent decides in a certain temporal frame depends on the agent’s act itself, divine knowledge does not conflict with the agent’s free will. (shrink)

Sometimes form-meaning mappings in language are not arbitrary, but iconic: they depict what they represent. Incorporating iconic elements of language into a compositional semantics faces a number of challenges in formal frameworks as evidenced by the lengthy literature in linguistics and philosophy on quotation/direct speech, which iconically portrays the words of another in the form that they were used. This paper compares the well-studied type of iconicity found with verbs of quotation with another form of iconicity common in sign languages: (...) classifier predicates. I argue that these two types of verbal iconicity can, and should, incorporate their iconic elements in the same way using event modification via the notion of a context dependent demonstration. This unified formal account of quotation and classifier predicates predicts that a language might use the same strategy for conveying both, and I argue that this is the case with role shift in American Sign Language. Role shift is used to report others’ language and thoughts as well as their actions, and recently has been argued to provide evidence in favor of Kaplanian “monstrous” indexical expressions. By reimagining role shift as involving either quotation for language demonstrations or “body classifier” predicates for action demonstrations, the proposed account eliminates one major argument for these monsters coming from sign languages. Throughout this paper, sign languages provide a fruitful perspective for studying quotation and other forms of iconicity in natural language due to their lack of a commonly used writing system which is otherwise often mistaken as primary data instead of speech, the rich existing literature on iconicity within sign language linguistics, and the ability of role shift to overtly mark the scope of a language report. In this view, written language is merely a special case of a more general phenomenon of sign and speech demonstration, which accounts more accurately for natural language data by permitting more strict or loose verbatim interpretations of demonstrations through the context dependent pragmatics. (shrink)

In the literature on linguistic context-sensitivity, a recurrent move has been made with the intention of attacking Charles Travis's occasion-sensitivity. The move is to provide a semantic analysis of the meaning of an expression which makes the content of that expression context sensitive but without providing any reason to think that the meaning of the expression is a character. I argue that this move is off-target. Such proposals are entirely consistent with occasion-sensitivity and so don't constitute an attack on it.

I critically examine Cappelen and Lepore’s definition of and tests for indexicality, and refine them to improve their adequacy. Indexicals cannot be defined as expressions with different referents in different contexts unless linguistic meaning and circumstances of evaluation are held constant. I show that despite Cappelen and Lepore’s claim that there are only a handful of indexical expressions, their “basic set” includes a number of large and open classes, and generates an infinity of indexical phrases. And while the tests can (...) be used effectively to combat contextualism concerning ‘knows’ and ‘actual,’ many expressions not in their basic set test positive for indexicality, including quantifier nouns, weather reports, and comparative adjectives. I rebut their claim that context-shifting arguments inevitably lead to radical contextualism, and that if there were any indexicals beyond their basic set, communication would be impossible. (shrink)

This paper investigates the truth conditions of sentences containing indefinite noun phrases, focusing on occurrences in attitude reports, and, in particular, a puzzle case due to Walter Edelberg. It is argued that indefinites semantically contribute the (thought-)object they denote, in a manner analogous to attributive definite descriptions. While there is an existential reading of attitude reports containing indefinites, it is argued that the existential quantifier is contributed by the de re interpretation of the indefinite (as the de re reading adds (...) existential quantification to the interpretation of definites on Kaplan’s analysis). (shrink)

The possibility of extraction across awh-island is usually assumed to be dependent on whether or not the constituent in question can undergo “long” (i.e., nonlocal) Ā-movement across the island. However, the question of how to make a principled distinction between those elements which can violate locality and those which cannot is still rather controversial. I will propose that there are no well-formed locality violations in these cases, and that the grammaticality patterns observed derive from a semantic filter on the escape (...) hatch used to bypass the island. In other words, if a phrase is extracted across awh-island, it must adjoin to the island in order to get by. This adjunction site is restricted by the interpretive component: only traces which are interpreted as variables of typee can occur in this position, while higher-order variables are not allowed. This restriction is shown to capture the known facts aboutwh-island violations, as well as some less known phenomena, such as the absence of functional (and pair-list) readings acrosswh-islands. (shrink)

This paper argues that Twin Earth twins belong to the same psychological natural kind, but that the reason for this is not that the causal powers of mental states supervene on local neural structure. Fodor’s argument for this latter thesis is criticized and found to rest on a confusion between it and the claim that Putnamian and Burgean type relational psychological properties do not affect the causal powers of the mental states that have them. While it is true that Putnamian (...) and Burgean type relational psychological properties do not affect causal powers, it is false that no relational psychological properties do. Examples of relational psychological properties that do affect causal powers are given and psychological laws are sketched that subsume twins in virtue of them instantiating these relational properties rather than them sharing the narrow contents of their thoughts. (shrink)

Quine introduced a famous distinction between the ‘notional’ sense and the ‘relational’ sense of certain attitude verbs. The distinction is both intuitive and sound but is often conflated with another distinction Quine draws between ‘dyadic’ and ‘triadic’ (or higher degree) attitudes. I argue that this conflation is largely responsible for the mistaken view that Quine’s account of attitudes is undermined by the problem of the ‘exportation’ of singular terms within attitude contexts. Quine’s system is also supposed to suffer from the (...) problem of ‘suspended judgement with continued belief’. I argue that this criticism fails to take account of a crucial presupposition of Quine’s about the connection between thought and language. The aim of the paper is to defend the spirit of Quine’s account of attitudes by offering solutions to these two problems. (shrink)

According to David Lewis, many de re modal predications – that is, sentences such as ‘John McCain could have won the 2008 U.S. Presidential election’ and ‘Dwight could receive a promotion’ – are inconstant insofar as their truth values can vary alongside changes in our interests. In this paper, I argue that previous accounts of this inconstancy, such as those offered by Lewis and Harold Noonan, are inadequate. Linguistic data, I claim – specifically, agreement and disagreement data – tell against (...) these views and in favor of a new, more radical approach. My goal in this paper is to present such data in an effort to offer some initial motivation for this new approach. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend an indexical analysis of the abstract-concrete distinction within the framework of modal realism. This analysis holds the abstract-concrete distinction to be conceptually inseparable from the distinction between the actual and the merely possible, which is assumed to be indexical in nature. The resulting view contributes to the case for modal realism by demonstrating how its distinctive resources provide a reductive analysis of the abstract-concrete distinction. This indexical analysis also provides a solution to a sceptical problem (...) regarding our concreteness, which parallels the sceptical problem that motivates indexicalism about actuality. (shrink)

In combining a pluri‐propositionalist framework (Bach‐style) concerning alleged conventional implicatures, and a pluri‐propositionalist framework (Perry‐style) distinguishing various levels of content associated with a single utterance, I defend a Grice‐inspired model of communication. In so doing, I rely on the distinction between what is said, i.e. what is semantically encoded, and what is pragmatically implicated. I show how the notion of same‐saying plays a central role in dealing with problems pertaining to communication insofar as it permits us to posit a stability (...) of content among interlocutors. I also show how people can be classified as same‐sayers in different ways, viz. if they express the same (minimal) proposition/content or if they utter the same sentence. If A utters ‘I'm happy’ and B replies: ‘C said that too’, what B said can mean either that C said that A is happy—thus C and A expressed the same proposition—or that C utters the same words—they both utter ‘I'm happy’ and in so doing express different propositions, i.e. that A is happy and that C is happy respectively. (shrink)

In focusing on indexicals and proper names and on the different ways in which their references are fixed, I illustrate how our linguistic practice rests on context, broadly construed. The following theses are discussed and defended: • There are two main kinds of information: (i) anchored information, i.e. the information one gathers in using and entertaining indexical expressions and (ii) unanchored information, i.e. the information one may gain in hearing a proper name. • Indexical expressions differ from proper names; this (...) difference relies on the differing ways in which extra‐linguistic context enters the scene. • The Kaplanian framework in particular, and the framework of direct reference in general, are best understood and appreciated against the background of a Wittgensteinian conception of language. (shrink)

We defend the view that an indexical uttered by an actor works on the model of deferred reference. If it defers to a character which does not exist, it is an empty term, just as ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Ophelia’ are. The utterance in which it appears does not express a proposition and thus lacks a truth value. We advocate an ontologically parsimonious, anti-realist, position. We show how the notion of truth in our use and understanding of indexicals (and fictional names) as (...) they appear within a fiction is not a central issue. We claim that our use and understanding of indexicals (and names) rests on the fact that their cognitive contribution is not exhausted by their semantic contribution. (shrink)

Dans ce texte j'aborderai presque exclusivement la question de savoir si le pronom personnel «je» est un terme référentiel ou non. Il s'agit en définitive de savoir si le pronom en question est une expression qui désigne quelque chose et, si oui, de spécifier la nature du référent en question. En un mot, je me propose ici d'analyser le comportement sémantique du pronom «je».

It is argued that, contrary to appearances, description-names (e.g.: "The Roman Empire", "The Beatles", "The Holy Virgin",...) do conform to Millianism, i.e. the view that proper names are directly referential expressions, referring regardless of whether the relevant individual satisfies some associated description or not. However, description-names name and describe. Some arguments supporting this peculiarity and a logic to handle description-names are proposed. It will be shown that the best framework with which to accommodate description-names is a multiple-proposition theory, according to (...) which a given utterance may express several propositions. (shrink)

Atlas argues that semantic minimalism fails because it cannot deal with semantic non-specificity. I argue that thereis a plausible version of minimalism-viz., situated minimalism-which doesn't succumb to the non-specificity charge insofar as non-specificity can be dealt with at a postsemantic level. Thus, pragmatics plays no rolewhen it comes to determining the proposition expressed. Instead, pragmatic and other extra-semantic considerations enter the scene in characterizing the situation vis-à-vis which the proposition is evaluated. For this reason a plausible form of minimalism must (...) embrace a form of truth-relativism: a proposition is not universally true/false, but true/false only relative to a situation. I show how the position defended is not only more cognitively plausible than either minimalism as proposed by Cappelen & Lepore or the positions appealing to pragmaticintrusion into the proposition expressed, but is also in accordance with ordinary people's intuitions. (shrink)

I argue for a theory that combines elements of reliabilism and evidentialism.

The determination argument is supposed to show that a sentence's meaning is at least a truth-condition. This argument is supposed to rest on innocent premises that even a deflationist about truth can accept. The argument comes in two versions: one is metaphysical and the other is epistemological. In this paper we will focus on the epistemological version. We will argue that the apparently innocent first premise of that version of the argument is not as innocent as it seems. If the (...) premise is understood in the sense required for the argument to go through then it should be rejected by a deflationist. (shrink)

Answering machines and other types of recording devices present prima facie problems for traditional theories of the meaning of indexicals. The present essay explores a range of semantic and pragmatic responses to these issues. Careful attention to the difficulties posed by recordings promises to help enlighten the boundaries between semantics and pragmatics more broadly.

Indexicalism is a strategy for defending truth-conditional semantics from under-determination arguments. According to indexicalism the class of indexical expressions includes not only the obvious indexicals, e.g. demonstratives and personal pronouns, but also unobvious indexical expressions, expressions which allegedly have been discovered to be indexicals. This paper argues that indexicalism faces significant obstacles that have yet to be overcome. The issue that divides indexicalism and truth-conditional pragmatics is first clarified. And then three general problems for indexicalism are presented, and some potential (...) solutions that have been proposed in its defense are criticized. (shrink)

To solve the referential sub-problem of negative existentials one must explain why we interpret uses of, e.g., ‘Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist’ as saying something coherent and intuitively true, even though the speaker purports to refer to something. Pragmatic Meinongism solves this problem by allowing ‘does not exist’ to be pragmatically modulated to express an inclusive sense under which it can be satisfied by something. I establish three points in defense of pragmatic Meinongism: it is superior to Russell-inspired solutions; it is (...) supported by independent evidence of pragmatic modulation; and it requires no dubious ontological commitments. (shrink)

Fodor (Mind Lang 16:1–15, 2001 ) endorses the mixed view that thought, yet not language, is compositional. That is, Fodor accepts the arguments of radical pragmatics that language is not compositional, but he claims these arguments do not apply to thought. My purpose here is to evaluate this mixed position: Assuming that the radical pragmaticists are right that language is not compositional, what arguments can be provided in support of the claim that thought is compositional? Before such arguments can be (...) evaluated, the relevant notion of compositionality must be clarified. So I first clarify this notion of compositionality, and then consider three arguments in support of the mixed position. All three of these arguments are found to be inadequate, and thus I conclude that the mixed position is unstable: If one endorses the arguments of radical pragmatics against the compositionality of language, then one should also reject the compositionality of thought. (shrink)

Drawing on the findings of neuroscience, this text proposes and defends the hypothesis that the various modalities of sensation share a generic form that the author, Austen Clark, calls feature-placing.

In this paper, I argue that there are universals. I begin (Sect. 1) by proposing a sufficient condition for a thing’s being a universal. I then argue (Sect. 2) that some truths exist necessarily. Finally, I argue (Sects. 3 and 4) that these truths are structured entities having constituents that meet the proposed sufficient condition for being universals.

I investigate the implication of the truth-relativist’s alleged ‘ faultless disagreements’ for issues in the epistemology of disagreement. A conclusion I draw is that the type of disagreement the truth-relativist claims to preserve fails in principle to be epistemically significant in the way we should expect disagreements to be in social-epistemic practice. In particular, the fact of faultless disagreement fails to ever play the epistemically significant role of making doxastic revision rationally required for either party in a disagreement. That the (...) truth-relativists’ disagreements over centred content fail to play this epistemically significant role that disagreements characteristically play in social epistemology should leave us sceptical that disagreement is what the truth-relativist has actually preserved. (shrink)

According to the traditional bundle theory, particulars are bundles of compresent universals. I think we should reject the bundle theory for a variety of reasons. But I will argue for the thesis at the core of the bundle theory: that all the facts about particulars are grounded in facts about universals. I begin by showing how to meet the main objection to this thesis (which is also the main objection to the bundle theory): that it is inconsistent with the possibility (...) of distinct qualitative indiscernibles. Here, the key idea appeals to a non-standard theory of haecceities as non-well-founded properties of a certain sort. I will then defend this theory from a number of objections, and finally argue that we should accept it on the basis of considerations of parsimony about the fundamental. (shrink)

Philosophers of language and linguists tend to think of the interpreter as an essentially non-creative participant in the communicative process. There’s no room, in traditional theories, for the view that correctness of interpretation depends in some essential way on the interpreter. As a result, there’s no room for the possibility that while P is the correct interpretation of an utterance, u, for one interpreter, P* is the correct interpretation of that utterance for another interpreter. Recently, a number of theorists have, (...) for separate reasons, argued in favour of a radically different view of communication – a view in which the interpreter and her context play what should be thought of as a content-creating role. According to such views, natural languages contain what I’ll call interpretation sensitive terms: terms the correct interpretation of which varies across interpreters (or, more generally, contexts of interpretation).3 An interpretation sensitive sentence can have one content relative to one interpreter and another content relative to another interpreter. This paper is a development and (partial) defence of the view that interpretation sensitivity is ubiquitous in natural language. I call the view that there are interpretation sensitive terms content relativism. Before starting the discussion of content relativism, it is worth pointing out that recent attempts to develop semantically motivated versions of truth relativism should be seen as part of this trend of giving the interpreter a more active role. (shrink)

Reply to Lasersohn, MacFarlane, and Richard.

Symposium on Insensitive Semantics. Replies to Kent Bach, John Hawthorne, Kepa Korta and John Perry, and Robert J. Stainton.

Can one and the same quotation be used on different occasions to quote distinct objects? The view that it can is taken for granted throughout the literature (e.g. Goddard & Routley 1966, Christensen 1967, Davidson 1979, Goldstein 1984, Jorgensen et al 1984, Atlas 1989, Clark & Gerrig 1990, Washington 1992, García-Carpintero 1994, 2004, 2005, Reimer 1996, Saka 1998, Wertheimer 1999). Garcia-Carpintero (1994, p. 261) illustrates with the quotation expression ''gone''. He says it can be used to quote any of the (...) following items. (shrink)

A semantic theory T for a language L should assign content to utterances of sentences of L. One common assumption is that T will assign p to some S of L just in case in uttering S a speaker A says that p. We will argue that this assumption is mistaken.

In this paper, I argue against Millian Descriptivism: that is, the view that, although sentences that contain names express singular propositions, when they use those sentences speakers communicate descriptive propositions. More precisely, I argue that Millian Descriptivism fares no better (or worse) than Fregean Descriptivism: that is, the view that sentences express descriptive propositions. This is bad news for Millian Descriptivists who think that Fregean Descriptivism is dead.

Some descriptivists reply to the modal argument by appealing to scope ambiguities. In this paper, we argue that those replies don’t work in the case of apparently empty names like ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

Philosophers have justified extant theories of singular thought in at least three ways: they have invoked wide-ranging theories motivated by data from other philosophical areas, they have elicited direct intuitions about which thoughts are singular, and they have subjected propositional attitude reports to tests such as Russellian substitution and Quinean exportation. In these ways, however, we haven’t yet been able to tell what it takes to have singular thoughts, nor have we been able to tell which of our thoughts they (...) are. I propose, therefore, a methodological contribution, a new source of data about singular thought. We can tell whether a thought is singular if we ask what we can coherently deny at the same time at which we agree with the thought. When we agree with a thought that is general, we cannot coherently deny about the thought’s subject a certain description, the one that occurs in the thought’s subject position. To show how to use this new data source, I develop a linguistic method for testing whether a speaker expresses a singular or a general thought. (shrink)

The traditional point of view on analyticity implies that truth in virtue only of meaning entails a priori acceptability and vice versa. The argument for this claim is based on the idea that meaning as it concerns truth and meaning as it concerns competence are one and the same thing. In this paper I argue that the extensions of these notions do not coincide. I hold that truth in virtue of meaning— truth for semantic reasons—doesn't imply a priori acceptability, and (...) that a priori reflection based only on knowledge of meaning—in the sense of competence—doesn't necessitate true conclusions.The main consequence of this view concerns conceptual analysis, as it presupposes we have a privileged—incorrigible in the face of empirical evidence—access to non-trivial truths about the world on the basis of mere a priori reflection founded on meaning. If, as I argue, such access is not incorrigible the project of conceptual analysis loses its special epistemological status. (shrink)

The source, status, and significance of the derivation of the necessity of identity at the beginning of Kripke’s lecture “Identity and Necessity” is discussed from a logical, philosophical, and historical point of view.

In contrast to Constructivist Views, which construe perceptual cognition as an essentially reconstructive process, this article recommends the Deictic View, which grounds perception in perceptual-demonstrative reference and the use of deictic tracking strategies for acquiring and updating knowledge about individuals. The view raises the problem of how sensory-motor tracking connects to epistemic and integrated forms of tracking. To study the strategies used to solve this problem, we report a study of the ability to track distal individuals when only their directions (...) can be perceived and not their locations. We introduce a new experimental paradigm named the 'Modified Traveling Salesman Problem' (MTSP), which requires subjects to visit n invisible targets in a 2D display once each. Surprisingly, subjects are competent at this task for up to 10 targets. We consider two types of tracking strategies that subjects might use: 'location-based' strategies and 'deictic direction-based' strategies. A number of observations suggest that subjects used the latter, at least for larger numbers of targets. We hypothesize that subjects used perceptual-demonstrative reference and deictic strategies (i) to perform the sensory-motor tracking of directional segments, (ii) to bind the segments with their updated status in the task, and (iii) to perform the epistemic tracking of invisible targets by means of perception-based inferences. (shrink)

Contextualists and assessment relativists neglect the expressive dimension of assertoric discourse that seems to give rise to faultless disagreement. Discourse that generates the intuition makes public an attitudinal conflict, and the affective -expressive dimension of the contributing utterances accounts for it. The FD-phenomenon is an effect of a public dispute generated by a sequence of expressing opposite attitudes towards a salient object or state of affairs, where the protagonists are making an attempt to persuade the other side into joining the (...) other’s camp. (shrink)

This paper examines a potential problem area for theories of direct reference: that of the substitution of co-referential names within the belief context of a belief attribution used to explain an action. Of particular interest are action explanations which involve cases of repetition — wherein beliefs are held which, though about one (other) individual, are mistakenly thought to concern two different people. It is argued that, despite the commonly held view to the contrary, no problem is posed by substitution in (...) such circumstances to theories of direct reference. (shrink)

There is a long-standing debate whether propositions, sentences, statements or utterances provide an answer to the question of what objects logical formulas stand for. Based on the traditional understanding of logic as a science of valid arguments, this question is firstly framed more exactly, making explicit that it calls not only for identifying some class of objects, but also for explaining their relationship to ordinary language utterances. It is then argued that there are strong arguments against the proposals commonly put (...) forward in the debate. The core of the problem is that an informative account of the objects formulas stand for presupposes a theory of formalization; that is, a theory that explains what formulas may adequately substitute for an inference in proofs of validity. Although such theories are still subject to research, some consequences can be drawn from an analysis of the reasons why the common accounts featuring sentences, propositions or utterances fail. Theories of formalization cannot refer to utterances qua expressions of propositions; instead they may refer to sentences and rely on additional information about linguistic structure and pragmatic context. (shrink)