In this paper, I want to deal with the problem of how to find an adequate context of interpretation for indexical sentences that enables one to account for the intuitive truth-conditional content which some apparently puzzling indexical sentences like “I am not here now” as well as other such sentences contextually have. In this respect, I will pursue a fictionalist line. This line allows for shifts in interpretation contexts and urges that such shifts are governed by pretense, which has to (...) be understood in terms of socially shared make-believe games. By appealing to pretense so conceived, I will show that the fictionalist perspective is halfway between an intentionalist perspective, according to which the above indexical sentences have to be interpreted in a shifted intended context, (this perspective is primarily defined by Predelli 1998, Analysis 58, 107; Mind and Language 13, 400) and a conventionalist perspective, according to which indexical reference shifts in accordance with a conventional setting. (For this perspective, cf. Corazza et al. 2002, Philosophical Studies 107, See also Corazza 2004, Reflecting the Mind: Indexicality and Quasi-Indexicality, Oxford University Press). Finally, I will claim that the fictionalist analysis of cases of non-ordinary uses of indexicals like “here” and “now” can be retained in face of a new alternative analysis of those cases in terms of an ‘unbound anaphora’ – theory (cf. Corazza 2004, Synthese 138, 145). (shrink)

A ‘multiple-proposition phenomenon’ is a putative counterexample to the widespread implicit assumption that a simple indicative sentence semantically expresses at most one proposition. Several philosophers and linguists have recently developed hypotheses concerning this notion. The guiding questions motivating this research are: Is there an interesting and homogenous semantic category of MP phenomena? If so, what is the import? Do MP theories have any relevance to important current questions in the study of language? I motivate an affirmative answer to, and then (...) argue that MP theorizing is quite relevant to debates at the semantics/ pragmatics interface. (shrink)

Following Neale, I call the notion that there can be no such thing as a structured referring expression ‘structure skepticism’. The specific aim of this paper is to defuse some putative counterexamples to structure skepticism. The general aim is to bolster the case in favor of the thesis that lack of structure—in a sense to be made precise—is essential to reference.

The received view about meteorological predicates like ‘rain’ is that they carry an argument slot for a location which can be filled explicitly or implicitly. The view assumes that ‘rain’, in the absence of an explicit location, demands that the context provide a specific location. In an earlier article in this journal, I provided a counter-example, viz. a context in which ‘it is raining’ receives a location-indefinite interpretation. On the basis of that example, I argued that when there is tacit (...) references to a location, it takes place for pragmatic reasons and casts no light on the semantics of meteorological predicates. Since then, several authors have reanalysed the counter-example, so as to make it compatible with the standard view. I discuss those attempts and argue that my account is superior. (shrink)

Since Kaplan : 81–98, 1979) first provided a logic for context-sensitive expressions, it has been thought that the only way to construct a logic for indexicals is to restrict it to arguments which take place in a single context— that is, instantaneous arguments, uttered by a single speaker, in a single place, etc. In this paper, I propose a logic which does away with these restrictions, and thus places arguments where they belong, in real world conversations. The central innovation is (...) that validity depends not just on the sentences in the argument, but also on certain abstract relations between contexts. This enrichment of the notion of logical form leads to some seemingly counter-intuitive results: a sequence of sentences may make up a valid argument in one sequence of contexts, and an invalid one in another such sequence. I argue that this is an unavoidable result of context sensitivity in general, and of the nature of indexicals in particular, and that reflection on such examples will lead us to a better understanding of the idea of applying logic to context sensitive expressions, and thus to natural language in general. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a new way to distinguish between indexicals, like “I” and “today”, and demonstratives, like “she” and “this”. The main test case is the second person singular pronoun “you”. The tradition would generally count it as a demonstrative, because the speaker’s intentions play a role in providing it with a semantic value. I present cross-linguistic data and explanations offered of the data in typology and semantics to show that “you” belongs on the indexical side, and argue (...) that they can be generalized to a novel criterion for distinguishing between indexicals and demonstratives. The central theoretical claim is that the semantic values of indexicals are objects which play certain utterance-related roles, which are fixed independently of the words being used in the utterance. For instance, the speaker plays the speaker role whether or not she uses the word “I”, and the addressee plays that role whether or not the speaker uses the word “you”. Demonstratives, on the other hand, pick out objects that play no such role, and are instead helped by the speaker’s word-specific intentions. (shrink)

The logical omniscience problem, whereby standard models of epistemic logic treat an agent as believing all consequences of its beliefs and knowing whatever follows from what else it knows, has received plenty of attention in the literature. But many attempted solutions focus on a fairly narrow specification of the problem: avoiding the closure of belief or knowledge, rather than showing how the proposed logic is of philosophical interest or of use in computer science or artificial intelligence. Sentential epistemic logics, as (...) opposed to traditional possible worlds approaches, do not suffer from the problems of logical omniscience but are often thought to lack interesting epistemic properties. In this paper, I focus on the case of rule-based agents, which play a key role in contemporary AI research but have been neglected in the logical literature. I develop a framework for modelling monotonic, nonmonotonic and introspective rule-based reasoners which have limited cognitive resources and prove that the resulting models have a number of interesting properties. An axiomatization of the resulting logic is given, together with completeness, decidability and complexity results. (shrink)

Our utterances are typically if not always "situated," in the sense that they are true or false relative to unarticulated parameters of the extra-linguistic context. The problem is to explain how these parameters are determined, given that nothing in the uttered sentences indicates them. It is tempting to claim that they must be determined at the level of thought or intention. However, as many philosophers have observed, thoughts themselves are no less situated than utterances. Unarticulated parameters need not be mentally (...) represented. In this paper, I try to make precise the notion of representation at stake here. In one sense of 'representation', something is represented if it is inferentially relevant. In another, less demanding sense, something is represented if it is relevant to the construction of a context-sensitive, ad hoc concept. Ad hoc concepts act as "proxies" for cognitively more demanding representations. They "imitate" the latter's epistemic and pragmatic roles while being inferentially less sophisticated. Thus, there are two senses in which a thought can be said to be situated: (1) its truth-value is relative to a non-represented contextual parameter, (2) its truth-value is not itself relative, but it involves a context-sensitive, ad hoc concept. (shrink)

-/- Human beings are conscious not only of the world around them but also of themselves: their activities, their bodies, and their mental lives. They are, that is, self-conscious (or, equivalently, self-aware). Self-consciousness can be understood as an awareness of oneself. But a self-conscious subject is not just aware of something that merely happens to be themselves, as one is if one sees an old photograph without realising that it is of oneself. Rather a self-conscious subject is aware of themselves (...) as themselves; it is manifest to them that they themselves are the object of awareness. Self-consciousness is a form of consciousness that is paradigmatically expressed in English by the words “I”, “me”, and “my”, terms that each of us uses to refer to ourselves as such. -/- A central topic throughout the history of philosophy—and increasingly so since the seventeenth century—the phenomena surrounding self-consciousness prompt a variety of fundamental philosophical and scientific questions, including its relation to consciousness; its semantic and epistemic features; its realisation in both conceptual and non-conceptual representation; and its connection to our conception of an objective world populated with others like ourselves. (shrink)

In this paper we present some benefits of semantic minimalism. In particular, we stress how minimalism allows us to avoid cognitive overloading, in that it does not posit hidden indexicals or variables at the LF or representational level and it does not posit the operation of free enrichment processes when we produce or hear a sentence. We nonetheless argue that a fully adequate semantic minimalism should embrace a form of relativism—that is, the view that semantic content must be evaluated, pace (...) Cappelen and Lepore, vis-à-vis a given situation, the latter being a fragment of a possible world or a partial world. In so doing we shall show how Cappelen and Lepore damage the insight of semantic minimalism insofar as they insist that the semantic content should be evaluated with respect to a whole possible world. This move fails to capture the powerful contextualist intuition that it does not make much sense to evaluate the content of, say, Naomi is rich, or Jon is tall, with respect to, for instance, the actual world. (shrink)

Is it possible for me to refer to someone other than myself with the word "I"? Or somewhere other than where I am with the word "here"? Or some time other than the present with the word "now"? David Kaplan, who provides the best worked out semantics for pure-indexical terms like "I," "here," and "now" suggests, quite intuitively, that I could not. Put simply, "I am here now" looks as though I can never utter it and have it turn out (...) false. But, intuitive as this seems, one need only hear the answering machine message, "Sorry! I am not here now," to see that there may be problems. If! can't fail to refer to where I am and when I'm there with "here" and "now," why is my apparently contradictory assertion so readily comprehensible? Many have been quick to abandon Kaplan's account of pure-indexicals in the face of such problems. The focus of this paper, though, is those who develop sophisticated accounts of how we determine different contexts for applying pure-indexicals. The hope is that this handles problem cases while allowing us to retain most of Kaplan's theory. However, this paper introduces and examines some additional uses of pure-indexicals which pose an interesting problem for the context-determination adaptation of Kaplan's account. It is argued that context-determination theorists cannot explain these cases in the same way that they explain standard problem cases, and that any reason they can offer for denying the relevance of such cases to accounts of pure-indexicals will apply equally well to the cases that motivate their theories, thus rendering context-determination accounts superfluous. In what follows, then, there is a brief summary of Kaplan's account, the problem cases that threaten it, and the context-determination theorist's response to these problem cases. The interesting and problematic uses of pure-indexicals that context-determination accounts cannot explain are then introduced, and an explanation is given of why there is no way for the context-determination theorist to exclude these cases from our accounts of pure-indexicals without also excluding the cases that motivate their own theory. (shrink)

My contribution to the 'MIMESIS, METAPHYSICS AND MAKE-BELIEVE' conference held in honour of Kendall Walton in the University of Leeds.

En un artículo publicado recientemente en esta revista, Javier Vidal argumenta que toda creencia de primera persona es una creencia consciente, una conclusión que pone en jaque ciertas teorías de la consciencia, como él mismo expone. El razonamiento de Vidal se basa en un argumento que muestra que uno conoce toda creencia de primera persona que tiene y en un principio que vincula conocimiento y consciencia. Mi objetivo en este trabajo es mostrar que el razonamiento de Vidal no es sólido. (...) En particular, hago patente que el argumento depende de rechazar la relación ampliamente aceptada en epistemología entre creencia y conocimiento. Además, argumento que SC* o bien prejuzga la cuestión o bien involucra una noción de consciencia no relevante para la discusión. (shrink)

The author defends a combination of Strawson’s account of definite descriptions as devices of singular reference par excellence with the Russellian truth-evaluation of utterances of sentences with descriptions. The complex Russellian proposition is, according to the author’s view, introduced by such utterances into communication as a by-product of the instrumental side of an attempt to make a singular statement. This, precisely like the instrumental aspects of similar attempts exploiting names or demonstratives has to be reflected by analysis but should not (...) be confused with the communicative function of utterances. The success of all these attempts depends on the fulfilment of empirical conditions of various types, given by semantics of descriptions, names or demonstratives . But their communicative function does not consist in claiming that these conditions are fulfilled.The author agrees with Strawson that the first two conjuncts of the complex Russellian proposition are introduced into communication as presuppositions: but argues in favour of defining presupposition in normative, rather the intentional terms. (shrink)

The received view about meteorological predicates like ‘rain' is that they carry an argument slot for a location which can be filled explicitly or implicitly. The view assumes that ‘rain', in the absence of an explicit location, demands that the context provide a specific location. In an earlier article, I have provided a counter-example to that claim, viz. a context in which ‘it is raining' receives a location-indefinite interpretation. On the basis of that example, I have argued that when there (...) is tacit reference to a location, it takes place for pragmatic reasons and casts no light on the semantics of meteorological predicates. But several authors have reanalysed the counter-example, so as to make it compatible with the standard view. I discuss those attempts, and argue that my account is better. Methodological considerations concerning the relations between pragmatics and logical form are offered along the way. (shrink)