In his 2022 article ‘A puzzle about the fixity of the past’, Lampert argues that standard views concerning knowledge and the semantics of ‘actually’ conflict with a widely held principle concerning the fixity of the past. I show that his attempt to establish the conflict fails, as it rests on the implicit assumption that a past mental state or utterance involving a modal indexical must have the same content across worlds with a shared past, when in fact it must, given (...) its character, differ in content. (shrink)

This paper argues for a version of metalinguistic descriptivism, the Mill-Frege view, comparing it to a currently popular alternative, predicativism. The Mill-Frege view combines tenets of Fregean views with features of the theory of direct reference. According to it, proper names have metalinguistic senses, known by competent speakers on the basis of their competence, which figure in ancillary presuppositions. In support of the view the paper argues that the name-bearing relation—which predicativists cite to account for the properties that they take (...) names to express—depends on acts of naming with a semantic significance. Acts of naming create particular words specifically designed for referential use, which they perform whether or not the language has other words articulated with the same sound or orthography. Like other forms of metalinguistic descriptivism, the Mill-Frege view affords responses to Kripke’s semantic and epistemic arguments against descriptivism. The view is prima facie more complex than predicativism; but the additional complexity is independently attested in natural languages and well-motivated. Finally, the Mill-Frege proposal deals well with Kripke’s modal argument, and accounts for modal intuitions about names, both issues that pose serious trouble to predicativism. (shrink)

De re or singular thoughts are, intuitively, those essentially or constitutively about a particular object or objects; any thought about different objects would be a different thought. How should a philosophical articulation or thematization of their nature look like? In spite of extended discussion of the issue since it was brought to the attention of the philosophical community in the late fifties by Quine (1956), we are far from having a plausible response. This is glaringly revealed by the contrasting recent (...) takes on the issue by writers such as Soames (2005) – who adopts the view by Donnellan (1979) to be outlined presently – and Jeshion (2001), otherwise sharing a similar direct-reference approach to the prototypical expression of those contents. Discussing the matter in connection with the status of the Kripkean category of the contingent a priori in the just mentioned article, Donnellan (1979) argued that what can be properly classified as knowable a priori about utterances like those involving ‘one meter’ or ‘Neptune’ famously proposed by Kripke (1980) cannot be the very same singular content that is contingent; he distinguished to that end between knowing a true proposition expressed by an utterance, and knowing that an utterance expresses a true proposition. (Thus, for instance, if, while listening to an utterance in a language that I do not know, I am told by a reliable person who knows the language and whom I trust that the utterance is true, I come thereby to know that the sentence expresses a truth, without knowing the truth that it expresses.) Evans (1979) replied that, for a very specific sort of cases involving “descriptive names”, a related proto-two-dimensionalist account should be preferred, on which it is not the singular contingent content, but rather a general descriptive one which is knowable a priori. In a series of papers, Robin Jeshion (2000, 2001) has recently attacked Donnellan's proposal, arguing in favour of the most straightforward interpretation of Kripke's claim: in the relevant cases, the very same singular content can be both contingent and knowable a priori. In this paper, I will appeal to a generalized version of two-dimensional semantics to advance an account of the Kripkean cases along the lines of Evans's, and I will argue that Jeshion's compelling arguments against Donnellan's view do not apply to this version. (shrink)

Russell’s theory of memory as acquaintance with the past seems to square uneasily with his definition of acquaintance as the converse of the relation of presentation of an object to a subject. We show how the two views can be made to cohere under a suitable construal of ‘presentation’, which has the additional appeal of bringing Russell’s theory of memory closer to contemporary views on direct reference and object-dependent thinking than is usually acknowledged. The drawback is that memory as acquaintance (...) with the past falls short of fulfilling Russell’s requirement that knowledge by acquaintance be discriminating knowledge – a shortcoming shared by contemporary externalist accounts of knowledge from memory. (shrink)

What are the conditions for fixing the reference of a proper name? Debate on this point has recently been rekindled by Scott Soames, Robin Jeshion, and others. In this paper, I sketch a new pragmatic approach to the justification of reference-fixing procedures, in opposition to accounts that insist on an invariant set of conditions for fixing reference across environments and linguistic communities. Comparing reference to other relations whose instances are introduced through "initiation" procedures, I outline a picture in which the (...) procedures that are successful for fixing the reference of proper names depend in part on regularities in the actual environment. (shrink)

Some philosophers, like Kripke, Williamson, Hawthorne, and Turri, have offered examples of claims that are allegedly contingent and a priori justifiable. If any of these examples is genuine, this would upend the traditional epistemological classification on which (a) all and only a priori justifiable claims are necessary and (b) all and only a posteriori ones are contingent. I argue here that these examples are not genuine. This conclusion is not new, but the strategy pursued here is to formalize these muchdiscussed (...) examples in symbolic logics. Once formalized, a perspicuous representation of their logical form will bring into sharp relief that these examples are not both contingent and a priori. Two takeaways are (1) that the traditional epistemological classification remains plausible and (2) that one’s proposed examples of contingent a priori claims should be supported by a formalization in one’s preferred background symbolic logic. (shrink)

I investigate when we can (rationally) have attitudes, and when we cannot. I argue that a comprehensive theory must explain three phenomena. First, being related by descriptions or names to a proposition one has strong reason to believe is true does not guarantee that one can rationally believe that proposition. Second, such descriptions, etc. do enable individuals to rationally have various non-doxastic attitudes, such as hope and admiration. And third, even for non-doxastic attitudes like that, not just any description will (...) allow it. I argue that we should think of attitude formation like we do (practical) choices among options. I motivate this view linguistically, extending "relevant alternatives'' theories of the attitudes to both belief and to the other, non-doxastic attitudes. Given a natural principle governing choice, and some important differences between doxastic and non-doxastic "choices'', we can explain these puzzling phenomena. (shrink)

I develop and argue for a kind of externalism about certain kinds of non-doxastic attitudes that I call policy externalism. Policy externalism about a given type of attitude is the view that all the reasonable policies for having attitudes of that type will not involve the agent's beliefs that some relevant conditions obtain. My defense primarily involves attitudes like hatred, regret, and admiration, and has two parts: a direct deductive argument and an indirect linguistic argument, an inference to the best (...) explanation of some strange ways we use certain conditionals. The main thought throughout is that attitudes we reason with, like belief, are very different from attitudes we don't reason with, in a way that constrains the former but not the latter. Finally, I investigate some consequences of policy externalism, including that it secures the possibility of genuine conditional apologies. (shrink)

I review and reconsider some of the themes of ‘Two notions of necessity’ (Davies and Humberstone, 1980) and attempt to reach a deeper understanding and appreciation of Gareth Evans’s reflections (in ‘Reference and contingency’, 1979) on both modality and reference. My aim is to plot the relationships between the notions of necessity that Humberstone and I characterised in terms of operators in two-dimensional modal logic, the notions of superficial and deep necessity that Evans himself described, and the epistemic notion of (...) a priority. (shrink)

I develop and argue for a kind of externalism about certain kinds of non-doxastic attitudes that I call policy externalism. Policy externalism about a given type of attitude is the view that all the reasonable policies for having attitudes of that type will not involve the agent's beliefs that some relevant conditions obtain. My defense primarily involves attitudes like hatred, regret, and admiration, and has two parts: a direct deductive argument and an indirect linguistic argument, an inference to the best (...) explanation of some strange ways we use certain conditionals. The main thought throughout is that attitudes we reason with, like belief, are very different from attitudes we don't reason with, in a way that constrains the former but not the latter. Finally, I investigate some consequences of policy externalism, including that it secures the possibility of genuine conditional apologies. (shrink)

Kripke claims that there are necessary a posteriori truths and contingent a priori truths. These claims challenge the traditional Kantian view that (K) All knowledge of necessary truths is a priori and all a priori knowledge is of necessary truths. Kripke’s claims continue to be resisted, which indicates that the Kantian view remains attractive. My goal is to identify the most plausible principles linking the epistemic and the modal. My strategy for identifying the principles is to investigate two related questions. (...) Are there compelling general supporting arguments for (K)? Are there decisive counterexamples to (K)? My investigation uncovers two intuitively plausible principles that are not open to decisive counterexamples but which enjoy no compelling independent support. (shrink)

In ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions', Keith Donnellan claimed that Bertrand Russell and Peter Strawson ignored referential uses of definite descriptions. The intense debate that followed Donnellan's paper focused on the contrast between Donnellan and Russell, leaving Strawson aside. In this paper, I focus on the contrast between Donnellan and Strawson. By focusing on this contrast, my aim is, first, to clarify the nature of Donnellan's distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions and, second, to argue that a proper (...) understanding of referential uses holds the key to a proper understanding of direct reference. Contrary to the standard view, the crucial issue is not the nature of the proposition expressed (singular versus general) but how a speaker comes to talk about an object. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to connect naming and analyticity and to argue that, like “Hesperus is Hesperus”, “Hesperus is Phosphorus” is analytic. In the paper, I also discuss several other unexpected cases of analytic truth like “Aristotle existed”.

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)

Names and natural kind terms have long been a major focus of debates about meaning and reference. This article discusses some of the theories and arguments that have appeared in those debates. It is remarkably difficult to say what names are without making controversial theoretical assumptions. This article does not attempt to do so here. It instead relies on paradigm examples that nearly all theorists would agree are proper names, for instance, ‘Aristotle’, ‘Mark Twain’, ‘London’, ‘Venus’, and ‘Pegasus’. All of (...) the proper names that are discussed in the article are singular nouns that have no syntactic structure. Most of them refer to objects, but some, such as ‘Pegasus’, apparently do not. The article begins with proper names and the question ‘What is the meaning of a proper name?’ It turns to natural kind terms later. (shrink)

This paper presents a semantic and pragmatic theory of complex demonstratives. According to this theory, the semantic content of a complex demonstrative, in a context, is simply an object, and the semantic content of a sentence that contains a complex demonstrative, in a context, is a singular proposition. This theory is defended from various objections to direct reference theories of complex demonstratives, including King's objection from quantification into complex demonstratives.

Robert Stalnaker contrasts two interpretations, semantic and metasemantic, of the two-dimensionalist framework. On the semantic interpretation, the primary intension or diagonal proposition associated with an utterance is a semantic value that the utterance has in virtue of the actual linguistic meaning of the corresponding sentence, and that primary intension is both what a competent speaker grasps and what determines different secondary intensions or horizontal propositions relative to different possible worlds considered as actual. The metasemantic interpretation reverses the order of explanation: (...) an utterance has the primary intension it has because it yields the secondary intensions it yields relative to different possible worlds considered as actual. In these possible worlds, the semantic facts can be different: the metasemantic interpretation is metasemantic in the sense that the secondary intensions are determined relative to possible worlds considered as actual given the meanings the expressions have there. Stalnaker holds a causal picture of the reference of names, according to which names have no meaning over and above their unique referent, and therefore maintains that the semantic interpretation is not an option. He thus endorses the metasemantic interpretation, while insisting that this interpretation does not, contrary to what he originally thought, yield any account of a priori truth and knowledge. My double aim in this paper is to show (i) that the metasemantic interpretation, as sketched by Stalnaker, is not compatible with one natural understanding of the causal picture of reference, on which names are rigid because they have their original bearers essentially , and (ii) that a third kind of interpretation of the framework is available, the metasyntactic interpretation, which grants that names have their bearers essentially and yields some account of a priori knowledge. (shrink)

This article systematically challenges Kripke's modal argument and Soames's defence of this argument by arguing that, just like descriptions, names can take narrow or wide scopes over modalities, and that there is a big difference between the wide scope reading and the narrow scope reading of a modal sentence with a name. Its final conclusions are that all of Kripke's and Soames's arguments are untenable due to some fallacies or mistakes; names are not “rigid designators”; if there were rigid designators, (...) description(s) could be rigidified to refer fixedly to objects; so names cannot be distinguished in this way from the corresponding descriptions. A descriptivist account of names is still correct; and there is no justification for Kripke's theory of rigid designation and its consequences. (shrink)

Although much has been written about the truth-conditions of de re attitude reports, little attention has been paid to certain ‘ultra-liberal’ uses of those reports. We believe that if these uses are legitimate, then a number of interesting consequences for various theses in philosophical semantics follow. The majority of the paper involves describing these consequences. In short, we argue that, if true, ultra-liberal reports: bring counterexamples to a popular approach to de re attitude ascriptions, which we will call ‘descriptivism’; and (...) combine with independently plausible principles about the logic of belief to imply that subjects can achieve omniscience about what exists from the armchair. Although we are not committed to the view that ultra-liberal reports are false, in the final part of the paper we discuss the prospects of pursuing a line according to which the acceptability of such reports ought not be taken at face value. We conclude by arguing that those who are sympathetic with this move might have reason to doubt the truth of an even broader class of acceptable de re attitude reports, namely those that have been taken to undermine orthodox accounts of de re attitude ascriptions. (shrink)

Famously, both Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan opposed description theories and insisted on the role of history in determining the reference of a proper name token. No wonder, then, that their views on proper names have often been assimilated. By focusing on reference borrowing—an alleged phenomenon that Kripke takes to be fundamental—we argue that they should not be. In particular, we claim that according to Donnellan a proper name token never borrows its reference from preceding tokens which it is historically (...) connected to. On the contrary, its reference is always fixed anew on who or what the speaker has in mind when he or she produces it. In fact, what is important to realize is that Donnellan and Kripke took two different histories to be relevant: that of the proper name token produced by the speaker , and that of the cognitive status of the speaker when he or she produces it . We end by suggesting that this difference between Kripke’s and Donnellan’s accounts of proper names rests on a more general difference in their approach to language. (shrink)

According to social externalism, it is possible to possess a concept not solely in virtue of one’s intrinsic properties but also in virtue of relations to one’s linguistic community. Derek Ball (2009) argues, in effect, that (i) social externalism extends to our concepts of colour experience and (ii) this fact undermines both the knowledge argument against physicalism and the most popular physicalist response to it, known as the phenomenal concept strategy. I argue that Ball is mistaken about (ii) even granting (...) (i). The knowledge argument and the phenomenal concept strategy might have to be modified to make them consistent with social externalism, but not in fundamental or detrimental ways. (shrink)

Mary learns all the physical facts that one can learn by watching lectures on black-on-white television. According to Jackson, Mary learns new facts when she leaves the room and has color experiences, and that this undermines physicalism. Physicalists have responded by denying the new facts thesis; they argue, she acquires abilities, acquaintance knowledge, or new guises. I argue that the NFT is more plausible than any of the proposed alternatives. I also argue that the NFT does not undermine physicalism unless (...) physicalism entails that all physical facts are discursively learnable, and that the latter entailment is questionable. (shrink)

De re or singular thoughts are, intuitively, those essentially or constitutively about a particular object or objects; any thought about different objects would be a different thought. How should a philosophical articulation or thematization of their nature look like? In spite of extended discussion of the issue since it was brought to the attention of the philosophical community in the late fifties by Quine (1956), we are far from having a plausible response. Discussing the matter in connection with the status (...) of the Kripkean category of the contingent a priori, Donnellan (1979) argued that what can be properly classified as knowable a priori about utterances like those involving ‘one meter’ or ‘Neptune’ famously proposed by Kripke (1980) cannot be the very same singular content that is contingent he distinguished to that end between knowing a true proposition expressed by an utterance, and knowing that an utterance expresses a true proposition. Evans (1979) replied that, for a very specific sort of cases involving “descriptive names”, a related proto-two-dimensionalist account should be preferred, on which it is not the singular contingent content, but rather a general descriptive one which is knowable a priori. In a series of papers, Robin Jeshion (2000, 2001) has recently attacked Donnellan's proposal, arguing in favour of the most straightforward interpretation of Kripke's claim: in the relevant cases, the very same singular content can be both contingent and knowable a priori. This paper appeals to a generalized version of two-dimensional semantics to advance an account of the Kripkean cases along the lines of Evans's, and argues that Jeshion's compelling arguments against Donnellan's view do not apply to this version. (shrink)

semantic minimalism and moderte contextualism.

The truth of a statement depends on the world in two ways: what the statement says is true if the world is as the statement says it is; on the other hand, what the expressions in the statement mean depends on what the world is like (for instance, on what conventions are in place). Each of these two kinds of dependence of truth on the world corresponds to one of the dimensions on the two-dimensional semantic framework, developed in the 1970’ (...) in the work of Evans, Kaplan, Kripke and Stalnaker. The introduction provides a systematic overview of the framework, the ideas of its earlier originators, recent developments and criticism. Finally, it gives a brief overview over the contributions to the volume. (shrink)

Over the past fifty years the philosophy of language and mind has been dominated by a nondescriptivist approach to content and reference. This book attempts to recast and systematize that approach by offering an indexical model in terms of mental files. According to Recanati, we refer through mental files, the function of which is to store information derived through certain types of contextual relation the subject bears to objects in his or her environment. The reference of a file is determined (...) relationally, not satisfactionally, so a file is not to be equated to the body of (mis-)information it contains. Mental files are the mental equivalent of singular terms, and the reference of linguistic expressions is inherited from that of the files we associate with them. On this approach, mental files, the vehicles of singular thought, do all the work of so-called 'modes of presentation' in Fregean and neo-Russellian theories. (shrink)

I consider difficult data involving the interaction of attitudes and conditionals, specifically non-doxastic attitude expressions like 'regret'. I first show that felicitous attitude conditionals in "ignorance contexts", where the relevant person doesn't know the antecedent is true, give rise to a number of difficult problems given widely held assumptions in semantics. I then argue that, even so, we should expect these conditionals to be true and reasonable to utter in ignorance contexts, given certain other kinds of attitude construction that tend (...) to involve free relatives like `whatever'. I then use that observation to explain many of the more puzzling aspects of these conditionals, and to show that we should treat felicitous doxastic attitude conditionals differently from felicitous non-doxastic ones. I leave explaining felicitous doxastic attitude conditionals for future work, but offer constraints on a satisfying explanation of them. (shrink)

Nathan Salmon presents a selection of nineteen of his essays from the early 1980s to 2006, on a set of closely connected topics central to analytic philosophy. The book is divided into four thematic sections, on direct reference, apriority, belief, and the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. The volume concludes with four essays about the distinction between meaning and use, or more generally, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics.

Kripke’s examples of allegedly contingent a priori sentences include ‘Stick S is exactly one meter long’, where the reference of ‘meter’ is fixed by the description ‘the length of stick S’. In response to skepticism concerning apriority Kripke replaced the meter sentence with a more sophisticated variant, arguing that the modified example is more immune to such skepticism. The case for apriority is examined. A distinction is drawn between apriority and a broader notion, “qua-priority,” of a truth whose epistemic justification (...) is dependent on no experience other than that required to justify belief of the deliverances of pure semantics. It is argued that Kripke’s examples are neither a priori nor qua-priori. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to and elaborate on some of the ideas put forth on my book The Philosophy of Curiosity (2012) as well as its follow-up “Curiosity and Ignorance” (2016) by Nenad Miščević, Erhan Demircioğlu, Mirela Fuš, Safi ye Yiğit, Danilo Šuster, Irem Günhan Altıparmak, and Aran Arslan.

In this paper, I dwell on a particular distinction introduced by Ilhan Inan—the distinction between ostensible and inostensible use of our language. The distinction applies to singular terms, such as proper names and definite descriptions, or to general terms like concepts and to the ways in which we refer to objects in the world by using such terms. Inan introduces the distinction primarily as an epistemic one but in his earlier writings (1997: 49) he leaves some room for it to (...) have some semantic significance i.e., the view that in certain intensional de re contexts whether a term occurring in a sentence is ostensible or inostensible may have a bearing on the semantic content of the sentence. However, in his later writings e.g., The Philosophy of Curiosity, he appears to abandon his earlier thoughts regarding the semantic significance of his distinction. He says: “the ostensible/inostensible distinction is basically an epistemic one.... It is an epistemic distinction that has no semantic significance” (2012: 65). I argue that there are indeed such intensional contexts in which the distinction has some semantic significance, i.e., whether a term is ostensible or inostensible has in fact a bearing on what proposition is expressed by the sentence in which the term occurs. (shrink)

A lot has been said about how the notion of reference relates to the notion of knowledge; not much has been said, however, on how the notion of referencerelates to our ability to become aware of what we do not know that allows us to be curious. In this essay I attempt to spell out a certain type of reference I call ‘inostensible’ that I claim to be a fundamental linguistic tool which allows us to become curious of what we (...) do not know. In the first part, I try to explicate the notion of inostensible reference, both for singular and for general terms, as well as full declarative sentences, and in the second part, I argue that our capacity to enjoy conceptual curiosity is essentially based upon our aptitude for inostensible reference. (shrink)

Throughout this paper, we are trying to show how and why our Mathematical frame-work seems inappropriate to solve problems in Theory of Computation. More exactly, the concept of turning back in time in paradoxes causes inconsistency in modeling of the concept of Time in some semantic situations. As we see in the first chapter, by introducing a version of “Unexpected Hanging Paradox”,first we attempt to open a new explanation for some paradoxes. In the second step, by applying this paradox, it (...) is demonstrated that any formalized system for the Theory of Computation based on Classical Logic and Turing Model of Computation leads us to a contradiction. We conclude that our mathematical frame work is inappropriate for Theory of Computation. Furthermore, the result provides us a reason that many problems in Complexity Theory resist to be solved.(This work is completed in 2017 -5- 2, it is in vixra in 2017-5-14, presented in Unilog 2018, Vichy). (shrink)

In “Naming with Necessity”, it is argued that Kripke’s thesis that proper names are rigid designators is best seen as being motivated by an individual-driven picture of modality, which has two parts. First, inherent in proper-name usage is the expectation that names refer to modally robust individuals: individuals that can sustain modal predications like ‘is necessarily human’. Second, these modally robust individuals are the fundamental building blocks on the basis of which possible worlds should be conceived in a modal semantics (...) intended to mirror the conceptual apparatus behind ordinary modal talk. The individual-driven picture is distinct from two views inspired by Kripke, direct reference theory and Millianism. The former covers only the first half of the picture, while the latter explicitly gives up on that half even, opting to remain neutral about what expectation expressions impose on the nature of their referents. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against the view there are contingent a priori truths, and against the related view that there are contingent logical truths. I will suggest that in general, predicates ›a priori‹ and ›contingent‹ are implicitly relativized to circumstances, and argue that apriority entails necessity, whenever the two are relativized to the same circumstance. I will then criticize the idea, inspired by David Kaplan's framework, of contingent contents "knowable under a priori characters." I will also argue, against Kaplan, (...) that sentences of the form »The actual F is F« do not deserve the status of logical truths, since what they express is neither necessary nor a priori. (shrink)

The elements of the referential proposal of Kripke and Putnam are presented. The consequences of such semantics in regard to the theory of truth and epistemology are examined. Some critical arguments are commented and, finally, it concludes with a general evaluation of the proposal of Kripke and Putnam.