This thesis investigates the nature of the relation between mental representations in successful verbal communication, thought attribution, agreement, and disagreement — a relation which I call “samethinking”. The nature of samethinking raises several foundational questions about the nature of (non-natural) meaning, and the cognitive underpinnings of the emergence of culture. It bears on long-lasting puzzles in the philosophy of mind and language (such as Frege’s puzzle and Kripke’s puzzle about belief). Samethinking does not amount to sharing a reference (with “sharing" (...) I refer to two or more thinkers having something in common): it is more demanding. How can we explain and characterize this relation, more stringent than coreference, that is instantiated by a pair of thoughts when samethinking takes place? It is often assumed that this relation involves sharing a thought content more fine-grained than reference. In this thesis, I argue that the issue is more complex than what has been commonly assumed, and I suggest an alternative model in which sharing thought content is not necessary. (shrink)

We may suppose that the truth predicate that we utilize in our semantic metalanguage is a two-place predicate relating sentences to contexts, the truth-in-context-X predicate. Seeming paradoxes pertaining to the truth-in-context-X predicate can be blocked by placing restrictions on the structure of contexts. While contexts must specify a domain of contexts, and what a context constant denotes relative to a context must be a context in the context domain of that context, no context may belong to its own context domain. (...) A generalization of that restriction appears to block all of the paradoxes of truth-in-context-X. This restriction entails that, in a certain sense, we cannot talk about the context we are in. This result will be defended, up to a point, on broadly ontological grounds. It will also be conjectured that our semantic metalanguage can be regarded as semantically closed. (shrink)

In this paper, we present two experimental studies on reference of complex demonstratives. The results of our experiments challenge the dominant view in philosophy of language, according to which demonstrative reference is determined by the speaker's intentions. The first experiment shows that in a context where there are two candidates for the referent—one determined by the speaker’s intention, the other by some “external” factors—people prefer to identify the referent of a demonstrative with the latter object. The external factors for which (...) this prediction has been confirmed include the speaker’s demonstration and the descriptive content of a demonstrative. The second experiment shows that while this preference can be explained in terms of the speakers’ having different sorts of referential intentions, the relevant kind of intentions are fully opaque to the subjects. At the end of our paper, we point to some alternative accounts of demonstrative reference, including a pluralistic and hybrid approach, which can accommodate our experimental results. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel argument against intentionalism about demonstrative reference. The term ‘intentionalism’ is used to denote the view saying that the referent of a demonstrative expression is determined by the speaker’s intention. My argument focuses on ‘mismatch cases’, roughly, the cases in which the speaker’s intention determines a different object from the one which appears to be the referent in the light of contextual factors. The opponents of intentionalism claim that intentionalism yields simply incorrect reference predictions in these (...) cases. Many intentionalism defenders claim to the contrary, i.e. that the relevant kind of intention fixes the referent in line with the contextual factors and thus the theory provides correct predictions. I will argue that this strategy is objectionable as the concept of the relevant referential intention is genuinely parasitic on non-intentional accounts of demonstrative reference. (shrink)

According to intentionalism, the semantic reference of the uses of demonstratives is fixed, at least partly, by the speaker’s referential intention. In this paper, I argue against the possibility of the existence of a semantic convention of this sort. My argument is placed in the Lewisian framework of signaling games and consists of several steps that correspond to four anti-intentionalist arguments, already present in the literature, that have proven inconclusive when employed separately and without being set in the mentioned framework.