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Words without Meaning

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  1. Presuppositions as Anaphoric Duality Enablers.Christopher Gauker - 2016 - Topoi 35 (1):133-144.
    The key to an adequate account of presupposition projection is to accommodate the fact that the presuppositions of a sentence cannot always be read off the sentence but can often be identified only on the basis of prior utterances in the conversation in which the sentence is uttered. In addition, an account of presupposition requires a three-valued semantics of assertibility and deniability in a context. Presuppositions can be explicated as sentences that belong to the conversation and the assertibility of which (...)
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  • Living Words: Meaning Underdetermination and the Dynamic Lexicon.Peter Ludlow - 2014 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Peter Ludlow shows how word meanings are much more dynamic than we might have supposed, and explores how they are modulated even during everyday conversation. The resulting view is radical, and has far-reaching consequences for our political and legal discourse, and for enduring puzzles in the foundations of semantics, epistemology, and logic.
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  • Neo-pragmatist (practice-based) theories of meaning.Ronald Loeffler - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 4 (1):197-218.
    In recent years, several systematic theories of linguistic meaning have been offered that give pride of place to linguistic practice, or the process of linguistic communication. Often these theories are referred to as neo-pragmatist or new pragmatist; I call them 'practice-based'. According to practice-based theories of meaning, the process of linguistic communication is somehow constitutive of, or otherwise essential for the existence of, propositional linguistic meaning. Moreover, these theories disavow, or downplay, the semantic importance of inflationary notions of representation. I (...)
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  • Computational modeling vs. computational explanation: Is everything a Turing machine, and does it matter to the philosophy of mind?Gualtiero Piccinini - 2007 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (1):93 – 115.
    According to pancomputationalism, everything is a computing system. In this paper, I distinguish between different varieties of pancomputationalism. I find that although some varieties are more plausible than others, only the strongest variety is relevant to the philosophy of mind, but only the most trivial varieties are true. As a side effect of this exercise, I offer a clarified distinction between computational modelling and computational explanation.<br><br>.
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  • Zero tolerance for pragmatics.Christopher Gauker - 2008 - Synthese 165 (3):359–371.
    The proposition expressed by a sentence is relative to a context. But what determines the content of the context? Many theorists would include among these determinants aspects of the speaker’s intention in speaking. My thesis is that, on the contrary, the determinants of the context never include the speaker’s intention. My argument for this thesis turns on a consideration of the role that the concept of proposition expressed in context is supposed to play in a theory of linguistic communication. To (...)
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  • A dilemma for dispositional answers to Kripkenstein’s challenge.Andrea Guardo - 2023 - Minds and Machines 33 (1):135-152.
    Kripkenstein’s challenge is usually described as being essentially about the use of a word in new kinds of cases ‒ the old kinds of cases being commonly considered as non-problematic. I show that this way of conceiving the challenge is neither true to Kripke’s intentions nor philosophically defensible: the Kripkean skeptic can question my answering “125” to the question “What is 68 plus 57?” even if that problem is one I have already encountered and answered. I then argue that once (...)
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  • How to Express Implicit Attitudes.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):251-272.
    I argue that what speakers mean or express can be determined by their implicit or unconscious states, rather than explicit or conscious states. Further, on this basis, I show that the sincerity conditions for utterances can also be fixed by implicit states. This is a surprising result which goes against common assumptions about speech acts and sincerity. Roughly, I argue that the result is implied by two plausible and independent theories of the metaphysics of speaker meaning and, further, that this (...)
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  • The Communicative Significance of Beliefs and Desires.Uku Tooming - 2014 - Dissertation, Universitatis Tartunesis
    When we think about what others believe and want, we are usually affected by what we know about their attitudes. If I’m aware that another person believes something, I have an opportunity to agree or disagree with it. If I think that another person wants something, I can endorse or disapprove of her desire. The importance of such reactions to attributed beliefs and desires has thus far been overlooked in philosophy of mind where the focus has been on explanatory and (...)
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  • Relativism, metasemantics, and the future.Derek Ball - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10):1036-1086.
    ABSTRACT Contemporary relativists often see their view as contributing to a semantic/post-semantic account of linguistic data about disagreement and retraction. I offer an independently motivated metasemantic account of the same data, that also handles a number of cases and empirical results that are problematic for the relativist. The key idea is that the content of assertions and beliefs is determined in part by facts about other times, including times after the assertion is made or the belief is formed. On this (...)
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  • The cultural evolution of mind-modelling.Richard Moore - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1):1751-1776.
    I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human forms of (...)
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  • Justification, Conversation, and Folk Psychology.Víctor Fernández Castro - 2019 - Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 34 (1):73-88.
    The aim of this paper is to offer a version of the so-called conversational hypothesis of the ontogenetic connection between language and mindreading (Harris 1996, 2005; Van Cleave and Gauker 2010; Hughes et al. 2006). After arguing against a particular way of understanding the hypothesis (the communicative view), I will start from the justificatory view in philosophy of social cognition (Andrews 2012; Hutto 2004; Zawidzki 2013) to make the case for the idea that the primary function of belief and desire (...)
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  • Representation without Thought: Confusion, Reference, and Communication.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2015 - Dissertation, Cuny Graduate Center
    I develop and argue for a novel theory of the mental state of identity confusion. I also argue that this mental state can corrupt the proper function of singular terms in linguistic communication. Finally, I propose a theory according to which identity confusion should be treated as a the source of a new sort of linguistic performance error, similar to malapropism, slips of the tongue, and so-called intentional obfuscation (inducing false belief by manipulating language in specific ways). -/- Going into (...)
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  • The edenic theory of reference.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (3):276-308.
    I argue for a theory of the optimal function of the speech act of referring, called the edenic theory. First, the act of singular reference is defined directly in terms of Gricean communicative intentions. Second, I propose a doxastic constraint on the optimal performance of such acts, stating, roughly, that the speaker must not have any relevant false beliefs about the identity or distinctness of the intended object. In uttering a singular term on an occasion, on this theory, one represents (...)
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  • Beliefs and Desires: from Attribution to Evaluation.Uku Tooming - 2017 - Philosophia 45 (1):359-369.
    The ability to attribute beliefs and desires is taken by many to be an essential component of human social cognition, enabling us to predict, explain and shape behaviour and other mental states. In this paper, I argue that there are certain basic responses to attributed attitudes which have thus far been overlooked in the study of social cognition, although they underlie many of the moves we make in our social interactions. The claim is that belief and desire attributions allow for (...)
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  • A Gricean Theory of Malaprops.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2017 - Mind and Language 32 (4):446-462.
    Gricean intentionalists hold that what a speaker says and means by a linguistic utterance is determined by the speaker's communicative intention. On this view, one cannot really say anything without meaning it as well. Conventionalists argue, however, that malapropisms provide powerful counterexamples to this claim. I present two arguments against the conventionalist and sketch a new Gricean theory of speech errors, called the misarticulation theory. On this view, malapropisms are understood as a special case of mispronunciation. I argue that the (...)
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  • A Completenesss Theorem for a 3-Valued Semantics for a First-order Language.Christopher Gauker - manuscript
    This document presents a Gentzen-style deductive calculus and proves that it is complete with respect to a 3-valued semantics for a language with quantifiers. The semantics resembles the strong Kleene semantics with respect to conjunction, disjunction and negation. The completeness proof for the sentential fragment fills in the details of a proof sketched in Arnon Avron (2003). The extension to quantifiers is original but uses standard techniques.
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  • Being at the Centre: Self-location in Thought and Language.Clas Weber - 2016 - In Manuel García-Carpintero & Stephan Torre (eds.), About Oneself: De Se Thought and Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 246-271.
    Self-locating attitudes and assertions provide a challenge to the received view of mental and linguistic intentionality. In this paper I try to show that the best way to meet this challenge is to adopt relativistic, centred possible worlds accounts for both belief and communication. First, I argue that self-locating beliefs support a centred account of belief. Second, I argue that self-locating utterances support a complementary centred account of communication. Together, these two claims motivate a unified centred conception of belief and (...)
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  • Meaning and Mindreading.J. Robert Thompson - 2014 - Mind and Language 29 (2):167-200.
    In this article, I defend Neo-Gricean accounts of language and communication from an objection about linguistic development. According to this objection, children are incapable of understanding the minds of others in the way that Neo-Gricean accounts require until long after they learn the meanings of words, are able to produce meaningful utterances, and understand the meaningful utterances of others. In answering this challenge, I outline exactly what sorts of psychological states are required by Neo-Gricean accounts and conclude that there is (...)
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  • Horwich on Natural and Non-Natural Meaning.Steffen Borge - 2014 - Acta Analytica 29 (2):229-253.
    Paul Horwich’s Use Theory of Meaning (UTM) depends on his rejection of Paul Grice’s distinction between natural and non-natural meaning and his Univocality of Meaning Thesis, as he wishes to deflate the meaning-relation to usage. Horwich’s programme of deflating the meaning-relation (i.e. how words, sentences, etc., acquire meaning) to some basic regularity of usage cannot be carried through if the meaning-relation depends on the minds of users. Here, I first give a somewhat detailed account of the distinction between natural and (...)
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  • What Tipper is Ready for: A Semantics for Incomplete Predicates.Christopher Gauker - 2012 - Noûs 46 (1):61-85.
    This paper presents a precise semantics for incomplete predicates such as “ready”. Incomplete predicates have distinctive logical properties that a semantic theory needs to accommodate. For instance, “Tipper is ready” logically implies “Tipper is ready for something”, but “Tipper is ready for something” does not imply “Tipper is ready”. It is shown that several approaches to the semantics of incomplete predicates fail to accommodate these logical properties. The account offered here defines contexts as structures containing an element called a proposition (...)
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  • Converging towards what: on semantic and pragmatic competence.Carlo Penco - 2005 - In L. Serafini & P. Bouquet (eds.), CEUR-Workshops.
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  • The function of folk psychology: Mind reading or mind shaping?Tadeusz W. Zawidzki - 2008 - Philosophical Explorations 11 (3):193 – 210.
    I argue for two claims. First I argue against the consensus view that accurate behavioral prediction based on accurate representation of cognitive states, i.e. mind reading , is the sustaining function of propositional attitude ascription. This practice cannot have been selected in evolution and cannot persist, in virtue of its predictive utility, because there are principled reasons why it is inadequate as a tool for behavioral prediction. Second I give reasons that favor an alternative account of the sustaining function of (...)
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  • The cognitive functions of language.Peter Carruthers - 2002 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (6):657-674.
    This paper explores a variety of different versions of the thesis that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibly strong and others as uninterestingly weak. Strong forms dismissed include the view that language is conceptually necessary for thought (endorsed by many philosophers) and the view that language is _de facto_ the medium of all human conceptual thinking (endorsed by many philosophers and social scientists). Weak forms include (...)
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  • A new perspective on the relationship between metacognition and social cognition: metacognitive concepts as socio-cognitive tools.Tadeusz W. Zawidzki - 2019 - Synthese 198 (7):6573-6596.
    I defend an alternative to the two traditional accounts of the relationship between metacognition and social cognition: metacognition as primary versus social cognition as primary. These accounts have complementary explanatory vices and virtues. They also share a natural assumption: that interpretation in terms of mental states is “spectatorial”, aiming exclusively for an objective description of the mental facts about self and others. I argue that if one rejects this assumption in favor of the view that interpretation in terms of mental (...)
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  • Pragmatics and Processing.Bart Geurts & Paula Rubio-Fernández - 2015 - Ratio 28 (4):446-469.
    Gricean pragmatics has often been criticised for being implausible from a psychological point of view. This line of criticism is never backed up by empirical evidence, but more importantly, it ignores the fact that Grice never meant to advance a processing theory, in the first place. Taking our lead from Marr, we distinguish between two levels of explanation: at the W-level, we are concerned with what agents do and why; at the H-level, we ask how agents do whatever it is (...)
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  • Skepticism and Objective Contexts: A Critique of DeRose.Giovanni Mion - 2013 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (2):119-129.
    In the paper, I contrast my contextualist account of Cartesian skepticism with Keith DeRose’s account. I agree with DeRose that when the Cartesian skeptic and her opponent meet in the same context, their claims are truth-value-less. But I agree with him on the basis of different conception of context sensitivity. According to DeRose, the content of context sensitive expressions in general, and of knowledge in particular, is personally indicated. Instead, for me, the content of context sensitive expressions in general, and (...)
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  • Against Accommodation: Heim, van der Sandt, and the Presupposition Projection Problem.Christopher Gauker - 2008 - Philosophical Perspectives 22 (1):171 - 205.
    This paper criticizes the dominant approaches to presupposition projection and proposes an alternative. Both the update semantics of Heim and the discourse representation theory of van der Sandt have problems in explicating the presuppositions of disjunctions. Moreover, Heim's approach is committed to a conception of accommodation that founders on the problem of informative presuppositions, and van der Sandt's approach is committed to a conception of accommodation that generates over-interpretations of utterances. The present approach borrows Karttunen's idea that instead of associating (...)
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  • Contexts in formal semantics.Christopher Gauker - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (7):568-578.
    Recent philosophical literature has debated the question of how much context-relativity needs to be countenanced in precise semantic theories for natural languages and has displayed different conceptions of the way in which it might be accommodated. This article presents reasons to think that context-relativity is a phenomenon that semantic theory must accommodate and identifies some of the issues concerning how it ought to be accommodated.
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  • Three Kinds of Nonconceptual Seeing-as.Christopher Gauker - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (4):763-779.
    It is commonly supposed that perceptual representations in some way embed concepts and that this embedding accounts for the phenomenon of seeing-as. But there are good reasons, which will be reviewed here, to doubt that perceptions embed concepts. The alternative is to suppose that perceptions are marks in a perceptual similarity space that map into locations in an objective quality space. From this point of view, there are at least three sorts of seeing-as. First, in cases of ambiguity resolution, the (...)
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  • Philosophical Theory-Construction and the Self-Image of Philosophy.Niels Skovgaard Olsen - 2014 - Open Journal of Philosophy 4 (3):231-243.
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  • In defense of the received view.Steffen Borge - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology 26 (6):863 - 887.
    In the paper, I present Christopher Gauker's critique of the view that we talk to each other as a way to make ourselves understood (the received view of linguistic communication) and his alternative theory. I show that both his critique and his alternative fail, and defend the received view of linguistic communication.
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  • (1 other version)The origins of mindreading: how interpretive socio-cognitive practices get off the ground.Marco Fenici & Tadeusz Wieslaw Zawidzki - 2020 - Synthese (9):1-23.
    Recent accounts of mindreading—i.e., the human capacity to attribute mental states to interpret, explain, and predict behavior—have suggested that it has evolved through cultural rather than biological evolution. Although these accounts describe the role of culture in the ontogenetic development of mindreading, they neglect the question of the cultural origins of mindreading in human prehistory. We discuss four possible models of this, distinguished by the role they posit for culture: the standard evolutionary psychology model, the individualist empiricist model, the cultural (...)
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  • Inference and action: relating beliefs to the world.Javier Gonzalez De Prado Salas - unknown
    The goal of this dissertation is to offer a practice-based account of intentionality. My aim is to examine what sort of practices agents have to engage in so as to count as talking and thinking about the way the world is – that is, what sort of practices count as representational. Representational practices answer to the way the world is: what is correct within such practices depends on the way things are, rather than on the attitudes of agents. An account (...)
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  • (2 other versions)On the evidence for prelinguistic concepts.Christopher Gauker - 2005 - Theoria-Revista De Teoria Historia y Fundamentos De La Ciencia 20 (3):287-297.
    Language acquisition is often said to be a process of mapping words into pre-existing concepts. Some researchers regard this theory as an immediate corollary of the assumption that all problem-solving involves the application of concepts. But in light of basic philosophical objections to the theory of language acquisition, that kind of rationale cannot be very persuasive. To have a reason to accept the theory of language acquisition despite the philosophical objections, we ought to have experimental evidence for the existence of (...)
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  • Facilitating Automation in Sentence Processing: The Emergence of Topic and Presupposition in Human Communication.Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri & Viviana Masia - 2018 - Topoi 37 (2):343-354.
    Human attention is limited in its capacity and duration. In language, this is manifested in many ways, but more conspicuously in the strategies by which information is distributed in utterances, that is, their information structures. We contend that the pragmatic categories of Topic and Presupposition precisely meet the necessity to modulate attentional resources on sentence contents, and they do this by “directing” certain contents to automatic and others to controlled processing mechanisms. We discuss experimental findings suggesting that presupposed or topicalized (...)
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  • Contextualism without incompleteness.Marina Sbisa - 2009 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 5 (1):55-72.
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