This article argues that errors in audio data processing should be examined to explore and expose the underlying components that enable linguistic communication and cross-cultural understanding. Examples of errors in the transcription of a Mexican social network’s conversations are analyzed to demonstrate the potential of such data in the development of sociocognitive language-processing theories. It is suggested that researchers working with audio-recorded data should expand the scope of what is considered useful data for the sake of both methodological reflexivity and (...) identifying the underlying cognitive processes enabling linguistic understanding. (shrink)

In this paper, Knetsch's exchange paradigm is analyzed from the perspective of pragmatics and social norms. In this paradigm the participant, at the beginning of the experiment, receives an object from the experimenter and at the end, the same experimenter offers to exchange the received object for an equivalent object. The observed refusal to exchange is called the endowment effect. We argue that this effect comes from an implicature made by the participant about the experimenter's own expectations. The participant perceives (...) the received item as a gift, or as a present, from the experimenter that cannot be exchanged as stipulated by the social norms of western politeness common to both the experimenter and the participant. This implicature, however, should not be produced by participants from Kanak culture for whom the perceived gift of a good will be interpreted as a first act of exchange based on gift and counter-gift. This exchange is a natural, frequent, balanced, and indispensable act for all Kanak social bonds whether private or public. Kanak people also know the French social norms that they apply in their interactions with French people living in New Caledonia. In our experiment, we show that when the exchange paradigm takes place in a French context, with a French experimenter and in French, the Kanak participant is subject to the endowment effect in the same way as a French participant. On the other hand, when the paradigm is carried out in a Kanak context, with a Kanak experimenter and in the vernacular language, or in a Kanak context that approaches the ceremonial of the custom, the endowment effect is no longer observed. The same number of Kanak participants accept or refuse to exchange the endowed item. These results, in addition to providing a new explanation for the endowment effect, highlight the great flexibility of decisions according to social-cultural context. (shrink)

The phenomenon of base-rate neglect has elicited much debate. One arena of debate concerns how people make judgments under conditions of uncertainty. Another more controversial arena concerns human rationality. In this target article, we attempt to unpack the perspectives in the literature on both kinds of issues and evaluate their ability to explain existing data and their conceptual coherence. From this evaluation we conclude that the best account of the data should be framed in terms of a dual-process model of (...) judgment, which attributes base-rate neglect to associative judgment strategies that fail to adequately represent the set structure of the problem. Base-rate neglect is reduced when problems are presented in a format that affords accurate representation in terms of nested sets of individuals. (shrink)

Semanticists face substitution challenges even outside of contexts commonly recognized as opaque. Jennifer M. Saul has drawn attention to pairs of simple sentences - her term for sentences lacking a that-clause operator - of which the following are typical: -/- (1) Clark Kent went into the phone booth, and Superman came out. (1*) Clark Kent went into the phone booth, and Clark Kent came out. -/- (2) Superman is more successful with women than Clark Kent. (2*) Superman is more successful (...) with women than Superman. -/- She challenges us to explain why the upper and lower sentences in each pair differ, or at least appear to differ, in their truth-values and hence truth-conditions. This appearance of substitution failure is inherently puzzling. Moreover, it is taken by Saul to generate a dilemma for anyone hostile to direct reference accounts of that-clause constructions. Direct reference theorists regard the appearance of substitution failure in that-clause contexts as mere appearance, to be dealt with pragmatically rather than semantically. -/- Critics of such accounts need to say something about simple-sentence cases. If they choose to allow that intuitions of substitution failure can be over-ridden and explained away pragmatically in simple-sentence cases but not in that-clause cases, they lay themselves open to the charge of operating a double standard. But if they do not choose this option, they must offer a semantic explanation of apparent substitution failure in simple-sentence cases - no easy task, it turns out. Other respondents to Saul's challenge have sought to provide elaborate semantic treatments. In contrast, this paper proposes a far simpler pragmatic explanation of intuitions of substitution failure in simple sentences, an explanation that deploys no more resources than are to be found in Grice's 'Logic and Conversation'. Ironically, this proposal turns out to be incompatible with a direct reference perspective. So if it is, as I maintain, the most plausible treatment of simple-sentence cases available, Saul's initial thought gets turned around 180 degrees: the phenomenon she has drawn attention to ends up representing a challenge to supporters of direct reference theories. (shrink)

A Notional Level of Cognitive Distortions in Depression: Does It Exist? A Voice for Interdisciplinarity in Studying Cognitive Functioning of Individuals with Depressive Disorders This aritcle raises the problem of cognitive depressive distortions observed at the notional level. It relates to recent neuropsychological, psychological, and linguistic studies, taking an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective, and illustrating the advantages of interdisciplinarity in modern psycholinguistic projects. It shows that, generally, the notional level has been neglected in psychopathological and psychological research on depressive functioning. The (...) problem is described with reference to linguistic and psycholinguistic theories linking language with cognition. Particular emphasis is devoted to theories and methods of metaphorical processing analysis which, taking into account the similarities between cognitive functions engaged in understanding metaphors, and those disordered as a result of depression, seem to be an adequate frame to study the problem. The text ends with a proposal of an interdisciplinary research project dedicated to the study of metaphorical conceptualizations of some notions created by people suffering from depression. (shrink)

: In this paper I argue that there is a very important, though often neglected, dissimilarity between the two Gricean conceptions of ‘what is said’: the one presented in his William James Lectures and the one sketched in the ‘Retrospective Epilogue’ to his book Studies in the Way of Words. The main problem lies with the idea of speakers' commitment to what they say and how this is to be related to the conventional, or standard, meaning of the sentences uttered (...) in the act of saying. Since the later notion of ‘what is said’, or ‘dictiveness’, is claimed to be logically independent from ‘formality’ (roughly, conventional meaning), Grice seems to maintain that there are cases in which content that is not expressed by a sentence in a context may nevertheless count as what is said. I propose an account of what is said that brings together the two apparently irreconcilable approaches. The price to be paid for a Gricean, however, is to accept a duality of behaviour between (natural language counterparts of) logical constants and logical variables. (shrink)

Dialogue has its origins in joint activities, which it serves to coordinate. Joint activities, in turn, usually emerge in hierarchically nested projects and subprojects. We propose that participants use dialogue to coordinate two kinds of transitions in these joint projects: vertical transitions, or entering and exiting joint projects; and horizontal transitions, or continuing within joint projects. The participants help signal these transitions with project markers, words such as uh-huh, m-hm, yeah, okay, or all right. These words have been studied mainly (...) as signals of listener feedback (back-channel signals) or turn-taking devices (acknowledgment tokens). We present evidence from several types of well-defined tasks that they are also part of a system of contrasts specialized for navigating joint projects. Uh-huh, m-hm and yeah are used for horizontal transitions, and okay and all right for vertical transitions. (shrink)

a comprehensive, somewhat Gricean theory of speech acts, including an account of communicative intentions and inferences, a taxonomy of speech acts, and coverage of many topics in pragmatics -/- .

Confusion in terms inspires confusion in concepts. When a relevant distinction is not clearly marked or not marked at all, it is apt to be blurred or even missed altogether in our thinking. This is true in any area of inquiry, pragmatics in particular. No one disputes that there are various ways in which what is communicated in an utterance can go beyond sentence meaning. The problem is to catalog the ways. It is generally recognized that linguistic meaning underdetermines speaker (...) meaning because of the need for disambiguation and reference assignment and because people can speak figuratively or indirectly. But philosophers and linguists are coming to recognize that these are not the only ways. The situation may be described in Gricean terms: the distinction between what is said and what is implicated is not exhaustive. Charting the middle ground between the two will require attending to specific examples, noting their distinctive features, and articulating the relevant concepts. That is what I aim to do here. The basic idea will be to distinguish not only the implied from the explicit but the implicit from the implied. (shrink)

I will suggest, in this article, a possible explanation of the fact that legal language appears incoherent to the general public. I will present one legal text (an indictment), explaining why it appears incoherent to legal laypersons. I will argue that the traits making this particular text appear incoherent are, first, that a specialized legal meaning is conveyed implicitly and, second, that there are no key-words that could direct laypersons to the knowledge making this meaning obvious to legalists. I will (...) conclude that any legal text having these traits is likely to appear incoherent to the general public and suggest that the traits making my example appear incoherent might be rather common among the various texts of the various legal systems. On this suggestion there is no need to assume any causal relation between lawyers’ social interests and the apparent incoherence of legal language as it entails that this incoherence is inevitable. (I will argue that it is a result of the facts that legal language is ordinary language used, in the ordinary way, in the special context of the legal discourse.). (shrink)

The official definition of ‘pain’ by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) hasn’t seen much revision since its publication in 1979. There have been various criticisms of the definition in the literature from different quarters: that the definition implies a dubious metaphysical dualism, that it requires a strong form of consciousness as well as linguistic abilities, that it excludes many vulnerable groups that are otherwise perfectly capable of experiencing pain, that it has therefore unacceptable practical as well (...) as ethical consequences, that it is unhelpful to the health-care professional as an operational definition, that it is too narrow, and many others. In my view, most of these criticisms depend on misunderstandings or on uncharitable interpretations. My aim is to go over the definition, clarify some potential ambiguities, and argue that these criticisms don’t cut much ice. At the end, I will present a few slightly reworded versions of the definition that I claim are more felicitous and capture the original intended meaning by the members of the taxonomic committee in a much better and transparent way that avoids all the major extant criticisms in the literature. (Written for interdisciplinary audiences.). (shrink)

When two people engage in a conversation, knowingly or unknowingly, they are playing a game. Players of such games have diverse objectives, or winning conditions: an applicant trying to convince her potential employer of her eligibility over that of a competitor, a prosecutor trying to convict a defendant, a politician trying to convince an electorate in a political debate, and so on. We argue that infinitary games offer a natural model for many structural characteristics of such conversations. We call such (...) games message exchange games, and we compare them to existing game theoretic frameworks used in linguistics—for example, signaling games—and show that message exchange games are needed to handle non-cooperative conversation. In this paper, we concentrate on conversational games where players’ interests are opposed. We provide a taxonomy of conversations based on their winning conditions, and we investigate some essential features of winning conditions like consistency and what we call rhetorical cooperativity. We show that these features make our games decomposition sensitive, a property we define formally in the paper. We show that this property has far-reaching implications for the existence of winning strategies and their complexity. There is a class of winning conditions for which message exchange games are equivalent to Banach- Mazur games, which have been extensively studied and enjoy nice topological results. But decomposition sensitive goals are much more the norm and much more interesting linguistically and philosophically. (shrink)

In this paper, we address several puzzles concerning speech acts, particularly indirect speech acts. We show how a formal semantictheory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech acts and to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action. We provide a formally precise definition of indirect speech acts, including the subclass of so-called conventionalized indirect speech acts. This analysis draws heavily on parallels between phenomena at the speech act level and the lexical level. First, we argue that, just (...) as co-predication shows that some words can behave linguistically as if they're `simultaneously' of incompatible semantic types, certain speech acts behave this way too. Secondly, as Horn and Bayer (1984) and others have suggested, both the lexicon and speech acts are subject to a principle of blocking or "preemption by synonymy": Conventionalized indirect speech acts can block their `paraphrases' from being interpreted as indirect speech acts, even if this interpretation is calculable from Gricean-style principles. We provide a formal model of this blocking, and compare it with existing accounts of lexical blocking. (shrink)

In this paper, we address several puzzles concerning speech acts,particularly indirect speech acts. We show how a formal semantictheory of discourse interpretation can be used to define speech actsand to avoid murky issues concerning the metaphysics of action. Weprovide a formally precise definition of indirect speech acts, includingthe subclass of so-called conventionalized indirect speech acts. Thisanalysis draws heavily on parallels between phenomena at the speechact level and the lexical level. First, we argue that, just as co-predicationshows that some words can (...) behave linguistically as if they're `simultaneously'of incompatible semantic types, certain speech acts behave this way too.Secondly, as Horn and Bayer (1984) and others have suggested, both thelexicon and speech acts are subject to a principle of blocking or ``preemptionby synonymy'': Conventionalized indirect speech acts can block their`paraphrases' from being interpreted as indirect speech acts, even ifthis interpretation is calculable from Gricean-style principles. Weprovide a formal model of this blocking, and compare it withexisting accounts of lexical blocking. (shrink)

Noncognitivism about normative judgment is the view that normative judgment is a distinctive kind of mental state, identical neither to belief or desire, but desire-like in its functional role and direction of fit. Noncognitivism about intention (also called the “distinctive practical attitude” theory) is the view that intention is a distinctive kind of mental state, identical neither to belief or desire, but desire-like in its functional role and direction of fit. While these theories are alike in several ways, they have (...) rarely been discussed in concert. This paper studies the relation between these two theories, focusing on the question of whether noncognitivism about intention faces an analogue of the well-known Frege-Geach problem for noncognitivism about normative judgment. I argue that whether it faces the Frege-Geach problem depends on how it treats the distinction between what Anscombe called expressions of intention and personal predictions. I show that there is substantial pressure to treat that distinction as semantic, and that a variant of the Frege-Geach problem arises for versions of noncognitivism about intention that go this route. Yet some philosophers of action may be willing to resist this pressure, and I develop a pragmatic account of the distinction that would allow such philosophers to avoid the Frege-Geach problem altogether. I argue that this pragmatic account has significant independent appeal. Notably, it provides a way for noncognitivists about intention to undercut the force of a recent argument for cognitivism due to Berislav Marušić and John Schwenkler. (shrink)

We investigate how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual's belief state through unimodal and multimodal cues. A total of 187 preschoolers participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind ability using a false belief task. Significant predictors included Age, Condition and success on the ToM task. Performance improved with age, and was significantly better for the multimodal condition compared to both unimodal conditions, suggesting that even though unimodal cues were useful to children, (...) the presence of reinforcing information for the multimodal condition was more effective for detecting disbelief. However, results also point to the development of intonational and gestural comprehension in tandem. Children that passed the ToM task significantly outperformed those that failed it for all conditions, showing that children who can attribute a false belief to another individual may more readily access these intonational and gestural cues. (shrink)

This essay describes conversation as an ensemble accomplishment that can be illuminated by critics working with specific texts within a rhetorical framework. We first establish dialogue as the key concept for any criticism of conversation, specifying the rhetorical dimensions of interpersonal dialogue. Second, we show how template thinking is particularly dangerous for conversational critics and suggest a research (anti)method, based on a coauthorship, that provides a thoroughgoing dialogical access to texts. Finally, we exemplify dialogic criticism of a conversational text by (...) analyzing the famous 1957 dialogue of philosopher Martin Buber and psychologist Carl Rogers. (shrink)

Plato articulates a deep perplexity about inquiry in ?Meno's Paradox??the claim that one can inquire neither into what one knows, nor into what one does not know. Although some commentators have wrestled with the paradox itself, many suppose that the paradox of inquiry is special to Plato, arising from peculiarities of the Socratic elenchus or of Platonic epistemology. But there is nothing peculiarly Platonic in this puzzle. For it arises, too, in classical Indian philosophical discussions, where it is formulated with (...) great clarity, and analysed in a way that casts it in a new light. We present three treatments of the puzzle in Indian philosophy, as a way of refining and sharpening our understanding of the paradox, before turning to the most radical of the Indian philosophers to tackle it. The Indian philosophers who are optimistic that the paradox can be resolved appeal to the existence of prior beliefs, and to the resources embedded in language to explain how we can investigate, and so move from ignorance to knowledge. Highlighting this structural feature of inquiry, however, allows the pessimist philosopher to demonstrate that the paradox stands. The incoherence of inquiry is rooted in the very idea of aiming our desires at the unknown. Asking questions and giving answers rests on referential intentions targeting objects in a region of epistemic darkness, and so our ?inquiry sceptic? also finds structurally similar forms of incoherence in the pragmatics of interrogative discourse. (shrink)

We review Potts' influential book on the semantics of conventional implicature , offering an explication of his technical apparatus and drawing out the proposal's implications, focusing on the class of CIs he calls supplements. While we applaud many facets of this work, we argue that careful considerations of the pragmatics of CIs will be required in order to yield an empirically and explanatorily adequate account.

I offer two potential diagnoses of the behavioral norms governing post‐truth politics by comparing the view of language, communication, and truth‐telling put forward by David Lewis (extended by game theorists), and John Searle. My first goal is to specify the different ways in which Lewis, and game theorists more generally, in contrast to Searle (in the company of Paul Grice and Jurgen Habermas), go about explaining the normativity of truthfulness within a linguistic community. The main difference is that for Lewis (...) and game theorists, “truthful” signaling follows from an align- ment of interests, and deception follows from mixed motives leading to the calculation that sending false information is better for oneself. Following in the Enlightenment tradition, Searle argues that practical reasoning, which involves mastery of at least one language, requires that actors intend to communicate. This intention includes constraining the content of statements to uphold veracity conditions. After distinguishing between these two accounts, I will artic- ulate the implications for explaining, and even informing actions, constitutive of post‐truth politics. I argue that the strategic view of communication is suffi- cient neither to model everyday conversation nor to reflect a public sphere useful for democratic govern- ment. Both the pedagogy of strategic communication as cheap talk, and its concordance with new digital information technologies, challenge norms of truthful- ness that underlie modern institutions essential to an effective public sphere. (shrink)

People respond to moral criticism of their speech by claiming that they were joking. In this paper, I develop a speech act analysis of the humor excuse consisting of a negative stage, in which the speaker denies he or she was making an assertion, and a positive stage, in which the speaker claims she or he was engaged in non-serious/humorous speech instead. This analysis, however, runs afoul of the group identity objection, according to which there is a moral distinction between (...) jokes targeting members of vulnerable groups made by members of those groups and similar jokes made by non-members. In order to avoid this objection, I offer a revision to the speech act analysis that draws upon Perry’s distinction between beliefs and belief-states. (shrink)

In the age of the Internet, people have increased access to information along multiple dimensions. It might seem that we are on our way to an epistemic utopia in which we spend less time and effort on basic cognitive tasks while devoting more time and effort to complex deliberation. However, though there are many accurate sources on the Internet, they must be sifted from the spammers, concern trolls, practical jokers, conspiracy theorists, counterintelligence sock-puppets, and outright liars who also proliferate online. (...) We can approach this problem via the individual or via the network, asking two questions. First, holding the topology of the network constant, which moral and epistemic dispositions are conducive to successful inquiry by nodes at different positions within it? Second, holding the distribution of people’s epistemic dispositions constant, which network topologies are more likely to produce epistemic goods and avoid epistemic ills? To answer these questions, we need to combine virtue-theoretic reflection on individual dispositions with a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of networks. In this paper, I highlight and explore some important properties of such networks and connect those properties with dispositions that make someone an excellent member of an epistemic network. (shrink)

Coalition announcement logic is one of the family of the logics of quantified announcements. It allows us to reason about what a coalition of agents can achieve by making announcements in the setting where the anti-coalition may have an announcement of their own to preclude the former from reaching its epistemic goals. In this paper, we describe a PSPACE-complete model checking algorithm for CAL that produces winning strategies for coalitions. The algorithm is implemented in a proof-of-concept model checker.

Those who want to deny the ‘ought implies can’ principle often turn to weakened views to explain ‘ought implies can’ phenomena. The two most common versions of such views are that ‘ought’ presupposes ‘can’, and that ‘ought’ conversationally implicates ‘can’. This paper will reject both views, and in doing so, present a case against any pragmatic view of ‘ought implies can’. Unlike much of the literature, I won't rely on counterexamples, but instead will argue that each of these views fails (...) on its own terms. ‘Ought’ and ‘can’ do not obey the negation test for presupposition, and they do not obey the calculability or the cancelability tests for conversational implicature. I diagnose these failures as partly a result of the importance of the contrapositive of ‘ought implies can’. I end with a final argument emphasizing the role the principle plays in moral thinking, and the fact that no pragmatic account can do it justice. (shrink)

Many formulations of scientific realism (SR) include some commitment to metaphysical realism (MR). On the other hand, authors like Schlick, Carnap and Putnam held forms of scientific realism coupled with metaphysical antirealism (and this has analogies in Kant). So we might ask: do scientific realists really need MR? or is MR already implied by SR, so that SR is actually incompatible with metaphysical antirealism? And if MR must really be added to SR, why is that so? And which additional arguments (...) scientific realists need to support it? After reviewing and classifying a number of different kinds of realisms, metaphysical and not, I answer that SR and MR are logically independent of each other, so that there is no logical inconsistency in holding SR while rejecting MR. However, I argue that the “no miracle” argument (NMA) not only is the “ultimate” argument for SR, but by the same token it also supports MR. Therefore one cannot effectively defend SR without also subscribing to MR, but this can be done at no additional argumentative cost. I show this by discussing not only the standard version of the NMA, but also three more versions which are not usually considered as such in the literature. (shrink)

On the basis of Levin’s claim that truth is not a scientific explanatory factor, Michel Ghins argues that the “no miracle” argument (NMA) is not scientific, therefore scientific realism is not a scientific hypothesis, and naturalism is wrong. I argue that there are genuine senses of ‘scientific’ and ‘explanation’ in which truth can yield scientific explanations. Hence, the NMA can be considered scientific in the sense that it hinges on a scientific explanation, it follows a typically scientific inferential pattern (IBE), (...) and it is based on an empirical fact (the success of science). Scientific realism, in turn, is scientific in the sense that it is supported both by a meta-level scientific argument (the NMA), and by first level scientific arguments through semantic ascent and generalization. However, both the NMA and scientific realism are not purely scientific, since they go beyond properly scientific concerns, and require additional philosophical reasoning. In turn, naturalism is correct in the sense that philosophy is continuous with science, partly based on it, and potentially equally well warranted. Beside denying the scientific nature of the NMA, Ghins raises some objections to its cogency , to which I reply in the final section. (shrink)

In this article we present the bases for a computational theory of the cognitive processes underlying human communication. The core of the article is devoted to the analysis of the phases in which the process of comprehension of a communicative act can be logically divided: (1) literal meaning, where the reconstruction of the mental states literally expressed by the actor takes place: (2) speaker's meaning, where the partner reconstructs the communicative intentions of the actor; (3) communicative effect, where the partner (...) possibly modifies his own beliefs and intentions; (4) reaction, where the intentions for the generation of the response are produced; and (5) response, where an overt response is constructed. The model appears to be compatible with relevant facts about human behavior. Our hypothesis is that, through communication, an actor tries to exploit the motivational structures of a partner so that the desired goal is generated. A second point is that social behavior requires that cooperation be maintained at some level. In the case of communication, cooperation is, in general, pursued even when the partner does not adhere to the actor's goals, and therefore no cooperation occurs at the behavioral level. This important distinction is reflected in the two kinds of game we introduce to account for communication. The main concept implied in communication is that two agents overtly reach a situation of shared mental states. Our model deals with sharedness through two primitives: shared beliefs and communicative intentions. (shrink)

Three forms of the straw man fallacy are posed: the straw, weak, and hollow man. Additionally, there can be non-fallacious cases of any of these species of straw man arguments.

The paper investigates how the politeness marker please is used by young people to distinguish themselves from adults and create an identity of their own. The analysis of please is based on the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language. The distribution and uses of please in COLT are compared with similar data from the British component of the International Corpus of English. We can recognize several functions of the “impolite” please in the COLT Corpus. To begin with, it is used (...) strategically to establish or confirm harmonious relationships between the speakers. Secondly, “mock impoliteness” may be understood in a positive way because it is amusing or entertaining. In young people’s circles entertainment skills are for example highly valued. Finally, impoliteness is used creatively in interaction by the participants who use repetition, reformulation and escalation to construct ritualized sequences of apparent insults. (shrink)

In standard theories of knowledge, issues like jokes, humour and laughter are not dealt with for the simple reason that these categories do not inhabit the world of true knowledge, and are hence not worthy of serious attention or study because these issues do not by their nature contribute to further generation of true knowledge. Taking a cue from Sigmund Freud, this article seeks to work on the possibilities of jokes, humour and even laughter, and their relation to the language (...) of the statement of truth. It may be seen that in spite of the superior claims of the so-called language of the statement of truth, and its not so veiled indignation at humour and jokes, one category is in dialogue with another in contexts and perhaps with itself. (shrink)

The genre to which an artwork belongs affects how it is to be interpreted and evaluated. An account of genre and of the criteria for genre membership should explain these interpretative and evaluative effects. Contrary to conceptions of genres as categories distinguished by the features of the works that belong to them, I argue that these effects are to be explained by conceiving of genres as categories distinguished by certain of the purposes that the works belonging to them are intended (...) to serve. (shrink)

Depiction is the form of representation distinctive of figurative paintings, drawings, and photographs. Accounts of depiction attempt to specify the relation something must bear to an object in order to depict it. Resemblance accounts hold that the notion of resemblance is necessary to the specification of this relation. Several difficulties with such analyses have led many philosophers to reject the possibility of an adequate resemblance account of depiction. This essay outlines these difficulties and argues that current resemblance accounts succumb to (...) them. It then develops an alternative resemblance account, drawing on Grice's account of nonnatural meaning and its role in determining sentence meaning to argue that something depicts an object if it bears intention-based resemblances to the object that jointly capture its overall appearance. In addition to solving the metaphysical problem of what it is for something to depict an object, this account also sheds significant light on the epistemological issue of how we are able to work out that something depicts an object. This essay argues that our ability to work out that something depicts an object results from both our more general ability to identify intentions from the products of communicative behavior and our knowledge of stylistic conventions. This account avoids the difficulties that face rival attempts to analyze depiction in terms of resemblance. It also clarifies and explains the features that distinguish depictive from nondepictive representation. (shrink)

This paper presents problems for Stalnaker’s common ground theory of presupposition. Stalnaker (Linguist and Philos 25:701–721, 2002) proposes a 2-stage process of utterance interpretation: presupposed content is added to the common ground prior to acceptance/rejection of the utterance as a whole. But this revision makes presupposition difficult to distinguish from assertion. A more fundamental problem is that the common ground theory rests on a faulty theory of assertion—that the essence of assertion is to present the content of an utterance as (...) new information. Many examples are presented of utterances which are felicitous but not informative in this way. (shrink)

Szabó follows Heim in viewing familiarity, rather than uniqueness, as the essence of the definite article, but attempts to derive both familiarity and uniqueness implications pragmatically, assigning a single semantic interpretation to both the definite and indefinite articles. I argue that if there is no semantic distinction between the articles, then there is no way to derive these differences between them pragmatically.

Within the relevant semantics and pragmatics literature the terms “presupposition” and “conventional implicature” are used in a variety of different, but frequently overlapping, ways. The overlaps are perhaps not surprising, given that the two categories of conveyed meaning share the property of remaining constant in the scope of other operators—the property usefully characterize as projectivity. One of my purposes in this paper will be to try to clarify these different usages. In addition to that we will explore two additional properties (...) which are shared by some of these projective contents—strong contextual felicity, and neutralizability. The idea is to try to explain all three properties by taking into account information packaging. (shrink)

Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean states that each moral virtue stands opposed to two types of vice: one of excess and one of deficiency, respectively. Critics claim that some virtues—like honesty, fair-mindedness, and patience—are counterexamples to Aristotle’s doctrine. Here, I develop a generalizable strategy to defend the doctrine of the mean against such counterexamples. I argue that not only is the doctrine of the mean defensible, but taking it seriously also allows us to gain substantial insight into particular virtues. Failure (...) to take the doctrine seriously, moreover, exposes us to the risk of mistaking certain vices for virtues. (shrink)

In academic contexts the appeal to authority is a quite common but seldom tested argument, either because we accept the authority without questioning it, or because we look for alternative experts or reasons to support a different point of view. But, by putting ourselves side by side an already accepted authority, we often rhetorically manoeuvre to displace the burden of the proof to avoid the fear to present our opinions and to allow face saving.

I characterize the deductivist ideal of justification and, following to a great extent Toulmin’s work The Uses of Argument, I try to explain why this ideal is erroneous. Then I offer an alternative model of justification capable of making our claims to knowledge about substantial matters sound and reasonable. This model of justification will be based on a conception of justification as the result of good argumentation, and on a model of argumentation which is a pragmatic linguistic reconstruction of Toulmin’s (...) model of argument. (shrink)

This book takes purism about knowledge as the default position and defends it from the challenges of pragmatic encroachment. The book is divided into two parts, a negative and a positive one. The negative part critically examines existing purist strategies in response to pragmatic encroachment. The positive part provides a new theory of how practical factors can systematically influence our confidence and explores some implications of such influence.

Consider the following two (hypothetical) generic causal claims: “Living in a neighborhood with many families with children increases purchases of bicycles” and “living in an affluent neighborhood with many families with children increases purchases of bicycles.” These claims not only differ in what they suggest about how bicycle ownership is distributed across different neighborhoods (i.e., “the data”), but also have the potential to communicate something about the speakers’ values: namely, the prominence they accord to affluence in representing and making decisions (...) about the social world. Here, we examine the relationship between the level of granularity with which a cause is described in a generic causal claim (e.g., neighborhood vs. affluent neighborhood) and the value of the information contained in the causal model that generates that claim. We argue that listeners who know any two of the following can make reliable inferences about the third: 1) the level of granularity at which a speaker makes a generic causal claim, 2) the speaker’s values, and 3) the data available to the speaker. We present results of four experiments (N=1,323) in the domain of social categories that provide evidence in keeping with these predictions. (shrink)

The Operator Argument against eternalism holds that having non-vacuous tense operators in the language is incompatible with the claim that every proposition has its truth-value eternally. Assuming that (1) there are non-vacuous tense operators, (2) tense operators operate on propositions and (3) tense operators which operate on eternal entities are vacuous, it may be argued that eternalism is false. In this paper, I examine the Operator Argument. The goal is threefold. First, I want to present some aspects of the debate (...) in a more elaborate way, especially those concerning formal matters. Secondly, I will argue that eternalism can escape the Operator Argument. There are two main strategies for handling the Operator Argument. The first one is based on replacing temporal operators with object-language quantifiers. The second rejects the identification of compositional semantic value with assertoric content. My third goal is to show that none of them is as good as the strategy that adopts Timestamp Semantics (Fritz in Philosl Stud 176:2933–2959, 2019). I am going to argue that the quantificational treatment of tenses is compatible with temporalism and that the arguments for rejecting the identification of compositional semantic value with assertoric content provide, in fact, a motivation for the temporalist position. At the end, I will develop Timestamp Semantics by providing a novel formalization of it, and defend it against three potential counter-arguments. (shrink)

This paper argues for contrastivism about the deontic modals, 'ought', 'must', and 'may'. A simple contrastivist semantics that predicts the desired entailment relations among these modals is offered.

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

Particularists in ethics emphasize that the normative is holistic, and invite us to infer with them that it therefore defies generalization. This has been supposed to present an obstacle to traditional moral theorizing, to have striking implications for moral epistemology and moral deliberation, and to rule out reductive theories of the normative, making it a bold and important thesis across the areas of normative theory, moral epistemology, moral psychology, and normative metaphysics. Though particularists emphasize the importance of the holism of (...) the normative, however, it is not something that they have been able to explain. In this paper I’ll show how to use a small number of simple and, I’ll argue, independently compelling assumptions in order to both predict and explain the holistic features of the normative with respect to the non-normative. The basic idea of the paper is simple. It is that normative claims are holistic because they are general, rather than because they defy generalization. (shrink)