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Studies in the Way of Words

Synthese 84 (1):153-161 (1989)

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  1. Gossip as a Burdened Virtue.Mark Alfano & Brian Robinson - 2017 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (3):473-82.
    Gossip is often serious business, not idle chitchat. Gossip allows those oppressed to privately name their oppressors as a warning to others. Of course, gossip can be in error. The speaker may be lying or merely have lacked sufficient evidence. Bias can also make those who hear the gossip more or less likely to believe the gossip. By examining the social functions of gossip and considering the differences in power dynamics in which gossip can occur, we contend that gossip may (...)
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  • Legal Speech and Implicit Content in the Law.Luke William Hunt - 2016 - Ratio Juris 29 (1):3-22.
    Interpreting the content of the law is not limited to what a relevant lawmaker utters. This paper examines the extent to which implied and implicit content is part of the law, and specifically whether the Gricean concept of conversational implicature is relevant in determining the content of law. Recent work has focused on how this question relates to acts of legislation. This paper extends the analysis to case law and departs from the literature on several key issues. The paper's argument (...)
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  • Conversational Implicatures and Legal Texts.Brian G. Slocum - 2016 - Ratio Juris 29 (1):23-43.
    Legal texts are often given interpretations that deviate from their literal meanings. While legal concerns often motivate these interpretations, others can be traced to linguistic phenomena. This paper argues that systematicities of language usage, captured by certain theories of conversational implicature, can sometimes explain why the meanings given to legal texts by judges differ from the literal meanings of the texts. Paul Grice's account of conversational implicature is controversial, and scholars have offered a variety of ways to conceptualize implicatures and (...)
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  • (1 other version)Truths Containing Empty Names.Michael McKinsey - 2016 - In Piotr Stalmaszczyk & Luis Fernandez Moreno (eds.), Philosophical Approaches to Proper Names. Peter Lang. pp. 175-202.
    Abstract. On the Direct Reference thesis, proper names are what I call ‘genuine terms’, terms whose sole semantic contributions to the propositions expressed by their use are the terms’ semantic referents. But unless qualified, this thesis implies the false consequence that sentences containing names that fail to refer can never express true or false propositions. (Consider ‘The ancient Greeks worshipped Zeus’, for instance.) I suggest that while names are typically and fundamentally used as genuine terms, there is a small class (...)
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  • Confusion is Corruptive Belief in False Identity.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2016 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (2):204-227.
    Speakers are confused about identity if they mistake one thing for two or two things for one. I present two plausible models of confusion, the Frege model and the Millikan model. I show how a prominent objection to Fregean models fails and argue that confusion consists in having false implicit beliefs involving the identity relation. Further, I argue that confused identity has characteristic corruptive effects on singular cognition and on the proper function of singular terms in linguistic communication.
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  • Reasons, Reason, and Context.Daniel Fogal - 2016 - In Errol Lord & Barry Maguire (eds.), Weighing Reasons. New York, NY: Oxford University Press USA.
    This paper explores various subtleties in our ordinary thought and talk about normative reasons—subtleties which, if taken seriously, have various upshots, both substantive and methodological. I focus on two subtleties in particular. The first concerns the use of reason (in its normative sense) as both a count noun and as a mass noun, and the second concerns the context-sensitivity of normative reasons-claims. The more carefully we look at the language of reasons, I argue, the clearer its limitations and liabilities become. (...)
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  • Definite descriptions are ambiguous.Felipe S. Amaral - 2008 - Analysis 68 (4):288-297.
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  • True, Truer, Truest.Brian Weatherson - 2005 - Philosophical Studies 123 (1):47-70.
    What the world needs now is another theory of vagueness. Not because the old theories are useless. Quite the contrary, the old theories provide many of the materials we need to construct the truest theory of vagueness ever seen. The theory shall be similar in motivation to supervaluationism, but more akin to many-valued theories in conceptualisation. What I take from the many-valued theories is the idea that some sentences can be truer than others. But I say very different things to (...)
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  • Reasoning from paradigms and negative evidence.Fabrizio Macagno & Douglas N. Walton - 2011 - Pragmatics and Cognition 19 (1):92-116.
    Reasoning from negative evidence takes place where an expected outcome is tested for, and when it is not found, a conclusion is drawn based on the significance of the failure to find it. By using Gricean maxims and implicatures, we show how a set of alternatives, which we call a paradigm, provides the deep inferential structure on which reasoning from lack of evidence is based. We show that the strength of reasoning from negative evidence depends on how the arguer defines (...)
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  • Compound figures: priority and speech-act structure.Mihaela Popa-Wyatt - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (1):141-161.
    Compound figures are a rich, and under-explored area for tackling fundamental issues in philosophy of language. This paper explores new ideas about how to explain some features of such figures. We start with an observation from Stern that in ironic-metaphor, metaphor is logically prior to irony in the structure of what is communicated. Call this thesis Logical-MPT. We argue that a speech-act-based explanation of Logical-MPT is to be preferred to a content-based explanation. To create this explanation we draw on Barker’s (...)
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  • Hybrid Accounts of Ethical Thought and Talk.Teemu Toppinen - 2018 - In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 243-259.
    This is a draft of a chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, edited by David Plunkett and Tristram McPherson. I offer an overview of hybrid views in metaethics, with main focus on hybrid cognitivist views such as those defended by Daniel Boisvert and David Copp, and on hybrid expressivist views such as those defended by Michael Ridge and myself.
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  • Skepticism and the Prediction Objection.Esben Petersen - 2015 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 5 (3):193-217.
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  • Skeptical pragmatic invariantism: good, but not good enough.Alexander Dinges - 2016 - Synthese 193 (8):2577-2593.
    In this paper, I will discuss what I will call “skeptical pragmatic invariantism” as a potential response to the intuitions we have about scenarios such as the so-called bank cases. SPI, very roughly, is a form of epistemic invariantism that says the following: The subject in the bank cases doesn’t know that the bank will be open. The knowledge ascription in the low standards case seems appropriate nevertheless because it has a true implicature. The goal of this paper is to (...)
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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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  • The Real Challenge to Photography (as Communicative Representational Art).Robert Hopkins - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (2):329-348.
    I argue that authentic photography is not able to develop to the full as a communicative representational art. Photography is authentic when it is true to its self-image as the imprinting of images. For an image to be imprinted is for its content to be linked to the scene in which it originates by a chain of sufficient, mind-independent causes. Communicative representational art (in any medium: photography, painting, literature, music, etc.) is art that exploits the resources of representation to achieve (...)
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  • Can evolution get us off the hook? Evaluating the ecological defence of human rationality.Maarten Boudry, Michael Vlerick & Ryan McKay - 2015 - Consciousness and Cognition 33:524-535.
    This paper discusses the ecological case for epistemic innocence: does biased cognition have evolutionary benefits, and if so, does that exculpate human reasoners from irrationality? Proponents of ‘ecological rationality’ have challenged the bleak view of human reasoning emerging from research on biases and fallacies. If we approach the human mind as an adaptive toolbox, tailored to the structure of the environment, many alleged biases and fallacies turn out to be artefacts of narrow norms and artificial set-ups. However, we argue that (...)
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  • Ruinous Arguments: Escalation of disagreement and the dangers of arguing.Fabio Paglieri - unknown
    People argue to reconcile differences of opinion, but reconciliation may fail to happen. In these cases, most theorists assume arguers are left with the same disagreement from which they started. This is too optimistic, since disagreement might instead escalate, and this may happen because of the argumentative practice, not in spite of it. These dangers depend on epistemological, pragmatic, and cultural factors, and show why arguers should be careful in picking their dialogical fights.
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  • Denying antecedents and affirming consequents: The state of the art.David Godden & Frank Zenker - 2015 - Informal Logic 35 (1):88-134.
    Recent work on conditional reasoning argues that denying the antecedent [DA] and affirming the consequent [AC] are defeasible but cogent patterns of argument, either because they are effective, rational, albeit heuristic applications of Bayesian probability, or because they are licensed by the principle of total evidence. Against this, we show that on any prevailing interpretation of indicative conditionals the premises of DA and AC arguments do not license their conclusions without additional assumptions. The cogency of DA and AC inferences rather (...)
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  • Intuitions' Linguistic Sources: Stereotypes, Intuitions and Illusions.Eugen Fischer & Paul E. Engelhardt - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (1):67-103.
    Intuitive judgments elicited by verbal case-descriptions play key roles in philosophical problem-setting and argument. Experimental philosophy's ‘sources project’ seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess our warrant for accepting them. This article develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by philosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradox about perception, trace them to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension, and employ a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to elicit the relevant (...)
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  • Minimalism And The Limits Of Warranted Assertability Maneuvers.Blake Roeber - 2014 - Episteme 11 (3):245-260.
    Contextualists and pragmatists agree that knowledge-denying sentences are contextually variable, in the sense that a knowledge-denying sentence might semantically express a false proposition in one context and a true proposition in another context, without any change in the properties traditionally viewed as necessary for knowledge. Minimalists deny both pragmatism and contextualism, and maintain that knowledge-denying sentences are not contextually variable. To defend their view from cases like DeRose and Stanley's high stakes bank case, minimalists like Patrick Rysiew, Jessica Brown, and (...)
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  • Pragmatic Contextualism.Geoff Pynn - 2015 - Metaphilosophy 46 (1):26-51.
    Contextualism in epistemology has traditionally been understood as the view that “know” functions semantically like an indexical term, encoding different contents in contexts with different epistemic standards. But the indexical hypothesis about “know” faces a range of objections. This article explores an alternative version of contextualism on which “know” is a semantically stable term, and the truth-conditional variability in knowledge claims is a matter of pragmatic enrichment. The central idea is that in contexts with stringent epistemic standards, knowledge claims are (...)
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  • The New and Old Ignorance Puzzles: How badly do we need closure?Brent G. Kyle - 2015 - Synthese 192 (5):1495-1525.
    Skeptical puzzles and arguments often employ knowledge-closure principles . Epistemologists widely believe that an adequate reply to the skeptic should explain why her reasoning is appealing albeit misleading; but it’s unclear what would explain the appeal of the skeptic’s closure principle, if not for its truth. In this paper, I aim to challenge the widespread commitment to knowledge-closure. But I proceed by first examining a new puzzle about failing to know—what I call the New Ignorance Puzzle . This puzzle resembles (...)
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  • Infelicitous Cancellation: The Explicit Cancellability Test for Conversational Implicature Revisited.Jonas Åkerman - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (3):1-10.
    This paper questions the adequacy of the explicit cancellability test for conversational implicature as it is commonly understood. The standard way of understanding this test relies on two assumptions: first, that that one can test whether a certain content is conversationally implicated, by checking whether that content is cancellable, and second, that a cancellation is successful only if it results in a felicitous utterance. While I accept the first of these assumptions, I reject the second one. I argue that a (...)
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  • What makes weird beliefs thrive? The epidemiology of pseudoscience.Maarten Boudry, Stefaan Blancke & Massimo Pigliucci - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (8):1177-1198.
    What makes beliefs thrive? In this paper, we model the dissemination of bona fide science versus pseudoscience, making use of Dan Sperber's epidemiological model of representations. Drawing on cognitive research on the roots of irrational beliefs and the institutional arrangement of science, we explain the dissemination of beliefs in terms of their salience to human cognition and their ability to adapt to specific cultural ecologies. By contrasting the cultural development of science and pseudoscience along a number of dimensions, we gain (...)
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  • Pluralism and the absence of truth.Jeremy Wyatt - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Connecticut
    In this dissertation, I argue that we should be pluralists about truth and in turn, eliminativists about the property Truth. Traditional deflationists were right to suspect that there is no such property as Truth. Yet there is a plurality of pluralities of properties which enjoy defining features that Truth would have, were it to exist. So although, in this sense, truth is plural, Truth is non-existent. The resulting account of truth is indebted to deflationism as the provenance of the suspicion (...)
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  • What 'If'?William B. Starr - 2014 - Philosophers' Imprint 14.
    No existing conditional semantics captures the dual role of 'if' in embedded interrogatives — 'X wonders if p' — and conditionals. This paper presses the importance and extent of this challenge, linking it to cross-linguistic patterns and other phenomena involving conditionals. Among these other phenomena are conditionals with multiple 'if'-clauses in the antecedent — 'if p and if q, then r' — and relevance conditionals — 'if you are hungry, there is food in the cupboard'. Both phenomena are shown to (...)
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  • Compositionality and Sandbag Semantics.Elmar Geir Unnsteinsson - 2014 - Synthese 191 (14):3329-3350.
    It is a common view that radical contextualism about linguistic meaning is incompatible with a compositional explanation of linguistic comprehension. Recently, some philosophers of language have proposed theories of 'pragmatic' compositionality challenging this assumption. This paper takes a close look at a prominent proposal of this kind due to François Recanati. The objective is to give a plausible formulation of the view. The major results are threefold. First, a basic distinction that contextualists make between mandatory and optional pragmatic processes needs (...)
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  • Incomplete Descriptions, Incomplete Quantified Expressions (Part of the dissertation portfolio Modality, Names and Descriptions).Zsófia Zvolenszky - 2007 - Dissertation, New York University
    This paper offers a unified, quantificational treatment of incomplete descriptions like ‘the table’. An incomplete quantified expression like ‘every bottle’ (as in “Every bottle is empty”) can feature in true utterances despite the fact that the world contains nonempty bottles. Positing a contextual restriction on the bottles being talked about is a straightforward solution. It is argued that the same strategy can be extended to incomplete definite descriptions across the board. ncorporating the contextual restrictions into semantics involves meeting a complex (...)
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  • Meaning, intentionality and communication.Pierre Jacob - 2011 - In Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning. De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 11--25.
    This chapter probes the connections between the metaphysics of meaning and the investigation of human communication. It first argues that contemporary philosophy of mind has inherited most of its metaphysical questions from Brentano's puzzling definition of intentionality. Then it examines how intentionality came to occupy the forefront of pragmatics in three steps. By investigating speech acts, Austin and ordinary language philosophers pioneered the study of intentional actions performed by uttering sentences of natural languages. Based on his novel concept of speaker's (...)
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  • Shifting Targets and Disagreements.Robin McKenna - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (4):725-742.
    Many have rejected contextualism about ?knows? because the view runs into trouble with intra- and inter-contextual disagreement reports. My aim in this paper is to show that this is a mistake. First, I outline four desiderata for a contextualist solution to the problem. Second, I argue that two extant solutions to the problem fail to satisfy the desiderata. Third, I develop an alternative solution which satisfies the four desiderata. The basic idea, put roughly, is that ?knowledge? ascriptions serve the function (...)
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  • Moral Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence.Jonas Olson - 2014 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Jonas Olson presents a critical survey of moral error theory, the view that there are no moral facts and so all moral claims are false. Part I explores the historical context of the debate; Part II assesses J. L. Mackie's famous arguments; Part III defends error theory against challenges and considers its implications for our moral thinking.
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  • A Gricean Rearrangement of Epithets.Zsófia Zvolenszky - 2012 - In Ferenc Kiefer & Zoltán Bánréti (eds.), 0 Years of Theoretical Linguistics in Budapest: A selection of papers from the 2010 conference celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Theoretical Linguistics Programme of Eötvös Loránd University. Tinta Publishing House. pp. 183-218.
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  • Are children with Specific Language Impairment competent with the pragmatics and logic of quantification?Napoleon Katsos, Clara Andrés Roqueta, Rosa Ana Clemente Estevan & Chris Cummins - 2011 - Cognition 119 (1):43-57.
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  • Gigerenzer's normative critique of Kahneman and Tversky.Peter B. M. Vranas - 2000 - Cognition 76 (3):179-193.
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  • The pragmatic interpretation of utterances.Jacek Malinowski - 2003 - Logic and Logical Philosophy 11:115-127.
    The aim of this paper is to analyze the differences and similarities between the linguistic and the logical meaning of a sentence and propose a uniform point of view on the notion of the meaning of utterances. The proposed notion differs from the notion of the logical meaning as well as from the linguistic one. It may be considered to be a kind of composition of both of them.
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  • Adaptive fuzzy logics for contextual hedge interpretation.Stephan van der Waart van Gulik - 2009 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 18 (3):333-356.
    The article presents several adaptive fuzzy hedge logics. These logics are designed to perform a specific kind of hedge detection. Given a premise set Γ that represents a series of communicated statements, the logics can check whether some predicate occurring in Γ may be interpreted as being (implicitly) hedged by technically, strictly speaking or loosely speaking, or simply non-hedged. The logics take into account both the logical constraints of the premise set as well as conceptual information concerning the meaning of (...)
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  • The semantics and acquisition of number words: integrating linguistic and developmental perspectives.Julien Musolino - 2004 - Cognition 93 (1):1-41.
    This article brings together two independent lines of research on numerally quantified expressions, e.g. two girls. One stems from work in linguistic theory and asks what truth conditional contributions such expressions make to the utterances in which they are used--in other words, what do numerals mean? The other comes from the study of language development and asks when and how children learn the meaning of such expressions. My goal is to show that when integrated, these two perspectives can both constrain (...)
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  • A Relational Response to Newman's Objection to Russell's Causal Theory of Perception.Naomi Eilan - 2013 - Theoria 81 (1):4-26.
    The causal theory of perception has come under a great deal of critical scrutiny from philosophers of mind interested in the nature of perception. M. H. Newman's set-theoretic objection to Russell's structuralist version of the CTP, in his 1928 paper “Mr Russell's Causal Theory of Perception” has not, to my knowledge, figured in these discussions. In this paper I aim to show that it should: Newman's objection can be generalized to yield a particularly powerful and incisive challenge to all versions (...)
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  • Re-inflating the Conception of Scientific Representation.Chuang Liu - 2015 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 29 (1):41-59.
    This article argues for an anti-deflationist view of scientific representation. Our discussion begins with an analysis of the recent Callender–Cohen deflationary view on scientific representation. We then argue that there are at least two radically different ways in which a thing can be represented: one is purely symbolic, and therefore conventional, and the other is epistemic. The failure to recognize that scientific models are epistemic vehicles rather than symbolic ones has led to the mistaken view that whatever distinguishes scientific models (...)
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  • Reference, Truth, and Biological Kinds.Marcel Weber - 2014 - In: J. Dutant, D. Fassio and A. Meylan (Eds.) Liber Amicorum Pascal Engel.
    This paper examines causal theories of reference with respect to how plausible an account they give of non-physical natural kind terms such as ‘gene’ as well as of the truth of the associated theoretical claims. I first show that reference fixism for ‘gene’ fails. By this, I mean the claim that the reference of ‘gene’ was stable over longer historical periods, for example, since the classical period of transmission genetics. Second, I show that the theory of partial reference does not (...)
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  • Arguments as Abstract Objects.Paul L. Simard Smith & Andrei Moldovan - 2011 - Informal Logic 31 (3):230-261.
    In recent discussions concerning the definition of argument, it has been maintained that the word ‘argument’ exhibits the process-product ambiguity, or an act/object ambigu-ity. Drawing on literature on lexical ambiguity we argue that ‘argument’ is not ambiguous. The term ‘argu-ment’ refers to an object, not to a speech act. We also examine some of the important implications of our argument by considering the question: what sort of abstract objects are arguments?
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  • Sociality and solitude.J. David Velleman - 2013 - Philosophical Explorations 16 (3):324-335.
    “How can I, who am thinking about the entire, centerless universe, be anything so specific as this: this measly creature existing in a tiny morsel of space and time?” This metaphysically self-deprecating question, posed by Thomas Nagel, holds an insight into the nature of personhood and the ordinary ways we value it, in others and in ourselves. I articulate that insight and apply it to the phenomena of friendship, companionship, sexuality, solitude, and love. Although love comes in many forms, I (...)
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  • The test of truth: An experimental investigation of the norm of assertion.John Turri - 2013 - Cognition 129 (2):279-291.
    Assertion is fundamental to our lives as social and cognitive beings. Philosophers have recently built an impressive case that the norm of assertion is factive. That is, you should make an assertion only if it is true. Thus far the case for a factive norm of assertion been based on observational data. This paper adds experimental evidence in favor of a factive norm from six studies. In these studies, an assertion’s truth value dramatically affects whether people think it should be (...)
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  • Conversational Implicatures Are Still Cancellable.Roberta Colonna Dahlman - 2013 - Acta Analytica 28 (3):321-327.
    Is it true that all conversational implicatures are cancellable? In some recent works (Weiner Analysis 66(2):127–130, 2004, followed by Blome-Tillmann Analysis 68(2):156–160, 2008 and, most recently, by Hazlett 2012), the property of cancellability that, according to Grice (1989), conversational implicatures must possess has been called into question. The aim of this article is to show that the cases on which Weiner builds his argument—the Train Case and the Sex Pistols Case— do not really suffice to endanger Grice’s Cancellability Hypothesis. What (...)
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  • Conjuring Ethics from Words.Jonathan McKeown-Green, Glen Pettigrove & Aness Webster - 2012 - Noûs 49 (1):71-93.
    Many claims about conceptual matters are often represented as, or inferred from, claims about the meaning, reference, or mastery, of words. But sometimes this has led to treating conceptual analysis as though it were nothing but linguistic analysis. We canvass the most promising justifications for moving from linguistic premises to substantive conclusions. We show that these justifications fail and argue against current practice (in metaethics and elsewhere), which confuses an investigation of a word’s meaning, reference, or competence conditions with an (...)
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  • Functionalism and The Independence Problems.Darren Bradley - 2013 - Noûs 47 (1):545-557.
    The independence problems for functionalism stem from the worry that if functional properties are defined in terms of their causes and effects then such functional properties seem to be too intimately connected to these purported causes and effects. I distinguish three different ways the independence problems can be filled out – in terms of necessary connections, analytic connections and vacuous explanations. I argue that none of these present serious problems. Instead, they bring out some important and over-looked features of functionalism.
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  • Why and How to Fill an Unfilled Proposition.Samuel C. Rickless - 2011 - Theoria 78 (1):6-25.
    There are two major semantic theories of proper names: Semantic Descriptivism and Direct Reference. According to Semantic Descriptivism, the semantic content of a proper name N for a speaker S is identical to the semantic content of a definite description “the F” that the speaker associates with the name. According to Direct Reference, the semantic content of a proper name is identical to its referent. Semantic Descriptivism suffers from a number of drawbacks first pointed out by Donnellan (1970) and Kripke (...)
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  • (1 other version)Does Meaning Evolve?Mark D. Roberts - 2004 - Behavior and Philosophy 32 (2):401 - 426.
    A common method of making a theory more understandable is to compare it to another theory that has been better developed. Radical interpretation is a theory that attempts to explain how communication has meaning. Radical interpretation is treated as another time-dependent theory and compared to the time-dependent theory of biological evolution. The main reason for doing this is to find the nature of the time dependence; producing analogs between the two theories is a necessary prerequisite to this and brings up (...)
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  • Reason and Language.Richard Heck - 2006 - In Cynthia Macdonald & Graham Macdonald (eds.), Mcdowell and His Critics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 22--45.
    John McDowell has often emphasized the fact that the use of langauge is a rational enterprise. In this paper, I explore the sense in which this is so, arguing that our use of language depends upon our consciously knowing what our words mean. I call this a 'cognitive conception of semantic competence'. The paper also contains a close analysis of the phenomenon of implicature and some suggestions about how it should and should not be understood.
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  • What Is Wrong with Lying?Paul Faulkner - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (3):535-557.
    One thing wrong with lying is that it can be manipulative. Understanding why lying can be a form of manipulation involves understanding how our telling someone something can give them a reason to believe it, and understanding this requires seeing both how our telling things can invite trust and how trust can be a reason to believe someone. This paper aims to outline the mechanism by means of which lies can be manipulative and through doing so identify a unique reason (...)
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