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  1. Lifting the church-ban on quotational analysis: The translation argument and the use-mention distinction. [REVIEW]Diederik Olders & Peter Sas - 2001 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 32 (2):257-270.
    According to quotational theory, indirect ascriptions of propositional attitudes should be analyzed as direct ascriptions of attitudes towards natural-language sentences specified by quotations. A famous objection to this theory is Church's translation argument. In the literature several objections to the translation argument have been raised, which in this paper are shown to be unsuccessful. This paper offers a new objection. We argue against Church's presupposition that quoted expressions, since they are mentioned, cannot be translated. In many contexts quoted expressions are (...)
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  • Paul Grice and the philosophy of language.Stephen Neale - 1992 - Linguistics and Philosophy 15 (5):509 - 559.
    The work of the late Paul Grice (1913–1988) exerts a powerful influence on the way philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists think about meaning and communication. With respect to a particular sentence φ and an “utterer” U, Grice stressed the philosophical importance of separating (i) what φ means, (ii) what U said on a given occasion by uttering φ, and (iii) what U meant by uttering φ on that occasion. Second, he provided systematic attempts to say precisely what meaning is by (...)
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  • (1 other version)Conversational Impliciture.Kent Bach - 1994 - Mind and Language 9 (2):124-162.
    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 (...)
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  • Computational situation theory.Erkan Tin & Varol Akman - 1994 - ACM SIGART Bulletin 5 (4):4-17.
    Situation theory has been developed over the last decade and various versions of the theory have been applied to a number of linguistic issues. However, not much work has been done in regard to its computational aspects. In this paper, we review the existing approaches towards 'computational situation theory' with considerable emphasis on our own research.
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  • ‘Pragmatics First’: Animal Communication and the Evolution of Language.Dorit Bar-On - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-28.
    Research on the evolution of language is often framed in terms of sharp discontinuities in syntax and semantics between animal communication systems and human language as we know them. According to the so-called “pragmatics-first” approach to the evolution of language, when trying to understand the origins of human language in animal communication, we should be focusing on potential pragmatic continuities. However, some proponents of this approach (e.g. Seyfarth and Cheney Animal Behavior 124: 339–346, 2017) find important pragmatic continuities, whereas others (...)
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  • Verbal Disagreement and Semantic Plans.Alexander W. Kocurek - 2023 - Erkenntnis.
    I develop an expressivist account of verbal disagreements as practical disagreements over how to use words rather than factual disagreements over what words actually mean. This account enjoys several advantages over others in the literature: it can be implemented in a neo-Stalnakerian possible worlds framework; it accounts for cases where speakers are undecided on how exactly to interpret an expression; it avoids appeals to fraught notions like subject matter, charitable interpretation, and joint-carving; and it naturally extends to an analysis of (...)
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  • Directing Thought.Henry Ian Schiller - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue that directing is a more fundamental kind of speech act than asserting, in the sense that the conditions under which an act counts as an assertion are sufficient for that act to count as a directive. I show how this follows from a particular way of conceiving intentionalism about speech acts, on which acts of assertion are attempts at changing a common body of information – or conversational common ground – maintained by conversational participants’ practical attitude of acceptance. (...)
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  • In Conversation with Artificial Intelligence: Aligning language Models with Human Values.Atoosa Kasirzadeh - 2023 - Philosophy and Technology 36 (2):1-24.
    Large-scale language technologies are increasingly used in various forms of communication with humans across different contexts. One particular use case for these technologies is conversational agents, which output natural language text in response to prompts and queries. This mode of engagement raises a number of social and ethical questions. For example, what does it mean to align conversational agents with human norms or values? Which norms or values should they be aligned with? And how can this be accomplished? In this (...)
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  • Imperative Inference and Practical Rationality.Daniel W. Harris - 2021 - Philosophical Studies (4):1065-1090.
    Some arguments include imperative clauses. For example: ‘Buy me a drink; you can’t buy me that drink unless you go to the bar; so, go to the bar!’ How should we build a logic that predicts which of these arguments are good? Because imperatives aren’t truth apt and so don’t stand in relations of truth preservation, this technical question gives rise to a foundational one: What would be the subject matter of this logic? I argue that declaratives are used to (...)
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  • True Griceanism: Filling the Gaps in Callender and Cohen’s Account of Scientific Representation.Quentin Ruyant - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (3):533-553.
    Callender and Cohen have proposed to apply a “Gricean strategy” to the constitution problem of scientific representation, taking inspiration from Grice’s reduction of linguistic meaning to mental states. They suggest that scientific representation can be reduced to stipulation by epistemic agents. This account has been criticised for not making a distinction between symbolic and epistemic representation and not taking into account the communal aspects of scientific representation. I argue that these criticisms would not apply if Grice’s actual strategy were properly (...)
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  • Meaning and Emotion: The Extended Gricean Model and What Emotional Signs Mean.Constant Bonard - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Geneva and University of Antwerp
    This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. I discuss cases involving emotional reactions, ways of clothing, speaking, or (...)
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  • Speaker's reference, semantic reference, sneaky reference.Eliot Michaelson - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (5):856-875.
    According to what is perhaps the dominant picture of reference, what a referential term refers to in a context is determined by what the speaker intends for her audience to identify as the referent. I argue that this sort of broadly Gricean view entails, counterintuitively, that it is impossible to knowingly use referential terms in ways that one expects or intends to be misunderstood. Then I sketch an alternative which can better account for such opaque uses of language, or what (...)
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  • Intentionalism and Bald-Faced Lies.Daniel W. Harris - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    In Lying and Insincerity, Andreas Stokke argues that bald-faced lies are genuine lies, and that lies are always assertions. Since bald-faced lies seem not to be aimed at convincing addressees of their contents, Stokke concludes that assertions needn’t have this aim. This conflicts with a traditional version of intentionalism, originally due to Grice, on which asserting something is a matter of communicatively intending for one’s addressee to believe it. I argue that Stokke’s own account of bald-faced lies faces serious problems (...)
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  • Lewis, Language, Lust and Lies.Max Kolbel - 1998 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 41 (3):301-315.
    David Lewis has tried to explain what it is for a possible language to be the actual language of a population in terms of his game-theoretical notion of a convention. This explanation of the actual language relation is re-evaluated in the light of some typical episodes of linguistic communication, and it is argued that speakers of a language do not generally stand in the actual language relation to that language if the actual language relation is explicated in Lewis's way. In (...)
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  • Travelling in Time and Space at the Origins of Language.Francesco Ferretti - 2014 - Humana Mente 7 (27).
    In this paper we propose a narrative hypothesis on the nature of language and a proto-discursive hypothesis on the origin of our communicative abilities. Our proposal is based on two assumptions. The first assumption, concerning the properties of language, is tied to the idea that global discourse coherence governs the origin of our communicative abilities as well the functioning of these abilities. The second assumption, concerning processing devices, is connected to the idea that the systems of spatial and temporal navigation (...)
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  • A Gricean analysis of discursive strategies in decision-oriented science: Bullshit, uncertainty, and meaning.Juan Bautista Bengoetxea - 2017 - Filosofia Unisinos 18 (1).
    The popular notion of bullshit and the term that expresses it has received little philosophical attention despite the fact that it pervades much of human discourse. Frankfurt recovered bullshit analysis in the eighties and opened the way to studies on its nature and function. Our interest in bullshit is philosophically analytical, but also practical, as bullshit particularly affects the field of science policy. In order to understand that double character, we first present Grice’s model of meaning of expressions and then (...)
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  • Verbal Disputes and the Varieties of Verbalness.Vermeulen Inga - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (2):331-348.
    Many philosophical disputes, most prominently disputes in ontology, have been suspected of being merely verbal and hence pointless. My goal in this paper is to offer an account of merely verbal disputes and to address the question of what is problematic with such disputes. I begin by arguing that extant accounts that focus on the semantics of the disputed statement S do not capture the full range of cases as they might arise in philosophy. Moreover, these accounts bring in heavy (...)
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  • The Lying Test.Eliot Michaelson - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (4):470-499.
    As an empirical inquiry into the nature of meaning, semantics must rely on data. Unfortunately, the primary data to which philosophers and linguists have traditionally appealed—judgments on the truth and falsity of sentences—have long been known to vary widely between competent speakers in a number of interesting cases. The present article constitutes an experiment in how to obtain some more consistent data for the enterprise of semantics. Specifically, it argues from some widely accepted Gricean premises to the conclusion that judgments (...)
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  • Gricean Communication and Transmission of Thoughts.Friedrich Christoph Doerge & Mark Siebel - 2008 - Erkenntnis 69 (1):55-67.
    Gricean communication is communication between utterers and their audiences, where the utterer means something and the audience understands what is meant. The weak transmission idea is that, whenever such communication takes place, there is something which is transmitted from utterer to audience; the strong transmission idea adds that what is transmitted is nothing else than what is communicated. We try to salvage these ideas from a seemingly forceful attack by Wayne Davis. Davis attaches too much significance to the surface structure (...)
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  • The Social Life of Slurs.Geoff Nunberg - 2018 - In Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris & Matt Moss (eds.), New Work on Speech Acts. Oxford University Press. pp. 237–295.
    The words we call slurs are just plain vanilla descriptions like ‘cowboy’ and ‘coat hanger’. They don't semantically convey any disparagement of their referents, whether as content, conventional implicature, presupposition, “coloring” or mode of presentation. What distinguishes 'kraut' and 'German' is metadata rather than meaning: the former is the conventional description for Germans among Germanophobes when they are speaking in that capacity, in the same way 'mad' is the conventional expression that some teenagers use as an intensifier when they’re emphasizing (...)
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  • (1 other version)Meaning, intentionality and communication.Pierre Jacob - 2011 - In Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn & 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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  • From communication to language—a psychological perspective.J. S. Bruner - 1974 - Cognition 3 (3):255-287.
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  • Literalness and other pragmatic principles.François Recanati - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (4):729-730.
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  • A New Source of Data About Singular Thought.Mihnea D. I. Capraru - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (4):1159-1172.
    Philosophers have justified extant theories of singular thought in at least three ways: they have invoked wide-ranging theories motivated by data from other philosophical areas, they have elicited direct intuitions about which thoughts are singular, and they have subjected propositional attitude reports to tests such as Russellian substitution and Quinean exportation. In these ways, however, we haven’t yet been able to tell what it takes to have singular thoughts, nor have we been able to tell which of our thoughts they (...)
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  • Shifty characters.Eliot Michaelson - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 167 (3):519-540.
    In “Demonstratives”, David Kaplan introduced a simple and remarkably robust semantics for indexicals. Unfortunately, Kaplan’s semantics is open to a number of apparent counterexamples, many of which involve recording devices. The classic case is the sentence “I am not here now” as recorded and played back on an answering machine. In this essay, I argue that the best way to accommodate these data is to conceive of recording technologies as introducing special, non-basic sorts of contexts, accompanied by non-basic conventions governing (...)
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  • Searle's derivation of promissory obligation.Savas L. Tsohatzidis - 2007 - In Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts: Essays on John Searle’s Social Ontology. Springer.
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  • Understanding proper names.Michael McKinsey - 2010 - Linguistics and Philosophy 33 (4):325-354.
    There is a fairly general consensus that names are Millian (or Russellian) genuine terms, that is, are singular terms whose sole semantic function is to introduce a referent into the propositions expressed by sentences containing the term. This answers the question as to what sort of proposition is expressed by use of sentences containing names. But there is a second serious semantic problem about proper names, that of how the referents of proper names are determined. This is the question that (...)
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  • Epistemic Contextualism as a Theory of Primary Speaker Meaning 1. [REVIEW]Gilbert Harman - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (1):173-179.
    Jason Stanley’s Knowledge and Practical Interests is a brilliant book, combining insights about knowledge with a careful examination of how recent views in epistemology fit with the best of recent linguistic semantics. Although I am largely convinced by Stanley’s objections to epistemic contextualism, I will try in what follows to formulate a version that might have some prospect of escaping his powerful critique.
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  • Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts.Kent Bach & Robert M. Harnish - 1979 - Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    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 -/- .
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  • The End of the Theory of Meaning.Mark Johnston - 1988 - Mind and Language 3 (1):28-42.
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  • Illocutionary forces and what is said.M. Kissine - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (1):122-138.
    A psychologically plausible analysis of the way we assign illocutionary forces to utterances is formulated using a 'contextualist' analysis of what is said. The account offered makes use of J. L. Austin's distinction between phatic acts (sentence meaning), locutionary acts (contextually determined what is said), illocutionary acts, and perolocutionary acts. In order to avoid the conflation between illocutionary and perlocutionary levels, assertive, directive and commissive illocutionary forces are defined in terms of inferential potential with respect to the common ground. Illocutionary (...)
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  • Cogitative and cognitive speaker meaning.Wayne A. Davis - 1992 - Philosophical Studies 67 (1):71 - 88.
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  • Two categories of content.Andrew Woodfield - 1986 - Mind and Language 1 (4):319-54.
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  • Saving psychological solipsism.J. Christopher Maloney - 1991 - Philosophical Studies 61 (March):267-83.
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  • An Unjustly Neglected Theory of Semantic Reference.J. P. Smit - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (5):1297-1316.
    There is a simple, intuitive theory of the semantic reference of proper names that has been unjustly neglected. This is the view that semantic reference is conventionalized speakers reference, i.e. the view that a name semantically refers to an object if, and only if, there exists a convention to use the name to speaker-refer to that object. The theory can be found in works dealing primarily with other issues (e.g. Stine in Philos Stud 33:319–337, 1977; Schiffer in Erkenntnis 13:171–206, 1978; (...)
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  • Nonattributive and Nonreferential Uses of Definite Descriptions.Maria Matuszkiewicz - 2024 - Philosophia 52 (2):305-323.
    This paper revisits Donnellan’s distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions and argues that it is not exhaustive. Donnellan characterizes the distinction in terms of two criteria: the speaker’s intentions and the type of content the speaker aims to express. I argue that contrary to the common view, these two criteria are independent and that the distinctive features may be coinstantiated in more than two ways. This leaves room for nonattributive and nonreferential uses of definite descriptions. Kripke’s notions (...)
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  • On the Relationship Between Modelling Practices and Interpretive Stances in Quantum Mechanics.Quentin Ruyant - 2022 - Foundations of Science 27 (2):387-405.
    The purpose of this article is to establish a connection between modelling practices and interpretive approaches in quantum mechanics, taking as a starting point the literature on scientific representation. Different types of modalities play different roles in scientific representation. I postulate that the way theoretical structures are interpreted in this respect affects the way models are constructed. In quantum mechanics, this would be the case in particular of initial conditions and observables. I examine two formulations of quantum mechanics, the standard (...)
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  • Pragmatic Structures for Action‐Directed Pragmatics.Igal Kvart - 2018 - Philosophical Perspectives 32 (1):219-253.
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  • Visual Objects as Part of a Rational Communication Process.Menashe Schwed - unknown
    In order for visual objects to be fully integrated in argumentation studies, we should be able to show how some visual objects can be part of a rational communication process and be analyzed as part of rational activity, where audiences reason their way to intentions and beliefs via their recognition of the arguer's intention to produce such results. This paper will focus on the way to enable the embedment of some visual objects in argumentation theory.
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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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  • Referring as a collaborative process.Herbert H. Clark & Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs - 1986 - Cognition 22 (1):1-39.
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  • The effect of experimenter's intention on the child's understanding of conservation.Chris Moore & Douglas Frye - 1986 - Cognition 22 (3):283-298.
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  • Conservation accidents.James McGarrigle & Margaret Donaldson - 1974 - Cognition 3 (4):341-350.
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  • Presumptions of relevance.Dan Sperber & Deirdre Wilson - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (4):736.
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  • Say What? On Grice On What Is Said.Luca Baptista - 2011 - European Journal of Philosophy 22 (1):1-19.
    : 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 (...)
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  • Communication Without Shared Meanings.Matej Drobňák - forthcoming - Acta Analytica:1-18.
    According to the objection raised by Fodor and Lepore, inferentialism is untenable because it cannot provide a distinction between meaning-constitutive and ‘utterly contingent’ inferences. As they argue, without the distinction, the meanings of expressions cannot be shared and, without the shared meanings, the successfulness of communication cannot be explained. In other words, without the distinction, inferentialism becomes committed to holism. The aim of this paper is to show that if we understand communication in terms of the coordination of actions, then (...)
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  • AUTOGEN and the Ethics of Co-Creation with Personalized LLMs—Reply to the Commentaries.Sebastian Porsdam Mann, Brian D. Earp, Nikolaj Møller, Vynn Suren & Julian Savulescu - 2024 - American Journal of Bioethics 24 (3):6-14.
    In this reply to our commentators, we respond to ethical concerns raised about the potential use (or misuse) of personalized LLMs for academic idea and prose generation, including questions about c...
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  • (1 other version)Meaning, Medicine, and Merit.Andreas L. Mogensen - 2020 - Utilitas 32 (1):90-107.
    Given the inevitability of scarcity, should public institutions ration healthcare resources so as to prioritize those who contribute more to society? Intuitively, we may feel that this would be somehow inegalitarian. I argue that the egalitarian objection to prioritizing treatment on the basis of patients’ usefulness to others is best thought of as semiotic: i.e. as having to do with what this practice would mean, convey, or express about a person's standing. I explore the implications of this conclusion when taken (...)
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  • Intenzioni ed inferenze nella teoria della comunicazione di Grice: un’interpretazione.Carla Antonelli - 2006 - Esercizi Filosofici 1 (2):83-99.
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  • Origins of Meaning: Must We ‘Go Gricean’?Dorit Bar-on - 2013 - Mind and Language 28 (3):342-375.
    The task of explaining language evolution is often presented by leading theorists in explicitly Gricean terms. After a critical evaluation, I present an alternative, non‐Gricean conceptualization of the task. I argue that, while it may be true that nonhuman animals, in contrast to language users, lack the ‘motive to share information’ understoodà laGrice, nonhuman animals nevertheless do express states of mind through complex nonlinguistic behavior. On a proper, non‐Gricean construal of expressive communication, this means that they show to their designated (...)
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