Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 5, Page 1322-1341, October 2021.

That knowledge ascriptions exhibit some form of sensitivity to context is uncontroversial. How best to account for the context-sensitivity at issue, however, is the topic of heated debates. A certain version of nonindexical contextualism seems to be a promising option. Even so, it is incumbent upon any contextualist account to explain in what way and to what extent the epistemic standard operative in a particular context of epistemic evaluation is affected by non-epistemic factors. In this paper, I investigate how non-epistemic (...) factors come into play when knowledge is ascribed. I argue that knowledge ascriptions often serve the purpose of providing actionable information. This, in turn, requires that epistemic interests be balanced against non-epistemic interests. Moreover, it raises the question of whose interests matter, those of the ascriber, the addressee, or the subject of ascription. Eventually, an answer to the question is suggested. (shrink)

Epistemic absolutism is an orthodox view that propositional knowledge is an ungradable concept. Absolutism is primarily grounded in our ungradable uses of “knows” in ordinary language. This paper advances a thorough objection to the linguistic argument for absolutism. My objection consists of two parts. Firstly, arguments for absolutism provided by Jason Stanley and Julien Dutant will be refuted respectively. After that, two more general refutation-strategies will be proposed: counterevidence against absolutism can be found in both English and non-English languages; the (...) linguistic argument for absolutism is subject to a methodological mistake as the linguistic usages of “knows” cannot accurately reflect its conceptual nature. Therefore, we should give epistemic gradualism, as opposed to absolutism, a more serious consideration. (shrink)

In this paper, I will defend that there is an asymmetry between straightforwardly factual and non-straightforwardly factual disagreements in terms of persistency and retraction, and that we can use what I will call coordination of contexts to explain these two asymmetries. To make my point I will focus on the kinematics of this type of disagreements. I will argue that one way to give a proper account of the kinematics of disagreements about taste and to discriminate between these two cases (...) of disagreement is to focus on coordination of contexts. (shrink)

It is usually claimed that taste utterances have judge-dependent semantic content. Jeremy Wyatt recently proposed a semantic theory that rejects this claim. According to him, the semantic content of taste sentences is judge-independent, but the content of our assertions made by uttering taste sentences is judge-dependent. He showed that this account explains faultless disagreements about tastes. My paper aims to raise some challenges to his proposal. First, a judge-independent taste proposition semantically expressed by a taste sentence seems unrelated to a (...) judge-dependent taste proposition asserted by the speaker. It means that the latter proposition is not systematically obtained from the former. Second, the theory assumes that there are judge-independent taste properties. The existence of such properties can be questioned because it is problematic to state instantiation conditions for them. The paper ends with a sketch of an alternative explanation; it shares Wyatt’s account of faultless disagreements but does not suffer from its drawbacks. (shrink)

Recent philosophical developments on personal indexicals reveal a disagreement between those who defend and those who deny the existence of a distinctive class of second person thoughts. In this piece, I tackle this controversy by highlighting two crucial constraints based on paradigmatic felicitous singular uses of the second person pronoun. On the one hand, the Addressing Constraint is brought out by the awareness and action capabilities displayed in successfully addressing another. On the other hand, the Merging Constraint arises, among other (...) things, from the fact that ‘I’/‘you’-exchanges ground intersubjective disagreement. Once these constraints are fully in view, I go on to show that they pose a challenging dilemma for any account of the second person and that the chasm between friends and foes of the distinctness of second person thought is better seen as endorsements of one of the horns of the dilemma. In reaction to this, I outline a way of accommodating both constraints in terms of ‘perspectives’, i.e. ways of thinking of a reference that do not individuate a thought. On the recommended approach, the second person perspective is cognitively distinctive but does not itself signal the existence of a distinctive second person type of thought. By contrast, a single type of thought about selves expressible with personal indexicals—the self-thought type—can be shown to comprise the third, the second and, perhaps surprisingly, the first person perspective. Unlike other perspectival approaches, the here proposed analysis relies on an elucidation of perspectives in terms of specific information on which a thinker draws made available by a concept-individuating reference rule. (shrink)

The present volume contains a collection of papers presented at the 21st annual meeting “Sinn und Bedeutung” of the Gesellschaft fur Semantik, which was held at the University of Edinburgh on September 4th–6th, 2016. The Sinn und Bedeutung conferences are one of the leading international venues for research in formal semantics.

Focusing on predicates of taste, this paper puts forward a novel version of relativism, motivated by a recently discussed phenomenon: perspectival plurality. After showing that the phenomenon is problematic for at least some versions of relativism and discussing several possible answers on behalf of the relativist, I put forward my own version. The main feature of the proposal is the introduction in the index not of a single parameter for perspectives, but of a (possibly infinite) sequence of such parameters. In (...) the last part of the paper, I defend the view from three objections. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue against a growing tendency to assimilate moral disagreements to disagreements about matters of personal taste. The argumentative strategy adopted in the paper appeals to a battery of linguistic criteria that reveal interesting and important differences between predicates of personal taste and moral predicates. The paper further argues that these semantically tractable differences have an impact on the nature of the corresponding disagreements.

The paper offers a semantic and pragmatic analysis of statements of the form ‘x is beautiful’ as involving a double speech act: first, a report that x is beautiful relative to the speaker’s aesthetic standard, along the lines of naive contextualism; second, the speaker’s recommendation that her audience comes to share her appraisal of x as beautiful. We suggest that attributions of beauty tend to convey such a recommendation due to the role that aesthetic practices play in fostering and enhancing (...) interpersonal coordination. Aesthetic practices are driven by a disposition towards the attunement of attitudes and aesthetic recommendations contribute to forwarding such attunement. Our view is motivated by an attempt to satisfy the following set of desiderata: to account for the experiential nature of aesthetic judgments, disagreements in aesthetic debates, and the normative aspirations of aesthetic discourse, as well as to avoid appealing to error theory and realist ontological commitments. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCarnap famously argued that there are two kinds of questions and claims concerning the existence or reality of entities: internal and external ones. We focus on Carnapian external ontological claims of the form: ‘Xs really exist’, where ‘X’ stands for some traditional metaphysical category, such as ‘substance’, ‘fact’ or ‘structure’. While Carnap considered them as meaningless, we consider them as faultlessly meaningful. However, in line with an expressivist guise, we do not claim that they have the meaning they have in (...) virtue of representing a certain range of entities in the world or describing pieces of reality. Quite the contrary, we maintain that they are meaningful because they perform a function that is fundamentally expressive, that is, a non-descriptive function. In particular, they may imply a distinctive type of metalinguistic expressive function. Moreover, we avoid accuses of mentalism insofar as we explain the meaning of external ontological claims in terms of the practical commitments to the adoption of certain linguistic forms they express, rather than as expressing some kind of mental state. (shrink)

Dworkin’s famous argument from legal disagreements poses a problem for legal positivism by undermining the idea that the law can be (just) the result of the practice and attitudes of norm-applying officials. In recent work, the chapter author argued that a hybrid contextualist theory paired with a dispositional theory of value—a hybrid dispositionalism, for short—offers the resources to respond to similar disagreement- based arguments in other evaluative and normative domains. This chapter claims that the theory the author advocates can extend (...) to legal statements and disputes, and shares some important features with Toh’s (2011) idea that legal statements express shared acceptance of norms. The chapter proposes that a contextualist semantics for legal statements paired with the pragmatic communication of implicatures that express shared acceptances of norms, achieves the same goal that Toh aims at. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSeveral authors have claimed that indicative conditionals are sensitive to the epistemic perspective of agents. According to this sort of view, the truth of an indicative conditional depends on the background evidence of some relevant agent or group of agents. In this paper, I argue that the context-dependence of indicative conditionals goes beyond this. Indicative conditionals are not only sensitive to the evidence of agents, but also to contextual factors that determine what is inferable from such background evidence. More specifically, (...) my proposal is that when the inference associated with a conditional is defeasible, the truth of that conditional is sensitive to practical stakes. (shrink)

In the present paper I present the metalinguistic solutions to the ‘lost disagreement’ problem proposed Sundell and Plunkett [2013] and Barker [2012]. I argue that metalinguistic negotiations about taste, even though successful in explaining the intuition of disagreement in a vast number of cases, are not an accurate solution to the disagreement problem in contextualism when it comes to the most paradigmatic case of “tasty”. I also argue against the account of faultless disagreement explained via vagueness of taste predicates [Barker, (...) 2012]. I believe that the notion of faultlessness employed in the discussion of vagueness [Wright, 1994] is a different notion than the one employed in the discussion of taste discourse [Kölbel, 2003]. (shrink)

What we can call asymmetric disagreement occurs when one agent is in disagreement with another, but not vice-versa. In this paper, I give an example of and develop a framework for understanding this phenomenon. One pivotal feature of my example is that one of the agents in the scenario has a belief about what might be the case—a might-belief. I show that a traditional account of might-beliefs and disagreement cannot explain the initially surprising phenomenon of asymmetric disagreement. In order to (...) provide an explanation, I develop a dynamic account of might-beliefs and a corresponding account of disagreement. I close by exploring a choice point for our account—showing that the simple dynamic account has some controversial (though, perhaps, true) consequences. I explore how revisionary notions of validity, inconsistency, and disagreement can allow us to avoid these consequences if we wish. (shrink)

In this short paper I survey recent contextualist answers to the challenge from disagreement raised by contemporary relativists. After making the challenge vivid by means of a working example, I specify the notion of disagreement lying at the heart of the challenge. The answers are grouped in three categories, the first characterized by rejecting the intuition of disagreement in certain cases, the second by conceiving disagreement as a clash of non-cognitive attitudes and the third by relegating disagreement at the pragmatic (...) level. For each category I present several important variants and raise some (general) criticisms. The paper is meant to offer a quick introduction to the current contextualist literature on disagreement and thus a useful tool for further research. (shrink)

In this paper I draw attention to a number of problems that afflict norm accounts of assertion, i.e. accounts that explain what assertion is, and typically how speakers understand what assertion is, by appeal to a norm of assertion. I argue that the disagreements in the literature over norm selection undermines such an account of understanding. I also argue that the treatment of intuitions as evidence in the literature undermines much of the connection to empirical evidence. I further argue that (...) appeals made to conversational patterns do not require the existence of any norms at all. (shrink)

I present a novel strategy to account for two thoughts concerning disagreements about taste: (i) that they need not involve any substantive fault (faultlessness); (ii) that the faultlessness of a contrary opinion can be coherently appreciated from within a committed perspective (parity). Under the assumption that judgments of taste are truth-apt and governed by the truth-norm, I argue that understanding how exactly truth is normative offers a strategy for accounting for both thoughts. I distinguish between different ways in which truth (...) governs judgment to substantiate the thesis that truth’s normative function varies according to the subject matter at issue. I then argue that truth’s normative guidance in the domain of taste is characteristically weak. I introduce an intuitive distinction between basic and refined taste, and show how this distinction affects questions of faultlessness and parity. Last, I discuss the idea of alethic suberogation in connection with disagreement about refined taste. (shrink)

This paper considers two competing pictures of knowledge of what one ought to do—one which assimilates this to other propositional knowledge conceived as partial ‘locational’ knowledge of where one is in a space of possibilities, the other which distinguishes this from other propositional knowledge by construing it as partial ‘directional’ knowledge of what to do in particular circumstances. I argue that the apparent tension can be lessened by better understanding the contextualized modal-cum-prescriptive nature of ‘ought’ and enriching our conception of (...) the kinds of possibilities within which we can locate ourselves. (shrink)

It has recently become popular to apply expressivism outside the moral domain, e.g., to truth and epistemic justification. This paper examines the prospects of generalizing expressivism to taste. This application has much initial plausibility. Many of the standard arguments used in favor of moral expressivism seem to apply to taste. For example, it seems conceivable that you and I disagree about whether chocolate is delicious although we don’t disagree about the facts, which suggests that taste judgments are noncognitive attitudes rather (...) than beliefs. However, there is also a striking difference between moral disagreements and disagreements about taste. Faced with a moral disagreement, we intuit that either party is at fault. Disagreements about taste, by contrast, are occurrences where neither party intuitively is at fault. This leads to a dilemma. On the one hand, if a disagreement in attitude is not intuited as faultless, then it seems implausible if applied to taste. If, on the other hand, a disagreement in attitude is a disagreement that we intuit as faultless, then it seems implausible if applied to the moral domain. The aim of this paper is to examine how an expressivist can avoid this dilemma. (shrink)

Some philosophers, for example David Lewis, have argued for the need to introduce de se contents or centered contents, i.e. contents of thought and speech the correctness of believing which depends not only on the possible world one inhabits, but also on the location one occupies. Independently, philosophers like Robert Stalnaker (and also David Lewis) have developed the conversational score model of linguistic communication. This conversational model usually relies on a more standard conception of content according to which the correctness (...) of believing a content depends merely on the possible world one occupies. The aim of this paper is to develop a modified conversational score model that operates with centered contents. I begin by explaining how in principle centered contents can figure in the transfer of information from one thinker to another. Here I distinguish the local portability approach from the portable surrogate approach. Then I explain how these modes of information transfer can be exploited in a stalnakerian conversational model involving centered contents, proposing a modified update rule for assertion. (shrink)

.Deep disagreements are those involving a disagreement about (relatively) fundamental epistemic principles. This paper considers the bearing of testimonial injustice, in Miranda Fricker’s sense, on the depth of disagreements, and what this can teach us about the nature and significance of deep disagreements. I start by re-evaluating T. J. Lagewaard’s recent argument that disagreements about the nature, scope, and impact of oppression will often be deepened by testimonial injustice, since the people best placed to offer relevant testimony will be subject (...) to testimonial injustice, pushing the disagreement into one about the bearing of certain epistemic sources on the original debate. I take issue with this last step, but I build on the argument to bring attention to unappreciated and worrying ways in which prejudices can make a disagreement deep in ways that can be hidden from one or more of the participants and from observers. Finally, I revisit some of the ways that deep disagreement has been thought to be problematic for the proper functioning of a democracy, and I examine whether the kinds of hidden deep disagreements I argue for in the paper make these problems any worse, concluding that they likely do. (shrink)

Some in the recent literature have claimed that a connection exists between the Liar paradox and _semantic relativism_: the view that the truth values of certain occurrences of sentences depend on the contexts at which they are assessed. Sagi (Erkenntnis 82(4):913–928, 2017) argues that contextualist accounts of the Liar paradox are committed to relativism, and Rudnicki and Łukowski (Synthese 1–20, 2019) propose a new account that they classify as relativist. I argue that a full understanding of how relativism is conceived (...) within theories of natural language shows that neither of the purported connections can be maintained. There is no reason why a solution to the Liar paradox needs to accept relativism. (shrink)

This thesis offers a teleosemantic account of moral discourse and judgment. It develops a number of views about the function and content of moral judgments and the nature of moral discourse based on Ruth Millikan’s theory of intentional content and the functions of intentional attitudes. Non-cognitivists in meta-ethics have argued that moral judgments are more akin to desires and other motivational attitudes than to descriptive beliefs. I argue that teleosemantics allows us to assign descriptive content to motivational attitudes and hence (...) that even if the non-cognitivist is correct, moral judgments can be said to describe the world. Moreover, given further teleosemantic assumptions, this conclusion has consequences that are both surprising and interesting. First of all, while moral judgments have descriptive content, moral statements do not. The purpose of moral discourse is not to convey beliefs that are true simpliciter, but to convey attitudes that are descriptively correct when tokened by the addressee. Consequently, moral discourse requires speakers to adapt to hearers in order to secure their assent and bring them into "community of judgment" with themselves. Secondly, the descriptive content of a motivational attitude is partly a matter of the subject’s own preferences and circumstances. In particular, the descriptive correctness of a moral judgment is partly a function of the degree to which it is shared with others. Since a moral judgment also motivates the subject to spread it, it has the ability to, in a certain sense, make itself true. If regular descriptive beliefs are supposed to adapt the subject to the world, a moral judgment also has the capacity to adapt the world to the subject. (shrink)

We identify two senses of ‘pragmatics’ and related terms that give rise to two different methods of propositional individuation. The first one is the contextualist approach that essentially acknowledges contextual information to take part in the determination of what is said by the utterance of a sentence. In this sense, Pragmatics relies on the Principle of Compositionality and interprets propositions as structured entities. It epitomises the Building-block Model of Propositional Individuation. The general approach that makes what the agents do the (...) grounding level of philosophical and linguistic analysis characterizes the second sense, Pragmatism. It finds its clearest expression in Peirce’s Pragmatist Maxim, and it relies on the Fregean Principle of Context, and supports a view of propositions as unstructured entities. This is the Organic Model of Propositional Individuation. There is a test, the Analytic Equivalence Test, that tells apart the two models. According to it, the answer to the question whether a theory makes room for different but analytically equivalent propositions determines the model the theory belongs in. A positive answer classifies the theory as belonging to the building-block model; a negative answer allocates the theory within the organic model. (shrink)

Our purpose in this paper is to contribute to a practice-based characterization of scientific inference. We want to explore whether Brandom’s pragmatist–inferentialist framework can suitably accommodate several types of ampliative inference common in scientific reasoning and explanation (probabilistic reasoning, abduction and idealisation). First, we argue that Brandom’s view of induction in terms of merely permissive inferences is inadequate; in order to overcome the shortcoming of Brandom’s proposal, we put forward an alternative conception of inductive, probabilistic reasoning by appeal to the (...) notion of degrees of commitment. Moreover, we examine the sorts of inferential commitments operative in other types of ampliative inferences, such as abduction or reasoning involving idealizations and assumptions. We suggest that agents engaging in these forms of reasoning often undertake restricted inferential commitments, whose scope and reach are more limited that in the case of the commitments associated with full beliefs. (shrink)

We explain three phenomena in legal discourse in terms of MacFarlane’s assessment-sensitive semantics: incompatible applications of law, assessments of statements about what is legally the case, and retrospective overruling. The claim is that assessment sensitivity fits in with the view, shared by many legal theorists at least with respect to hard cases, that the final adjudicator’s interpretation of legal sources is constitutive of the applied norm. We argue that there are strong analogies between certain kinds of statements in legal discourse (...) as understood in light of that view and discourse about matters of taste and future contingents. Thus, if assessment-sensitive semantics provides a compelling account of discourse about matters of taste and future contingents, then it likewise provides a compelling account of those statements in legal discourse. (shrink)

Sentences containing predicates of personal taste exhibit two striking features: whether they are true seems to lie in the eye of the beholder and whether they are true can be—and often is—subject to disagreement. In the last decade, there has been a lively debate about how to account for these two features. In this paper, I shall argue for two claims: first, I shall show that even the most promising approaches so far offered by proponents of so-called indexical contextualism fail (...) to account for the disagreement feature. They might be able to account for some disagreement data, but they have trouble accounting for two kinds of disagreement data that caused the estrangement from indexical contextualism and the migration to relativism in the first place: the denial and the retraction data. Second, I shall show that we still do not have to abandon indexical contextualism, because what I shall call the superiority approach—a new pragmatically extended version of indexical contextualism—can very well account for the data. (shrink)

I articulate the challenge disagreement poses for epistemic contextualism, and then discuss several possible replies on behalf of the contextualist.

Know-how and expressivism are usually regarded as disjoint topics, belonging to distant areas of philosophy. This paper argues that, despite obvious differences, the two debates have important similarities. In particular, semantic and conceptual tools developed by expressivists can be exported to the know-how debate. On the one hand, some of the expressivists' semantic resources can be used to deflect Stanley and Williamson's influential argument for factualism about know-how: the claim that knowing how to do something consists in knowing a fact. (...) On the other, expressivism provides the resources to formulate a nonfactualist account of know-how. On this account, know-how has a kind of nonpropositional content and plays the role of guiding performance of action, rather than recording information from the environment. (shrink)

In some cases of disagreement it seems that neither party is at fault or making a mistake. This phenomenon, so-called faultless disagreement, has recently been invoked as a key motivation for relativist treatments of domains prone to such disagreements. The conceivability of faultless disagreement therefore appears incompatible with traditional realists semantics. This paper examines recent attempts to accommodate faultless disagreement without giving up on realism. We argue that the accommodation is unsatisfactory. However, the examination highlights that “faultless” is multiply ambiguous. (...) The more overarching purpose is to examine the consequences of this—more generally, how to think about faultless disagreement. (shrink)

In this paper I put forward and substantiate a possible defensive move on behalf of the relativist about predicates of personal taste that can be used to block a recent contextualist argument raised against the view: the ‘argument from binding’ proposed in Schaffer (). The move consists in adopting Recanati's “variadic functions” apparatus and applying it to predicates of personal taste like ‘tasty’ and experiencer phrases like ‘for John’. I substantiate the account in a basic relativistic framework and reply to (...) several objections to the variadic-functions approach in general and to its application to the expressions at hand. (shrink)

An assertion is existentially known if and only if: (i) the speaker knows that the sentence she uses to make the assertion expresses a true proposition; (ii) she makes the assertion based on that knowledge; and (iii) she does not believe, have justification for, or know the proposition asserted. Accordingly, if existentially known assertions could be made correctly—as argued by Charlie Pelling in his ‘Assertion and the Provision of Knowledge’—this would show that the norm of assertion cannot be the speaker's (...) belief in, justification for or knowledge of the proposition. In this paper, I try to show that Pelling's argument is inconclusive, as it rests on two assumptions which can be resisted. In turn, I offer a pair of alternative strategies to explain how we can deal with existentially known assertions under the assumption that the speaker's knowledge is the norm of assertion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In recent experimental work, the spectrum-like nature of the phenomenon of ordering subjectivity has been accounted for by recourse to the distinction, within the class of subjective adjectives, between multi-dimensional and judge-dependent ones. One way to cash out judge-dependency is in terms of some kind of experiencer-sensitivity. In this paper, we argue that this approach is insufficient. Applying Solt’s experimental paradigm to moral adjectives suggests that, within the class of judge-dependent adjectives, one must draw a further distinction between experiential (...) and evaluative adjectives. This opens up the question of what, if anything, characterizes judge-dependency. We propose that judge-dependency is characterized by the notion of holistic multi-dimensionality: a predicate is holistically multidimensional just in case its denotation is composed by various dimensions whose contribution is inseparable. (shrink)

This work presents a defense of causal contrastivism based on causal contexualism. As argued, our proposal on causal contextualism is compatible with both causal contrastivism and causal binarism, including explanations of why and in which sense secondary counterfactuals are relevant.

ABSTRACT The paper proposes that the distinctive features of aesthetic assertion are due to a special norm governing such assertion rather than any semantic features of aesthetic predication. The norm is elaborated as a reading of Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment. Apart from the proposed norm capturing various features of aesthetic assertion, it is supported by various linguistic considerations that point to the semantic profile of predicates of personal taste and aesthetic predicates being in fact alike with respect to the (...) role of a judge or experiencer in the interpretation of the respective kinds of assertions. The difference between the two, therefore, must have a different source than the understood role of an agent, viz. the advertised norm. In particular, it is argued that the role of an explicit agent in both predicates acts to signal a presupposition of another agent having a different experience or judgment from the speaker rather than an articulation of the content of the predicate itself or a determination of its truth value. (shrink)

In Kripke-semantics for modal logic, the truth value of a sentence depends on the choice of a semantic index. It means that application of such semantics to natural language analysis requires indication of an index relevant for semantic analysis. It is commonly accepted that the relevant index is initialised by the context of an utterance. The idea has been rejected by the semanticists investigating tempo-modal languages in the framework of indeterminism, which generated the problem of initialization of the semantic index. (...) I present the main argument of those semanticists and describe several responses to the initialisation problem. I finally argue that under certain metaphysical and semantic assumptions, one can respond to the initialisation failure in the classical way, even in indeterministic contexts. (shrink)

I have two objectives in this paper. The first is to investigate whether, and to what extent, truth is valuable. I do this by first isolating the value question from other normative questions. Second, I import into the debate about the nature of truth some key distinctions hailing from value theory. This will help us to clarify the sense in which truth is valuable. I then argue that there is significant variability in the value of truth in different areas of (...) discourse. I shall call this the axiological variability conjecture. I illustrate and substantiate AVC by contrasting the occurrence of disagreement in two paradigmatically evaluative areas of discourse, viz. matters of taste, on the one hand, and morality, on the other. I claim that there is a reasonable tendency to care much more about settling moral disagreements than taste disagreements and that this difference has to do, at least partly but significantly, with the different value that truth exhibits in these two areas of discourse. I then turn to the second objective of the paper—namely, to discuss how pluralistic accounts of the nature of truth may deal with the value of truth in light of AVC. I will argue that AVC is a problem for all versions of truth pluralism that are committed to the following two theses: that truth is a value concept; and that this characteristic of the concept has to be reflected in the metaphysical nature of any admissible truth properties—i.e., all the various properties that are admissible in the pluralist account are value-conferring properties and thus intrinsically valuable. In so doing, I will focus primarily on Michael Lynch’s functionalist incarnation of truth pluralism. Lynch terms this “Manifestation Alethic Pluralism”. My reason for this is twofold: first and foremost, MAP is a paradigmatic exemplification of a model of truth pluralism that is committed to both and ; second, MAP has, to date, enjoyed the most discussion, and currently provides the most developed account of truth pluralism. However, I argue that MAP lacks the resources to account for AVC. Owing to this, I suggest two ways out for an advocate of MAP, which force various structural changes in her view. (shrink)

An agent A blames B hypocritically for violating a moral norm N if and only if: A is likewise blameworthy for violating N, and A is not disposed to blame herself for violating N. Normally, an assertion involving blame is retracted following the objection that and hold. I discuss two prima facie explanations for such a withdrawal: that the objection hampers the speaker’s assertoric authority, rendering and the necessary condition to assert, and that the joint condition is, instead, merely a (...) regulative rule. Having shown that the former option is too revisory as it requires reformulation of all normative accounts of assertion on the table, and the latter false, I proceed to argue that and do not target assertions to begin with. An assertion involving blame is, instead, a clear case of a double speech act: after arguing for this claim, I proceed to show that qua assertion, the act is correct given one’s preferred normative account, whereas it is incorrect qua blaming, as in order to perform such an act, the speaker needs to satisfy the conditions and. (shrink)

Huw Price holds that a recognizable version of expressivism about normative and modal language can be “globalized” so as to apply to all areas of discourse. He focuses on globalizing the anti-representationalism of expressivist theories. By contrast, this paper’s topic is the seldom-discussed way Price seeks to globalize the expressivist view that “non-descriptive” discourse exhibits subjectivity. I argue that Price’s own argument against the possibility of a purely objective domain conflicts with his anti-representationalism and is self-undermining. I then defend a (...) different strategy for arguing that a kind of subjectivity can emerge even in domains traditional expressivists have regarded as purely objective. I do so by using an account of assertoric practice to offer a new solution to a puzzle concerning how to describe contingent histories in the use of natural kind terms. (shrink)

This article presents an empirical examination of the consequences of the virtual entailment principle proposed by Jean Buridan to resolve the Liar paradox. This principle states that every sentence in natural language implicitly asserts its own truth. Adopting this principle means that the Liar sentence is not paradoxical but false, because its content is contradictory to what is virtually implied. As a result, humans should perceive the Liar sentence the same way as any other false sentence. This solution to the (...) Liar paradox received criticism for making ad hoc claims about the natural language. However, thanks to modern advancements in psychophysiology, it became possible to empirically investigate if the human brain really perceives the Liar sentence like a false sentence. We designed and conducted an experiment to examine brain activity in response to true sentences, false sentences and self-referential sentences. Our results provide support for the Buridan’s hypothesis and show that the Liar sentence is processed by the human brain identically to false sentences, while the Truthteller sentence is perceived identically to true sentences. This agrees with predictions derived from the virtual entailment principle and supports the idea that humans think with the logic of truth—a logic for which the truth is a designated value of its adequate semantics. (shrink)

Epistemic relativism comes in many forms, which have been much discussed in the last decade or so in analytic epistemology. My goal is to defend a version of epistemic relativism that sources the relativity in the metaphysics of epistemic properties and relations, most saliently knowledge. I contrast it with other relativist theses. I argue that the sort of metaphysical relativism about knowledge I favor does not threaten the objectivity of the epistemological domain.

Open futurism is the indeterministic position according to which the future is ‘open’, i.e., there is now no fact of the matter as to what future contingent events will actually obtain. Many open futurists hold a branching conception of time, in which a variety of possible futures exist. This paper introduces two challenges to branching-time open futurism, which are similar in spirit to a challenge posed by Fine to tense realism. The paper argues that, to address the new challenges, open (...) futurists must adopt an objective, non-perspectival notion of actuality and subscribe to an A-theoretic, dynamic conception of reality. Moreover, given a natural understanding of “actual future”, it is perfectly sensible for open futurists to hold that a unique, objectively actual future exists, contrary to a common assumption in the current debate. The paper also contends that recognising the existence of a unique actual future helps open futurists to avoid potential misconceptions. (shrink)

This paper defends Lewis’ influential treatment of de se attitudes from recent criticism to the effect that a key explanatory notion—self-ascription—goes unexplained. It is shown that Lewis’ treatment can be reconstructed in a way which provides clear responses. This sheds light on the explanatory ambitions of those engaged in Lewis’ project.

MacFarlane (2014) advocates a radical form of semantic relativism. He argues that his proposal complies with the norms governing our assertion practices in various areas of discourse. These practices also include norms regarding the conditions in which it is inappropriate not to retract an assertion. Ferrari & Zeman (2014) identify an asymmetry concerning retractions in two relevant areas of discourse and argue that assessment-sensitivity needs to be supplemented with further theoretical tools to explain it. I dispel the asymmetry and conclude (...) that assessment-sensitivity needs no supplementation to account for it. (shrink)

I propose and defend an account on which the semantic content of propositions expressed by utterances making use of modals epistemically is constant; i.e., invariant. Although such proposals are typically considered non-starters, I aim to show that combining such a semantics with a performative account in which such utterances perform two speech acts is quite promising. I argue that a performative account, when combined with an invariant semantic content theory, does a good job of accounting for ordinary intuitions in some (...) of the standard test cases discussed in the literature. I further show that the contextualist has a little noticed problem with how a single speaker is able to consider the same epistemic possibility proposition over time. An invariant position has no such problem, and I argue that this counts strongly in its favor. (shrink)

I discuss Lawlor’s Austinian account of knowledge ascriptions and argue that it is a brand of pragmatic encroachment. I then criticize the motivation for pragmatic encroachment theories that derives from assumptions about the functional role of knowledge ascriptions. I argue that this criticism also apply to contextualist followers of Craig. Finally, I suggest that the central lesson from reflection on the communicative functions of knowledge ascriptions is that they, upon reflection, motivate traditional invariantism.

How good are we at understanding what others communicate? It often seems to us, at least, that we understand quite well what others convey when speaking in a familiar language. However, a growing body of evidence from the psychology of language suggests that in various communicative settings comprehenders routinely form linguistic representations that are underdetermined, “sketchy”, “shallow” or imprecise, often without noticing it. The paper discusses some important consequences of this evidence. Following recent discussions in this strand of research, I (...) outline how the evidence is currently best interpreted as supporting a view on which operating at a certain level of imprecision and underdetermination is a functional feature of the system responsible for comprehension of linguistic utterances in humans. That this kind of imprecision and underdetermination is part and parcel of linguistic interactions, makes the exact success rate of comprehension particularly hard to estimate. This poses a unique and interesting challenge for assessing the quality of linguistic comprehension. Understanding what a speaker intended to convey with a linguistic utterance may be less transparent than it appears to us. I will discuss the extent to which this evidence may lead to pessimism about how good we are at comprehending what others communicate. However, as I will argue in the last part of the paper, in various cases language users can be sensitive to some types of imprecision and underdetermination in comprehension and make up for it by means of various forms of post hoc deliberation. I will describe some such clarificatory contexts and end by charting a map of important issues that require further investigation. (shrink)