A remarkable thing about natural language is that we can use it to share our beliefs and thoughts about the world with other speakers of our language. In cases of successful communication, beliefs seem to be transferred from speakers to hearers by means of the hearer recovering the contents of the speaker’s utterances. This is so natural to us that we take it for granted in our everyday life, and rarely stop to think about how it's is possible. Nevertheless, it's (...) a phenomenon that calls for explanation. It is natural to expect that natural language semantics has a key explanatory role to play here. In order to understand this role, we must relate the semantic values assigned to sentences by semantic theory with the content of our speech acts. The simplest possible relation would be identity; the meaning of a sentence is simply the belief expressed by an assertion of the sentence in a given context of utterance. However, a number of problem cases in the literature suggest that this cannot be the case. This dissertation offers a critical assessment of the arguments for distinguishing the semantic value of a sentence from it's so called assertoric content, focusing on problems arising from the analysis of tense and temporal expressions. I conclude that they are indeed distinct, and offer a constructive account of how they must be related in order to allow for an explanation of communicative success. (shrink)

As Quine observed, the following sentence has a reading which, if true, would be of special interest to the authorities: Ralph believes that someone is a spy. This is the reading where the quantifier is naturally understood as taking wide scope relative to the attitude verb and as binding a variable within the scope of the attitude verb. This essay is interested in addressing the question what the semantic analysis of this kind of reading should look like from a Fregean (...) perspective—a perspective according to which attitude states are generally relations to structured Fregean thoughts composed of senses. The Fregean view faces a challenge of compositionality here. This essay describes the challenge and offers a response on the Fregean's behalf. (shrink)

According to an attractive account of belief, our beliefs have centered content. According to an attractive account of communication, we utter sentences to express our beliefs and share them with each other. However, the two accounts are in conflict. In this paper I explore the consequences of holding on to the claim that beliefs have centered content. If we do in fact express the centered content of our beliefs, the content of the belief the hearer acquires cannot in general be (...) identical to the content the speaker expresses. I sketch an alternative account of communication, the Recentering model, that accepts this consequence and explains how expressed and acquired content are related. (shrink)

It seems plausible that successfully communicating with our peers requires entertaining the same thoughts as they do. We argue that this view is incompatible with other, independently plausible principles of thought individuation. Our argument is based on a puzzle inspired by the Kripkean story of Peter and Paderewski: having developed several variations of the original story, we conclude that understanding and communication cannot be modeled as a process of thought transfer between speaker and hearer. While we are not the first (...) to reach this conclusion, the significance of our argument lies in the fact that it only relies on widely accepted premises, without depending on any especially controversial theory of mental and linguistic content. We conclude by drawing out the implications of that conclusion: if communication and understanding do not require thought identity, then one important motivation for the postulation of inter-personally shared thoughts is undercut. (shrink)

There is currently disagreement about whether the phenomenon of first-person, or de se, thought motivates a move towards special kinds of contents. Some take the conclusion that traditional propositions are unable to serve as the content of de se belief to be old news, successfully argued for in a number of influential works several decades ago.1 Recently, some philosophers have challenged the view that there exist uniquely de se contents, claiming that most of the philosophical community has been under the (...) grip of an attractive but unmotivated myth.2 At the very least, this latter group has brought into question the arguments in favor of positing special kinds of content for de se belief; I think they have successfully shown that these arguments are not as conclusive, or fully articulated, as many have taken them to be. In this paper I will address these challenges directly and I will present and defend an argument for the conclusion that the phenomenon of de se thought does indeed motivate the move to a special kind of content, content that is uniquely de se. First, I characterize a notion of de se belief that is neutral with respect to friends and foes of uniquely de se content. I then argue for a determination thesis relating de se belief to belief content: that there is no difference in de se belief without a difference in belief content. I argue that various proposals for rejecting this determination thesis are unsuccessful. In the last part of the paper, I employ this determination thesis to argue for the existence of a type of belief content that is uniquely de se. (shrink)

What is the relationship between Frege’s puzzle and the puzzle of the de se? An increasingly influential view claims that the de se puzzle is merely an instance of Frege’s puzzle and that the idea that de se attitudes pose a distinctive theoretical challenge rests on a myth. Here we argue that this view is misguided. There are important differences between the two puzzles. First, unlike Frege puzzle cases, de se puzzle cases involve unshareable Fregean senses. Second, unlike Frege puzzle (...) cases, de se puzzle cases cannot be resolved by objective information alone. Further, there seem to be pure cases of each puzzle: instances of the de se puzzle which do not have a Fregean structure, and instances of Frege’s puzzle, which do not involve de se attitudes. We conclude that the two puzzles are fundamentally different and that the traditional theory of attitudes needs to be amended. (shrink)

Standpoint epistemology, the view that social identity is relevant to knowledge-acquisition, has been consigned to the margins of mainstream philosophy. In part, this is because the principles of standpoint epistemology are taken to be in opposition to those which guide traditional epistemology. One goal of this paper is to tease out the characterization of traditional epistemology that is at odds with standpoint epistemology. The characterization of traditional epistemology that I put forth is one which endorses the thesis of intellectualism, the (...) view that knowledge does not depend on non-epistemic features. I then suggest that two further components – the atomistic view of knowers and aperspectivalism – can be usefully interpreted as supporting features of intellectualism. A further goal of this paper is to show that we ought to resist this characterization of traditional epistemology. I use pragmatic encroachment as a dialectical tool to motivate the denial of intellectualism, and consequently, the denial of both supporting components. I then attempt to show how it is possible to have a view, similar to pragmatic encroachment, that takes social identity, rather than stakes, to be the feature that makes a difference to what a person is in a position to know. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a heated debate on how to accommodate John Perry's observations about the essentiality of indexicality into our models of linguistic communication. This article is an attempt at providing a new perspective on this issue. I argue that we should jettison two elements taken for granted by the views I present, and criticize, here: no centring, uncentring, recentring and multicentring. These elements are: (1) taking the asserted content to be a part of the communication process (...) and (2) assumptions that the indexical belief of the speaker, when successfully communicated, must be acquired by the hearer as indexical, too. The theory of indexical communication that I propose here is laid out in the mental files framework and devoid of the two aforementioned elements. (shrink)

We assume a central thesis about modal auxiliaries due to Angelika Kratzer, the modal base presupposition: natural language expressions that contain a modal component in their meaning, including all English modal auxiliaries and epistemic modal auxiliaries (EMA)s in particular, presuppose a modal base, a function that draws from context a relevant set of propositions which contribute to a premise-semantics for the modal. Accepting this thesis for EMAs leaves open (at least) the following two questions about the meaning of English EMAs (...) like _must_ and _might_: (i) What constraints, if any, are there on the character of the premise set for an EMA? And (ii) what is the nature of the relationship between premises and conclusion that is required for truth of the EMA statement? I argue for at least a partial answer to (i), with a hypothesis about constraints on the modal base for an EMA: EMAs, unlike some other types of modals, are indexical: They are anchored to an agent-in-a-situation whose doxastic state is currently under discussion in the context of utterance. Realized in a Kratzerian semantics, indexicality sheds new light on a number of outstanding puzzles, including the widely observed variability of anchoring of EMAs, the ways in which EMAs differ from so-called root modals, Yalcin’s (Mind 116:983–1026, 2007) puzzle (a version of Moore’s paradox for epistemic modals embedded under attitudes), how to explain the apparent weakness of necessity EMAs, and problems with second order belief and disagreement. (shrink)

My responses to seven critical reviews of my book *Mental Files* published in a special issue of the journal Disputatio, edited by F. Salis. The reviewers are: Keith Hall, David Papineau, Annalisa Coliva and Delia Belleri, Peter Pagin, Thea Goodsell, Krista Lawlor and Manuel Garcia-Carpintero.

I argue that Frege Problems in thought are best modeled using graph-theoretic machinery; and that these problems can arise even when subjects associate all the same qualitative properties to the object they’re thinking of twice. I compare the proposed treatment to similar ideas by Heck, Ninan, Recanati, Kamp and Asher, Fodor, and others.

It was pointed out, first by Robert Stalnaker, then also by Andy Egan, that David Lewis’s model of centered-worlds contents has undesired consequences for communication of de se contents. The recent years have seen a number of attempts to save the model by amending it to handle de se communication. Proposals include the appeal to sequences of individuals in the centers, to ersatz classical propositions, and to operations of “re-centering”. The authors are Dilip Ninan and Stephan Torre, Sarah Moss and (...) Max Kölbel, and Alan Gibbard and Clas Weber. The present paper discusses these attempts. The conclusion is that they fail. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss two influential pictures of communication and the relation between them. One picture holds that successful communication requires identity of content: The speaker has a belief that she expresses with her utterance, and the hearer acquires a belief with the same content by understanding the utterance. The second picture was proposed by Lewis in his classic work Convention and then refined in “Languages and Language.” It sees communication as coordination among speakers—a technical notion that Lewis draws (...) from game theory. Samuel Cumming has recently provided an elegant and insightful synthesis of the two pictures, arguing that Lewisian coordination among speakers is in fact a form of content identity. In this paper, my negative goal is to argue against Cumming’s attempt to construe coordination as content identity, showing that it yields incorrect predictions about certain cases of successful communication. My positive goal is to show how we can avoid Cumming’s problematic interpretation of coordination and still do justice to the relevant data within a coordination-based framework. (shrink)

According to one tradition in the philosophy of language and mind, the content of a psychological attitude can be characterized by a set of possibilities. On the classic version of this account, advocated by Hintikka (1962) and Stalnaker (1984) among others, the possibilities in question are possible worlds, ways the universe might be. Lewis (1979, 1983a) proposed an alternative to this account, according to which the possibilities in question are possible individuals or centered worlds, ways an individual might be. The (...) motivation for the centered worlds theory has primarily to do with self-locating – or de se – attitudes. The focus of this paper is on the less-discussed question of how other-locating – or de re – attitudes ought to be treated within this framework. Most advocates of what we might call the modal approach to attitudes, Stalnaker and Lewis included, offer some kind of descriptivist solution to the well-known problems that other-locating attitudes raise. There are intramural differences between Stalnaker, Lewis, and other modal theorists (e.g. two-dimensionalists) on a number of issues: on the precise nature of the descriptivism involved, how attitude content relates to the asserted content of the sentences we utter, and on the proper semantic treatment of attitude reports. I pass over these differences to focus on a problem common to these various approaches: all face a problem when it comes to characterizing the contents of counterfactual attitudes like imagining, dreaming, and wishing. (shrink)

This paper is about the relationship between two questions: the question of what the objects of assertion are and the question of how best to theorise about ‘shifty’ phenomena like modality and tense. I argue that the relationship between these two questions is less direct than is often supposed. I then explore the consequences of this for a number of debates in the philosophy of language.

In his book Mental Files , Francois Recanati develops a theory of mind and language based on the idea that Fregean senses should be identified with ‘mental files’, mental representations whose primary function is to store information about objects. I discuss three aspects of Recanati’s book. The first concerns his use of acquaintance relations in individuating mental files, and what this means for ‘file dynamics’. The second concerns his comments on a theory that I have elsewhere advocated, the ‘sequenced worlds’ (...) or ‘multi-centered worlds’ theory. The third concerns how the mental file approach handles non-doxastic attitudes like imagining. (shrink)

Attitudinal propositionalism is the view that all mental attitude content is truth-evaluable. While attitudinal propositionalism is still silently assumed in large parts of analytic philosophy, recent work on objectual attitudes (i.e. attitudes like ‘fearing Moriarty’ and ‘imagining a unicorn’ that are reported through intensional transitive verbs with a direct object) has put attitudinal propositionalism under explanatory pressure. This paper defends propositionalism for a special subclass of objectual attitudes, viz. experiential attitudes. The latter are attitudes like seeing, remembering, and imagining whose (...) grammatical objects intuitively denote (events or) scenes. I provide a propositional analysis of experiential attitudes that preserves the merits of propositionalism. This analysis uses the possibility of representing the target-scenes of experiential attitudes by the intersection of all propositions that are true in these scenes. I show that this analysis makes available the usual (Russellian) account of intensionality and the common (Boolean) logic for entailments. (shrink)

Two lines of investigation into the nature of mental content have proceeded in parallel until now. The first looks at thoughts that are attributable to collectives, such as bands' beliefs and teams' desires. So far, philosophers who have written on collective belief, collective intentionality, etc. have primarily focused on third-personal attributions of thoughts to collectives. The second looks at de se, or self-locating, thoughts, such as beliefs and desires that are essentially about oneself. So far, philosophers who have written on (...) the de se have primarily focused on de se thoughts of individuals. This paper looks at where these two lines of investigations intersect: collective de se thoughts, such as bands' and teams' beliefs and desires that are essentially about themselves. There is a surprising problem at this intersection: the most prominent framework for modeling de se thoughts, the framework of centered worlds, cannot model a special class of collective de se thoughts. A brief survey of this problem's solution space shows that collective de se thoughts pose a new challenge for modeling mental content. (shrink)

Evaluative sentences (moral judgments, expressions of taste, epistemic modals) are relative to the speaker's standards. Lately, a phenomenon has challenged the traditional explanation of this relativity: whenever two speakers disagree over them they contradict each other without being at fault. Hence, it is thought that the correction of the assertions involved must be relative to an unprivileged standard not necessarily the speaker's. I will claim instead that so far, neither this nor any other proposal has provided an explanation of the (...) phenomenon. I will point out several problems presented by them and I will hint to how this phenomenon could be explained by making minor adjustments to our semantic theory. Sentenças avaliativas (julgamentos morais, expressões de gosto, modos epistêmicos) são relativas aos padrões do falante. Recentemente, um fenômeno desafiou a explicação tradicional dessa relatividade: sempre que dois falantes discordam entre si, eles contradizem um ao outro sem estarem errados. Por isso, pensa-se que a correção das asserções envolvidas deve ser relacionada a um padrão desprovido de privilégio e não necessariamente ao padrão do falante. Eu sustentarei, ao contrário, que até agora nem esta nem alguma outra proposta forneceu uma explicação do fenômeno. Eu assinalarei diversos problemas apresentados por essas propostas e sugerirei o modo como este fenômeno poderia ser explicado ao fazer pequenos ajustes em nossa teoria semântica. (shrink)

I distinguish two notions of agreement in belief: believing the same content versus having beliefs that necessarily coincide/diverge in normative status. The second notion of agreement,, is clearly significant for the communication of beliefs amongst thinkers. Thus there would seem to be some prima facie advantage to choosing the conception of content operative in in such a way that the normative status of beliefs supervenes on their content, and this seems to be the prevailing assumption of many semanticists. I shall (...) argue that de se beliefs and assertions provide a motivation to depart from this assumption, and so do beliefs and assertions concerning what is epistemically possible. I conclude by offering two models of assertoric communication that are compatible with the abandonment of the assumption, and suggesting schematically that each model applies to different cases. (shrink)

In the pair of articles of which this is the second, I present a set of problems and philosophical proposals that have in recent years been associated with the term “relativism”. These problems are related to the question of how we should represent thought and speech about certain topics. The main issue is whether we should model such mental states or linguistic acts as involving representational contents that are absolutely correct or incorrect, or whether, alternatively, their correctness should be thought (...) of as varying with some (more or less surprising) factor. In the first article, “Relativism 1: Representational Content”, I discussed the general issue of relativism about representational content. I argued for the conciliatory view that both relativist and absoutist conceptions of representational content can be legitimate. In the present continuation, I look in more detail at a special case of the general issue, namely the question of whether semantic contents, i.e. the contents assigned to linguistic utterances in the semantics of natural language, should be construed in an absolutist or in a relativist way. (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)

In this paper, I argue that, contrary to Robert Stalnaker’s highly influential account of linguistic communication, successful communication does not depend on a common ground between speaker and hearer. The problem for Stalnaker’s account manifests itself in communicative situations that represent both Lingens cases, i.e., cases involving egocentric beliefs, and Frege cases, i.e., cases involving identity confusions. I describe two hypothetical cases that involve successful communication, but in which no common ground of the kind required by Stalnaker’s account is available. (...) I therefore propose an alternative account of communication that is based on epistemic two-dimensionalism. This account maintains that communication requires the transfer of a thought content from speaker to hearer. By holding that this shared content often constitutes common ground, it preserves much of the appeal of Stalnaker’s account. However, my account allows for cases in which the shared thought content does not figure in common ground. (shrink)

It has long been known that the popular account of egocentric thoughts developed by David Lewis is in conflict with a natural account of communication, according to which successful communication requires the transmission of a thought content from speaker to hearer. In this paper, I discuss a number of proposed attempts to reconcile these two accounts of egocentric thought and communication. Each of them postulates two kinds of mental content, where one is egocentric, and the other is transmitted from speaker (...) to hearer in communication. I argue that Ninan’s account, which involves multi-centered contents, and Kölbel’s and Moss’s accounts, which postulate centered and uncentered proxy contents, respectively, are unsatisfactory. Therefore, I propose a two-dimensionalist account, according to which egocentric thoughts are represented by primary intensions, while the thoughts shared by speaker and hearer in cases of successful communication are represented by secondary intensions. Finally, I argue that aside from being able to reconcile Lewis’s account of egocentric thoughts with the natural account of communication, two-dimensionalism also provides the means for modeling agreement and disagreement. (shrink)

ABSTRACT. The received picture of linguistic communication understands communication as the transmission of information from speaker's head to hearer's head. This picture is in conflict with the attractive Lewisian view of belief as self-location, which is motivated by de se attitudes – first-personal attitudes about oneself – as well as attitudes about subjective matters such as personal taste. In this paper, I provide a solution to the conflict that reconciles these views. I argue for an account of mental attitudes and (...) communication on which mental content and speech act content is understood as sets of multicentered worlds – roughly, possible worlds ‘centered’ on a sequence of individuals at a time. I develop a Stalnakerian model of communication based on multicentered worlds content, and I provide a suitable semantics for personal pronouns and predicates of personal taste. The resulting picture is one on which the point of conversation is the coordination of individual perspectives. (shrink)

This article considers the question whether belief ascriptions exhibit context dependence. I first distinguish two potential forms of context dependence in belief ascription. Propositional context dependence concerns what the subject believes, whereas attitudinal context dependence concerns what it is to believe a proposition. I then discuss three potential sources of PCD and two potential sources of ACD. Given the nature of this article, my discussion will provide only an overview of these various forms and sources of context dependence. Along the (...) way I will identify areas where continued research is needed. (shrink)

“I”‐thought is often taken to have a special cognitive significance, with “I” symbolising a subjective way of thinking about oneself that is inapt for communication. In this paper I argue that the way one thinks of oneself in “I”‐thought is immaterial to the meaning of “I,” for in general the psychological role associated with a referential expression is separable from its meaning. With respect to “I,” I suggest that its meaning consists in an interpersonal way of fixing its reference in (...) a context, which is accessible to the speaker and the hearer. Consequently, “I” would have a dual cognitive significance. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe in things, propositions, which are the things that we believe, assert etc., and which are the contents of sentences. The act-type theory of propositions is an attempt to say what propositions are, to explain how we stand in relations to them, and to explain why they are true or false. The core idea of the act-type theory is that propositions are types of acts of predication. The theory is developed in various ways to offer explanations of the (...) important properties of propositions. I present the core idea of the theory, and some developments of it. I discuss the relationship between the theory and the content–force distinction. I also present an important type of objection that has been raised to the explanations offered by the act-type theory. (shrink)

A first-person proposition is a proposition that only a single subject can assert or believe. When I assert ‘I am on fire’ I assert a first-person proposition that only I have access to, in the sense that no one else can assert or believe this proposition. This is in contrast to third-person propositions, which can be asserted or believed by anyone.

Recent descendants of David Lewis, such as Stephen Torre, Dilip Ninan, and Dirk Kindermann have utilized multi-centered propositions, which are roughly sets of possible worlds centered on a sequence of individuals, to characterize the content of attitudes. In an attempt to explain counterfactual attitudes such as wishing and imagining, Ninan (2012, 2013) developed a more fine-grained characterization of multi-centered propositions than others in the multi-centered camp. While Ninan provides a systematic explanation of the nature of de se attitudes (attitudes one (...) expresses with first-person pronouns like ‘I’ or ‘me’), the nature of other types of indexical attitudes (attitudes one expresses with indexical terms like ‘you,’ ‘today,’ ‘now,’) is not explored. This paper does two things. First, it demonstrates how we can account for indexical attitudes within Ninan’s framework. This, however, has the consequence of generating propositions of limited accessibility of sorts, which in turn conflict with a received and simple model of linguistic communication. According to this simple model, successful communication consists of the transmission of mental content from speaker to hearer. Second, in light of this conflict, the paper proposes an adjustment to Ninan’s theory in order to avoid commitment to propositions of limited accessibility, and thus preserve the shareability of attitudinal content from speaker to hearer. (shrink)

The view that first-person (de se) mental content is essential to the explanation of action in general is a strong essential indexicality thesis. A weaker essential indexicality claim is that de se mental content is an essential ingredient of intentional action. An argument by Bermúdez for the former thesis and an argument from Babb in support of the latter are discussed in Section 2, and for reasons presented there it seems that both arguments are unsound and the conclusions are false (...) as well. However, the discussion of their arguments helps us identify a certain class of intentional action, and an apparently very large class, the members of which are guaranteed to have de se origin. This class of intentional action is identified in Sections 3 and 4 and it is shown that necessarily, any member of this class has its origin in indexical, specifically, de se mental content. (shrink)

Adopting a dispositional theory of value promises to deliver a lot of theoretical goodies. One recurring problem for dispositional theories of value, though, is a problem about nonconvergence. If being a value is being disposed to elicit response R in us, what should we say if it turns out that not everybody is disposed to have R to the same things? One horn of the problem here is a danger of the view collapsing into an error theory—of it turning out, (...) on account of the diversity of agents' relevant dispositions, that nothing is really a value, since nothing is disposed to elicit R in everybody. Alternatively, there is a danger of an objectionable fragmentation of value, according to which there is no such thing as a value simpliciter, but only valuesme and valuesyou, valuesus and valuesthem. I advocate a de se relativist version of a dispositional theory of value. If we go for this sort of de-se-ified dispositional theory, we get to keep our theoretical goodies, but we avoid the problem of nonconvergence that leads to a danger of either collapse into an error theory, or else talking-past, and a loss of common subject matter. (shrink)

This paper presents and advocates an approach to the semantics of opinion statements, including matters of personal taste and moral claims. In this framework, ‘outlook-based semantics’, the circumstances of evaluation are not composed of a possible world and a judge ; rather, outlooks replace possible worlds in the role of circumstance of evaluation. Outlooks are refinements of worlds that settle not only matters of fact but also matters of opinion. Several virtues of the framework and advantages over existing implementations of (...) world-judge relativism are demonstrated in this paper. First, world-judge relativism does not actually explain the ‘disagreement’ of ‘faultless disagreement’, while a straightforward explanation suggests itself in outlook-based semantics. Second, outlook-based semantics provides an account of subjective attitude verbs that can capture lack of opinionatedness. Third, outlook-based semantics unproblematically explains the connection-building role of aesthetic discourse and the group-relevance of discretionary assertions, while capturing the same effects in world-judge relativism obviates the purpose of the judge parameter. Finally, because the proposed circumstances of evaluation are entirely analogous to possible worlds, the framework is easy to use and extend. (shrink)

Coliva-Belleri_Some-observations-on-François-Recanatis-Mental-Files.

One of the most difficult problems in the foundations of physics is what gives rise to the arrow of time. Since the fundamental dynamical laws of physics are (essentially) symmetric in time, the explanation for time's arrow must come from elsewhere. A promising explanation introduces a special cosmological initial condition, now called the Past Hypothesis: the universe started in a low-entropy state. Unfortunately, in a universe where there are many copies of us (in the distant ''past'' or the distant ''future''), (...) the Past Hypothesis is not enough; we also need to postulate self-locating (de se) probabilities. However, I show that we can similarly use self-locating probabilities to strengthen its rival---the Fluctuation Hypothesis, leading to in-principle empirical underdetermination and radical epistemological skepticism. The underdetermination is robust in the sense that it is not resolved by the usual appeal to 'empirical coherence' or 'simplicity.' That is a serious problem for the vision of providing a completely scientific explanation of time's arrow. (shrink)

Many think that expressivists have a special problem with negation. I disagree. For if there is a problem with negation, I argue, it is a problem shared by those who accept some plausible claims about the nature of intentionality. Whether there is any special problem for expressivists turns, I will argue, on whether facts about what truth-conditions beliefs have can explain facts about basic inferential relations among those beliefs. And I will suggest that the answer to this last question is, (...) on most plausible attempts at solving the problem of intentionality, ‘no’. (shrink)

An account of meta-epistemic defeaters—distinct from traditional epistemic defeaters—is motivated and defended, drawing from case studies involving epistemic error-theory and epistemic relativism. Mechanisms of traditional epistemic defeat and meta-epistemic defeat are compared and contrasted, and some new puzzles are introduced.

A common view relating compositional semantics and the objects of assertion holds the following: Sentences φ and ψ expresses the same proposition iff φ and ψ have the same modal profile. Following Dummett, Evans, and Lewis, Stanley argues that this view is fundamentally mistaken. According to Dummett, we must distinguish the semantic contribution a sentence makes to more complex expressions in which it occurs from its assertoric content. Stojnić insists that views which distinguish the roles of content and semantic value (...) must nevertheless ensure a tight connection between the two. But, she contends, there is a crucial disanalogy between the views that follow Lewis and the views that follow Dummett. Stanley’s Dummettian view is argued to contain a fatal flaw: On such views, there is no way to secure an appropriate connection between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content. I will review the background issues from Dummett, Evans, Lewis, and Stanley, and provide a principled way of bridging the gap between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content. (shrink)

The topic of the paper is at the intersection of recent debates on de se thought and phenomenal intentionality. An interesting problem for phenomenal intentionality is the question of how to account for the intentional properties of de se thought-contents---i.e., thoughts about oneself as oneself. Here, I aim to describe and consider the significance of a phenomenological perspective on self-consciousness in its application to de se thought. I argue that having de se thoughts can be explained in terms of the (...) ways that subjects consciously attend to themselves in experiences of thinking. Therefore, a strong form of first-person persectivalness, in which the subject is capable of self-directed control of the focus of conscious attention, is required for de se thought. But no constraints on the semantic content of such thoughts are required. The outcome of the question therefore bears importantly on both on the problem of self-reflexive self-reference and the wider problem of self-consciousness. My model suggests phenomenologically-derived conceptual constraints for the extension of minimal, background forms of self-awareness to robust, cognitive forms of self-awareness that have been of interest in recent empirical studies on self-consciousness. The framework therefore provides a way of operationalizing the concept of self-reflexive consciousness by deploying widely deployed notions from the empirical literature such as attention and minimal phenomenal selfhood, enabling a framework for empirically falsifiable hypotheses about the neural mechanisms underlying the structure of self-consciousness. What Is it Like to Think about Oneself? De Se Thought and Phenomenal Intentionality. (shrink)

The topic of the paper is at the intersection of recent debates on de se thought and phenomenal intentionality. An interesting problem for phenomenal intentionality is the question of how to account for the intentional properties of de se thought-contents---i.e., thoughts about oneself as oneself. Here, I aim to describe and consider the significance of a phenomenological perspective on self-consciousness in its application to de se thought. I argue that having de se thoughts can be explained in terms of the (...) ways that subjects consciously attend to themselves in experiences of thinking. Therefore, a strong form of first-person persectivalness, in which the subject is capable of self-directed control of the focus of conscious attention, is required for de se thought. But no constraints on the semantic content of such thoughts are required. The outcome of the question therefore bears importantly on both on the problem of self-reflexive self-reference and the wider problem of self-consciousness. My model suggests phenomenologically-derived conceptual constraints for the extension of minimal, background forms of self-awareness to robust, cognitive forms of self-awareness that have been of interest in recent empirical studies on self-consciousness. The framework therefore provides a way of operationalizing the concept of self-reflexive consciousness by deploying widely deployed notions from the empirical literature such as attention and minimal phenomenal selfhood, enabling a framework for empirically falsifiable hypotheses about the neural mechanisms underlying the structure of self-consciousness. What Is it Like to Think about Oneself? De Se Thought and Phenomenal Intentionality. (shrink)

What role, if any, should centered possible worlds play in characterizing the attitudes? Lewis :513–543, 1979) argued that, in order to account for the phenomena of self-location :474–497, 1977, Noûs 13:3–21, 1979), the contents of the attitudes should be taken to be centered propositions. Stalnaker Assertion: New philosophical essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011, Context, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014), however, has argued that while centered worlds are needed to characterize e.g. belief states, the contents of such states should be (...) understood as ordinary, uncentered propositions. But Stalnaker does not, as is common, provide a semantics of attitude ascriptions based on the models he develops of the attitudinal states themselves. This paper begins to explore the prospects for doing so. It argues that a simple but well-motivated approach does not yield the principles of knowledge and belief Stalnaker endorses; and that a modification which does brings with it worries of its own surrounding communication and learnability. A technical appendix contains novel and pertinent results in doxastic/epistemic logic. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to make sense of a characteristic feature of interactive fictions, such as video game fictions, adventure books and role playing games. In particular, I describe one important way consumers of interactive fiction ‘take on the role’ of a fictional character and are ‘involved’ in the story. I argue that appreciative engagement with such works requires imagining being someone else and imagining parts of the story in a self-locating manner. In short, consuming works of interactive (...) fiction involves imagining the story from the protagonist’s perspective. (shrink)

This paper outlines a bicontextual account of fictional reports. A fictional report is a report on something that happens in a fiction, and a bicontextual account is an account that relativizes truth to two contexts. The proposal is motivated by two considerations. First, it explains the intuitive truth conditions of fictional reports without postulating hidden fiction operators. Second, it handles the problem of indexicals in fictional reports better than the standard accounts.