Work on analogy has been done from a number of disciplinary perspectives throughout the history of Western thought. This work is a multidisciplinary guide to theorizing about analogy. It contains 1,406 references, primarily to journal articles and monographs, and primarily to English language material. classical through to contemporary sources are included. The work is classified into eight different sections (with a number of subsections). A brief introduction to each section is provided. Keywords and key expressions of importance to research on (...) analogy are discussed in the introductory material. Electronic resources for conducting research on analogy are listed as well. (shrink)

Manipulation of quotation, shown to be a common tactic of argumentation in this paper, is associated with fallacies like wrenching from context, hasty generalization, equivocation, accent, the straw man fallacy, and ad hominem arguments. Several examples are presented from everyday speech, legislative debates and trials. Analysis using dialog models explains the critical defects of argumentation illustrated in each of the examples. In the formal dialog system CB, a proponent and respondent take turns in making moves in an orderly goal-directed sequence (...) of argumentation in which the proponent tries to persuade the respondent to become committed to a conclusion by asking questions and offering arguments. Analyzing quotation by using the notion of commitment in dialog, it is shown (a) how an arguer’s previous assertions can be brought to light in the course of a dialog to deal with problems arising from misquotation, (b) how the profile of dialog model allows a critic to analyse the fundamental effects misquotation brings about in a dialog, and (c) how the critic can use such an analysis to correct the problem. (shrink)

An argument can be taken as an operation of justification or as the product of this operation. But what about a counter-argument? This article is based on the hypothesis that there exists an operation of argumentative negation, which is both the argumentative and the negative equivalent of the operation of justification. Justification and argumentative negation necessarily act on assertions, for they are active at the level of the epistemic modalities of statements. As an operation, a counter-argument can thus be described, (...) as the application of an argumentative negation; as a product, it can be described as an argument the conclusion of which shows traces of negative modality. Two uses of argumentative negation are distinguished here: counter-argumentation and calling into question. The former can lead only to assertive conclusive statements, but the latter can also lead to directives or commissives. This leads the authors to introduce the notion of pseudo-argument, besides those of argument and counter-argument. It is shown in particular that when a pseudo-argument is rejected, argumentative negation has the effect of making evident an underlying argument. With respect to the latterit functions as a counter-argumentation, whereas with respect to the illocutionary act accomplished by the conclusive statement, it functions as a calling into question of a condition of satisfaction for this act. This article also defines certain characteristics of argument, proposes criteria for identifying argumentative negation in polemical conversations, and distinguishes four modes of counter-argumentation. (shrink)

When we use a word, we face a crucial epistemic gap: we ground our move on the fact that our interlocutor knows the meaning of the word we used, and therefore he can interpret our dialogical intention. However, how is it possible to know the other’s mind? Hamblin explained this dialogical problem advancing the idea of dialectical meaning: on his view, the use of a word is based on a set of presumptions. Building on this approach, the use of a (...) word in a dialogue can be analyzed in terms of presumptive reasoning, while the manipulative strategies based on slanted or loaded terms or redefinitions can be conceived as forms of conflicts of presumptions. A presumptive approach to meaning can also ground different dialectical strategies to solve misunderstanding or definitional disagreements, or tactics to undermine the interlocutor’s arguments by advancing charges of equivocation. (shrink)

Assertion is fundamental to our lives as social and cognitive beings. Philosophers have recently built an impressive case that the norm of assertion is factive. That is, you should make an assertion only if it is true. Thus far the case for a factive norm of assertion been based on observational data. This paper adds experimental evidence in favor of a factive norm from six studies. In these studies, an assertion’s truth value dramatically affects whether people think it should be (...) made. Whereas nearly everyone agreed that a true assertion supported by good evidence should be made, most people judged that a false assertion supported by good evidence should not be made. The studies also suggest that people are consciously aware of criteria that guide their evaluation of assertions. Evidence is also presented that some intuitive support for a non-factive norm of assertion comes from a surprising tendency people have to misdescribe cases of blameless rule-breaking as cases where no rule is broken. (shrink)

John Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality and Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital shifted the focus of current thought on capital and economic development to the cultural and conceptual ideas that underpin market economies and that are taken for granted in developed nations. This collection of essays assembles 21 philosophers, economists, and political scientists to help readers understand these exciting new theories.

Are there such things as moral truths? How do we know what we should do? And does it matter? Constructivism states that moral truths are neither invented nor discovered, but rather are constructed by rational agents in order to solve practical problems. While constructivism has become the focus of many philosophical debates in normative ethics, meta-ethics and action theory, its importance is still to be fully appreciated. These new essays written by leading scholars define and assess this new approach in (...) ethics, addressing such questions as the nature of constructivism, how constructivism improves our understanding of moral obligations, how it accounts for the development of normative practices, whether moral truths change over time, and many other topics. The volume will be valuable for advanced students and scholars of ethics and all who are interested in questions about the foundation of morality. (shrink)

This paper shows how reasoning from best explanation combines with linguistic and factual presumptions during the process of retrieving a speaker’s intention. It is shown how differences between presumptions need to be used to pick the best explanation of a pragmatic manifestation of a dialogical intention. It is shown why we cannot simply jump to an interpretative conclusion based on what we presume to be the most common purpose of a speech act, and why, in cases of indirect speech acts, (...) we need to depend on an abductive process of interpretation. (shrink)

What is the relationship between saying ‘I know that Q’ and guaranteeing that Q? John Austin, Roderick Chisholm and Wilfrid Sellars all agreed that there is some important connection, but disagreed over what exactly it was. In this paper I discuss each of their accounts and present a new one of my own. Drawing on speech-act theory and recent research on the epistemic norms of speech acts, I suggest that the relationship is this: by saying ‘I know that Q’, you (...) represent yourself as having the authority to guarantee that Q. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a descriptive definition of art that is able to accommodate the existence of bad art, while illuminating the value of good art. This, I argue, is something that existing definitions of art fail to do. I approach this task by providing an account according to which what makes something an artwork is the institutional process by which it is made. I argue that Searle’s account of institutions and institutional facts shows that the existence of all (...) institutions is due to their being perceived by their participants to perform some humanly valuable function. I then identify the functions to which the existence of art institutions is due. I then use these functions to provide a reductive institutional definition of art. Finally, in section seven, I examine the account’s consequences for the value of good art. (shrink)

The main aim of this thesis is to defend moral realism. In chapter 1, I argue that moral realism is best understood as the view that moral sentences have truth-value, there are moral properties that make some moral sentences true, and moral properties are not reducible to non- moral properties. Realism is contrasted with non-cognitivism, error-theory and reductionism, which, in brief, deny, and, respectively. In the introductory chapter, it is also argued that there are some prima facie reasons to assume (...) that non-cognitivism and error-theory are erroneous. In chapters 2 and 3, I suggest that the two main forms of reductionism, analytic and synthetic reductionism, are mistaken. In chapter 4, I argue that the considerations in the previous chapters in relation to non-cognitivism, error-theory and reductionism provide support to moral realism. It is also suggested that these considerations make it plausible to hypothesise that moral properties depend on non- moral properties in a way I refer to as ‘the realist formula’. The realist formula confirms moral realism since it implies that moral properties are not reducible to non- moral properties. In chapters 5, 6 and 7, I argue that moral realism, much owing to the realist formula, is able to explain significant meta-ethical issues regarding moral disagreement, moral reason and moral motivation. Among other things, externalism concerning moral motivation is defended. The explanatory value of moral realism in relation to these meta-ethical issues is taken to suggest that this view is preferable to non-cognitivism, error-theory and reductionism. Some of the meta-ethical issues discussed in these chapters, particularly moral disagreement and motivation, have been thought to provide support to non-cognitivism and error-theory. I maintain that since realism, unlike reductionism, is able to counter these arguments, it justifies us in upholding the view that moral sentences have truth-value and the view that there are moral properties. In chapter 8, various objections against realism with regard to the dependence of moral properties on non- moral properties are responded to. In chapter 9, I consider an influential argument to the effect that moral properties are not involved in causal explanations. I maintain that this argument fails and that it therefore is reasonable to assume that moral properties are natural properties. However, the discussions in chapters 8 and 9 also suggest that moral realism might face problems that cannot be thoroughly discussed in this thesis. (shrink)

It is often observed in metaethics that moral language displays a certain duality in as much as it seems to concern both objective facts in the world and subjective attitudes that move to action. In this paper, I defend The Dual Aspect Account which is intended to capture this duality: A person’s utterance of a sentence according to which φing has a moral characteristic, such as “φing is wrong,” conveys two things: The sentence expresses, in virtue of its conventional meaning, (...) the belief that φing has a moral property, and the utterance of the sentence carries a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that the person in question has an action-guiding attitude in relation to φing. This account has significant advantages over competing views: (i) As it is purely cognitivist, it does not have the difficulties of expressivism and various ecumenical positions. (ii) Yet, in spite of this, it can explain the close, “meaning-like,” connection between moral language and attitudes. (iii) In contrast to other pragmatic accounts, it is compatible with any relevant cognitivist view. (iv) It does not rest on a contentious pragmatic notion, such as conventional implicature. (v) It does not imply that utterances of complex moral sentences, such as conditionals, convey attitudes. In addition, the generalized implicature in question is fully calculable and cancellable. (shrink)

What are we to make of the fact that world leaders, such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau, have, within the last few decades, offered official apologies for a whole host of past injustices? Scholars have largely dealt with this phenomenon as a moral question, seeing in these expressions of contrition a radical disruption of contemporary neoliberal individualism, a promise of a more humane world. Focusing on Canadian apology politics, this essay instead proposes a nonideal approach to state apologies, sidestepping questions of (...) what they ought to do and focusing instead on their actual functioning as political acts. Through a sociologically informed speech act theory and Foucault’s work on power, apology is conceptualized as a speech act with an essentially relational nature. The state, through apologizing, reaffirms the norms governing its relationship to its subjects at a moment when a past transgression threatens to destabilize this relation. From a Foucauldian point of view, the state’s power inheres in the very stability of the state–citizen relation, and we should therefore see apologies as defensive moves to protect state hegemony. In the context of Western liberal democracies, such as Canada, apologies embody, rather than challenge, the logic of neoliberal governmentality by suggesting that everything, including resentment against the state, can be managed within the current status quo. Nevertheless, total cynicism about apology politics is not warranted. In many indigenous apology campaigners’ demands for contrition we see another side of apologies: their potential to bring about change by enacting counterhegemonic relations to the state. (shrink)

This essay is a sustained attempt to bring new light to some of the perennial problems in philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection through developing an account of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Building on the information-theoretic framework of Dretske (1981), we present an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call sensory concepts, concepts that apply, roughly, to so-called secondary qualities of objects. We show that these concepts have a special informational character and semantic structure that closely (...) tie them to the brain states realizing conscious qualitative experiences. We then develop an account of introspection which exploits this special nature of sensory concepts. The result is a new class of concepts, which, following recent terminology, we call phenomenal concepts: these concepts refer to phenomenal experience itself and are the vehicles used in introspection. On our account, the connection between sensory and phenomenal concepts is very tight: it consists in different semantic uses of the same cognitive structures underlying the sensory concepts, such as the concept of red. Contrary to widespread opinion, we show that information theory contains all the resources to satisfy internalist intuitions about phenomenal consciousness, while not offending externalist ones. A consequence of this account is that it explains and predicts the so-called conceivability arguments against physicalism on the basis of the special nature of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Thus we not only show why physicalism is not threatened by such arguments, but also demonstrate its strength in virtue of its ability to predict and explain away such arguments in a principled way. However, we take the main contribution of this work to be what it provides in addition to a response to those conceivability arguments, namely, a substantive account of the interface between sensory and conceptual systems and the mechanisms of introspection as based on the special nature of the information flow between them. (shrink)

Recent third person approaches to thought experiments and conceptual analysis through the method of surveys are motivated by and motivate skepticism about the traditional first person method. I argue that such surveys give no good ground for skepticism, that they have some utility, but that they do not represent a fundamentally new way of doing philosophy, that they are liable to considerable methodological difficulties, and that they cannot be substituted for the first person method, since the a priori knowledge which (...) is our object in conceptual analysis can be acquired only from the first person standpoint. (shrink)

A common view is that natural language treats numbers as abstract objects, with expressions like the number of planets, eight, as well as the number eight acting as referential terms referring to numbers. In this paper I will argue that this view about reference to numbers in natural language is fundamentally mistaken. A more thorough look at natural language reveals a very different view of the ontological status of natural numbers. On this view, numbers are not primarily treated abstract objects, (...) but rather 'aspects' of pluralities of ordinary objects, namely number tropes, a view that in fact appears to have been the Aristotelian view of numbers. Natural language moreover provides support for another view of the ontological status of numbers, on which natural numbers do not act as entities, but rather have the status of plural properties, the meaning of numerals when acting like adjectives. This view matches contemporary approaches in the philosophy of mathematics of what Dummett called the Adjectival Strategy, the view on which number terms in arithmetical sentences are not terms referring to numbers, but rather make contributions to generalizations about ordinary (and possible) objects. It is only with complex expressions somewhat at the periphery of language such as the number eight that reference to pure numbers is permitted. (shrink)

There has frequently been taken to be a tension, if not an incompatibility, between "externalist" theories of content (which allow the make-up of one's physical environment and the linguistic usage of one's community to contribute to the contents of one's thoughts and utterances) and the "methodologically individualist" intuition that whatever contributes to the content of one's thoughts and utterances must ultimately be grounded in facts about one's own attitudes and behavior. In this dissertation I argue that one can underwrite such (...) externalist theories within a methodologically individualistic framework by understanding semantic norms in terms of the need to reach, for each of one's terms, a type of "equilibrium." Each speaker's commitment to making her _own_ beliefs and applications consistent allows one to incorporate these 'external' factors into the contents of their thoughts and utterances in a way that remains methodologically individualistic. Methodologically individualistic accounts are typically taken to be unable to incorporate 'external' factors such as the world's physical make-up or communal usage because of arguments suggesting that the individual's own beliefs and usage underdetermine or even misidentify what, according to externalist accounts, they mean by their terms. These arguments, however, only seem plausible if one presupposes a comparatively impoverished conception of the individual's beliefs. The beliefs a speaker associates with a given term extend far beyond the handful of sentences they would produce if asked to list such beliefs. In particular, speakers have an implicit, but rich, understanding of their language, their world, and the relation between them. Speakers typically understand languages as shared temporally extended practices about which they can be, both individually and collectively, mistaken. Once this conception of language is taken into account, the ascriptions which purportedly forced 'non-individualistic' conceptions of content upon us (particularly ascriptions which seemed to tie what we meant to social use rather than our own beliefs) turn out to be ultimately grounded in the individual's own beliefs. Indeed, our self-conception does much more than merely underwrite 'non-individualistic' ascriptions.. (shrink)

The central pillar of Austin’s theory of speech acts is the three-way distinction between locutionary acts like saying, illocutionary acts like asserting, and perlocutionary acts like persuading (Austin 1962: VIII-IX). While the latter distinction has been widely accepted, the former distinction has been frequently rejected due to Searle’s objections, who argued that since Austin’s locutionary acts are supposed to be forceful in the sense contrasting with neutral expression of a content and all force is by Austin’s own definition illocutionary, the (...) notion of a locutionary act collapses into that of an illocutionary act (Searle 1968). In this paper, I provide an interpretation of Austin’s distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts and defend it against Searle’s objections. I argue that Searle’s main objection relies on mistakenly running together two notions of ‘force’: the Fregean notion of representational force as presentation-as-true and the Austinian notion of illocutionary force as the social-communicative significance of the speech act. Once we distinguish these we can see that although Searle is correct that Austin’s locutionary acts are forceful in the former sense, he’s mistaken in thinking that such force is illocutionary. Given this, his objection that locutionary acts collapse into illocutionary acts misses its mark. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the practice of categorizing works of art and its relationship to art criticism. How a work of art is categorized influences how it is appreciated and criticized. Being frightening is a merit for horror, but a demerit for lullabies. The brushstrokes in Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" (1874) look crude when seen as a Neoclassical painting, but graceful when seen as an Impressionist painting. Many of the judgments we make about artworks are category-dependent in this way, but previous research (...) has rarely examined in depth the ontological structure of art categories, how they are generated and maintained, and how they function. This dissertation fills this gap. The proposal of this dissertation can be summarized as follows. Categories (especially genres) should be analyzed as clusters of rules that regulate the responses and behaviors of agents in the artworld. The visual mundaneness is a critical reason to consider Duchamp's "Comb" (1916) provocative, given the existence of the readymade as a set of rules that justifies such reasoning. The critical and appreciative practice of which categorization is a part is a social practice of making, declaring, proposing, reforming, and developing rules of appreciation. How we appreciate artworks, and how criticism guides our appreciation, is sensitive to how we categorize artworks. How we categorize artworks is sensitive to what categories have been set up in our community and which categories are active regarding each artwork. (shrink)

In this paper, we take up an old issue that of pragmemes, broached by Mey and further explored by Capone. It is not easy to define pragmemes and distinguish them sufficiently from speech acts (units of language use broached by Austin and Searle) or from Wittgensteinian language games or from macro speech acts (see van Dijk on macrostructures) or from Goffman’s scripts. The best idea we could develop about pragmemes is that they instantiate the triple articulation of language, proposed by (...) Jock Wong; being essentially composed of phonological-syntactic units, that have a certain content relative to a social situation and to a certain culture, pragmemes express a certain function (or illocutionary force), like, e.g., modifying society or some aspect of it. They are part of a chapter that can be called either “societal pragmatics” or “emancipatory pragmatics,” to use the words by Mey. In fact, knowledge of how language is used to diminish the rights of people and to propagate the “status quo” may be instrumental to give rights and power to ordinary human beings who are oppressed by political and economical structures. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper, I defend fictional creationism, the view that fictional objects are abstract artifacts, from the objection that the apparent truth of fictional negative existentials, such as “Sherlock Holmes does not exist,” poses a serious problem for creationism. I develop a sophisticated version of the pragmatic approach by focusing on the inconsistent referential intentions of ordinary speakers: the upshot would be that creationism is no worse —perhaps even in a better position— than anti-realism, even if we restrict our linguistic (...) data to fictional negative existentials. (shrink)

It has been argued that moral assertions involve the possession, on the part of the speaker, of appropriate non-cognitive attitudes. Thus, uttering ‘murder is wrong’ invites an inference that the speaker disapproves of murder. In this paper, we present the result of 4 empirical studies concerning this phenomenon. We assess the acceptability of constructions in which that inference is explicitly canceled, such as ‘murder is wrong but I don’t disapprove of it’; and we compare them to similar constructions involving ‘think’ (...) instead of ‘disapprove’—that is, Moore paradoxes (‘murder is wrong but I don’t think that it is wrong’). Our results indicate that the former type of constructions are largely infelicitous, although not as infelicitous as their Moorean counterparts. (shrink)

Several critics have argued that private prisons are not only problematic because of their worse effects but also intrinsically wrong. This article analyzes two prominent arguments for this claim: the representation argument and the condemnation argument. The conclusion is that these arguments fail to show that there is something intrinsically wrong about private prisons. This is especially true if the arguments are extended to non-profit private prisons under social injustice contexts that states are responsible for. In such cases, non-profit private (...) prisons might not only be on a par with public prisons but be preferable to them. However, the arguments are also insufficient to oppose every conceivable for-profit private prison. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to provide a plausible fictional creationist explanation of when and how a fictional object comes into existence without a successful creative intention, focusing on the problem posed by Stuart Brock’s nominalist author scenario. I first present some intuitions about parallel scenarios for fictional objects and concrete artifacts as data to be explained. Then I provide a sufficient condition for the existence of artifacts that can explain both cases. An important upshot of this is (...) that there is an overlooked way to bring artifacts into existence that should merit serious consideration, and this leads to a version of the mind-dependence, but not the intention-dependence, view of artifacts. (shrink)

What is it that we are doing when we make ethical claims and judgments, such as the claim that we morally ought to assist refugees? This dissertation introduces and defends a novel theory of ethical thought and discourse. I begin by identifying the surface features of ethical thought and discourse to be explained, including the realist and cognitivist (i.e. belief-like) appearance of ethical judgments, and the apparent close connection between making a sincere ethical judgment and being motivated to act on (...) it. I examine prominent attempts to explain these features, with a focus on recent ‘hybrid’ theories combining elements of expressivism and cognitivism. Despite their initial promise, I argue that extant hybrid theories are nevertheless committed to problematic semantic, metasemantic, or pragmatic assumptions. I then discuss what I take to be the strongest existing option, ethical neo-expressivism (Bar-On and Chrisman, 2009; Bar-On, Chrisman, and Sias, 2014), and develop it into an explicitly hybrid theory proposing that ethical judgments incorporate both motivationally-charged affective states and moral beliefs. I then supplement this account with a theory of the proper function (following Millikan, 1984) of ethical claims and judgments, arguing that they function simultaneously to track the morally salient features of social situations, and to coordinate our behavior around these features. Finally, I defend one of the cognitivist commitments of the theory – namely, that objective moral knowledge is possible – by applying recent work on the epistemology of fundamental or ‘core’ intellectual commitments (Lynch, 2012; Pritchard, 2016) to the moral realm. (shrink)

Many sentences can be interpreted both as a metaphor and as a literal claim, depending on the context. The aim of this paper is to show that there are discourse-based systematic constraints on the identification of an utterance as metaphorical, literal, or both (as in the case of twice-apt metaphors), from a normative point of view. We claim that the key is contextual coherence. In order to substantiate this claim, we introduce a novel notion of context as a rich and (...) heterogeneous body of information, including previous discourse, elements coming from the surroundings of the utterance, background information, and Questions Under Discussion (QUD) issued from these three sources. We then define contextual coherence as a relation between what we call the minimal paraphrase of the metaphor and the context, and argue that for an interpretation to be coherent two conditions must be met. First, the minimal paraphrase must address some question in the QUD stack. Second, it must be externally consistent, i.e. consistent with the available contextual information. Finally, we argue that an approach based on contextual coherence is better suited to deal with twice-true and twice-apt metaphors than traditional approaches based on semantic deviance or pragmatic lack of fit. (shrink)

We often say one thing and mean another. This kind of indirection (concerning the content conveyed) is both ubiquitous and widely recognized. Other forms of indirection, however, are less common and less discussed. For example, we can sometimes address one person with the primary intention of being overheard by someone else. And, sometimes speakers say something simply in order to make it possible for someone else to say that they said it. Politicians generating sounds bites for the media are an (...) example of this kind of indirection. In this paper, I will explore—via a series of fictionalized examples—these less discussed forms of indirection and consider how such forms of indirection can be duplicitous and misleading. (shrink)

Delusions have traditionally been considered the hallmark of mental illness, and their conception, diagnosis and treatment raise many of the fundamental conceptual and practical questions of psychopathology. One of these fundamental questions is whether delusions are understandable. In this paper, we propose to consider the question of understandability of delusions from a philosophy of language perspective. For this purpose, we frame the question of how delusions can be understood as a question about the meaning of delusional utterances. Accordingly, we ask: (...) “what meaning(s) can delusional utterances possibly have?”. We argue that in the current literature, there is a standard approach to the meaning of delusional utterances, namely the descriptive account which assumes that a delusional utterance “p” means that p is the case. Drawing on Speech Act Theory, we argue that solely relying on the descriptive account disregards essential ways of how linguistic meaning is constituted. Further, we show that Speech Act Theory can prove a helpful addition to the theoretical and clinical “toolbox” used for attempting to understand delusional utterances. This, we believe, may address some of the theoretical and clinical shortcomings of using only the currently predominant descriptive account. (shrink)

A widespread assumption in debates about trust and trustworthiness is that the evaluative norms of principal interest on the trustor’s side of a cooperative exchange regulate trusting attitudes and performances whereas those on the trustee’s side regulate dispositions to respond to trust. The aim here will be to highlight some unnoticed problems with this asymmetrical picture – and in particular, how it elides certain key evaluative norms on both the trustor’s and trustee’s side the satisfaction of which are critical to (...) successful cooperative exchanges – and to show that a symmetrical, ‘achievement-first’ approach to theorising about trust and trustworthiness (and their relation to each other) has important advantages by comparison. The view I develop is guided by a structural analogy with practical reasoning. Just as practical reasoning is working as it should only when there is realisation (knowledge and action) of states (belief and intention) with reverse directions of fits (mind-to-world and world-to-mind), likewise, cooperation between trustor and trustee is functioning as it should only when there is an analogous kind of realisation on both sides of the cooperative exchange – viz., when the trustor ‘matches’ her achievement in trusting (an achievement in fitting reliance to reciprocity) with the trustee’s achievement in responding to trust (an achievement in fitting reciprocity to reliance). An upshot of viewing cooperation between trustor and trustee as exhibiting achievement-theoretic structure is that we will be better positioned to subsume trustworthiness (and its cognates on the trustee’s side), like trust, under a wider suite of evaluative norms that regulate attempts, dispositions, and achievements symmetrically on both sides of a cooperative exchange, with ‘matching achievements’ as the gold standard. (shrink)

The paper argues that Gareth Evans’ argument for transparent self-knowledge is based on a conflation of doxastic transparency with ascriptive transparency. Doxastic transparency means that belief about one’s own doxastic state, e.g., the belief that one thinks that it will rain, can be warranted by ordinary empirical observation, e.g., of the weather. In contrast, ascriptive transparency says that self-ascriptions of belief, e.g., “I believe it will rain”, can be warranted by such observation. We first show that the thesis of doxastic (...) transparency is ill-motivated and then offer a non-epistemic interpretation of ascriptive transparency by reference to the theory of explicit expressive acts: “I think it will rain” requires attendance to the weather because the utterance expresses a belief about the weather, not about ourselves. This will allow us to avoid what is often called “the puzzle of transparent self-knowledge” while remaining faithful to Evans’ linguistic observations. (shrink)

The normativity of meaning—introduced by Kripke in 1982, and the subject of active debate since the early 1990s—has been exclusively understood in terms of duty-imposing norms. But there are norms of another type, well-known within the philosophy of law: authority-conferring norms. Philosophers thinking and writing about the normativity of meaning—normativists, anti-normativists, and even Kripke himself—seem to have failed to consider the possibility that semantic norms are authority-conferring. I argue that semantic norms should be understood as having an authority-conferring structure, and (...) show how this allows normativism about meaning to escape the two most popular arguments against it. (shrink)

In this chapter, we start by spelling out three important features that distinguish expressives—utterances that express emotions and other affects—from descriptives, including those that describe emotions (Section 1). Drawing on recent insights from the philosophy of emotion and value (2), we show how these three features derive from the nature of affects, concentrating on emotions (3). We then spell out how theories of non-natural meaning and communication in the philosophy of language allow claims that expressives inherit their meaning from specificities (...) of emotions—namely, from being felt, evaluative attitudes toward propositional or non-propositional contents (4). (shrink)

According to a rich tradition in philosophy of action, intentional action requires practical knowledge: someone who acts intentionally knows what they are doing while they are doing it. Piñeros Glasscock argues that an anti-luminosity argument, of the sort developed in Williamson, can be readily adapted to provide a reductio of an epistemic condition on intentional action. This paper undertakes a rescue mission on behalf of an epistemic condition on intentional action. We formulate and defend a version of an epistemic condition (...) that is free from any luminosity commitments. While this version of an epistemic condition escapes reductio, it comes with substantive commitments of its own. In particular, we will see that it forces us to deny the existence of any essentially intentional actions. We go on to argue that this consequence should be embraced. On the resulting picture, intentional action is not luminous. But it still entails practical knowledge. (shrink)

Philosophers often characterize discourse in general as aiming at some sort of convergence (in beliefs, plans, dispositions, feelings, etc.), and many views about aesthetic discourse in particular affirm this thought. I argue that a convergence norm does not govern aesthetic discourse. The conversational dynamics of aesthetic discourse suggest that typical aesthetic claims have directive force. I distinguish between dynamic and illocutionary force and develop related theories of each for aesthetic discourse. I argue that the illocutionary force of aesthetic utterances is (...) typically invitational because its dynamic force is influenced by a ‘communal’ norm. I draw on dynamic pragmatics to develop a formal account of this dynamic force that explains why invitation has pride of place in aesthetic conversation. It turns out that the end of aesthetic discourse is not convergence but a distinctive form of community, a kind of harmony of individuality, that is compatible with aesthetic disagreement. If this is right, then convergence theories of aesthetic and normative discourse, and of conversation in general, need to be revised. (shrink)

Since the middle of the last century, normative language has been much studied. In particular, the normative function performed by certain sentences and by certain speech acts has been investigated in depth. Still, the normative function performed by certain physical artifacts designed and built to regulate human behaviors has not yet been thoroughly investigated. We propose to call this specific type of artifacts with normative intent ‘deontic artifacts’. This article aims to investigate this normative phenomenon that is so widespread in (...) our daily reality, but so often forgotten by scholars of norms and normativity. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the nature and scope of Moore’s paradox, articulates the desiderata of a successful solution and claims that psychological expressivism best meets these desiderata. After a brief discussion of prominent responses to Moore’s paradox, the paper offers a solution based on a theory of expressive acts: a Moorean utterance is absurd because the speaker expresses mental states with conflicting contents in commissive versions of the paradox and conflicting states of mind in omissive versions. The paper presents a theory (...) of expressivism for self-ascriptions of mental states. In addition, it introduces the idea of expressive denegation—the speaker’s expressing the absence of a mental state—as an analysis of negative self-ascriptions of mental states. Some of the consequences of expressivism for avowals are explored. (shrink)

Within the conceptual framework of comparative discourse linguistics, this article examines the similarities and the differences between Anglo-American and French Usenet newsgroups and builds hypotheses about the implicit rules which govern the respective ethnolinguistic communities. The comparison is focused on cultural perceptions of questions and explanations occurring in the messages posted in these newsgroups. Both discursive operations have different conversational functions in the Anglo-American and the French messages. Their cross-cultural analysis shows that within the Anglo-American newsgroup, the purpose of the (...) discussion is to get a better comprehension of the complexity of issues, whereas the purpose within the French newsgroup is to maintain an ordinary conversation between equals. (shrink)

The main aim of the study is to ascertain contrastively, in English and Spanish, how directive speech acts are represented in film discourse. For the purpose of the investigation, the directive speech acts of 24 films, 12 in English and 12 in Spanish, were extracted and analysed. A classification taxonomy, inspired by previous research, was created in order to categorize the different types of directive speech acts and determine their level of (in)directness. The results show that indirectness is more widely (...) represented in the English than in the Spanish film scripts, thus confirming the assertion that being indirect is a distinctive feature of English native speakers (Grundy, 2008). This research makes a valuable contribution to the exploration of speech acts in filmspeak and informs the existing local grammar descriptions of the linguistic patterns of directive speech acts. (shrink)

Provisional draft, pre-production copy of my book “The Modal Future” (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).

The aim of this paper is to argue that lying differs from mere misleading in a way that can be morally relevant: liars commit themselves to something they believe to be false, while misleaders avoid such commitment, and this difference can make a moral difference. Even holding all else fixed, a lie can therefore be morally worse than a corresponding misleading utterance. But, we argue, there are also cases in which the difference in commitment makes lying morally better than misleading, (...) as well as cases in which the difference is not morally relevant. This view conflicts with the two main positions philosophers have defended in the ethics of lying and misleading, which entail either that lying is in virtue of its nature worse than misleading or that there is no morally relevant difference between lying and misleading. (shrink)

It is widely held within contemporary metaethics that there is a lack of linguistic support for evaluative expressivism. On the contrary, it seems that the predictions that expressivists make about evaluative discourse are not borne out. An instance of this is the so-called problem of missing Moorean infelicity. Expressivists maintain that evaluative statements express non-cognitive states of mind in a similar manner to how ordinary descriptive language expresses beliefs. Conjoining an ordinary assertion that p with the denial of being in (...) the corresponding belief state famously gives rise to Moorean infelicity:?? It’s raining but I don’t believe that it’s raining. If expressivists are right, then conjoining evaluative statements with the denial of being in the relevant non-cognitive state of mind should give rise to similar infelicity. However, as several theorists have pointed out, this does not seem to be the case. Statements like the following are not infelicitous: Murder is wrong but I don’t disapprove of it. In this paper, I argue that evaluative statements express the kind of states that are attributed by ‘find’-constructions in English and that these states are non-cognitive in nature. This addresses the problem of missing Moorean infelicity and, more generally, goes to show that there are linguistic facts which support expressivism about evaluative discourse. (shrink)

In this thesis I provide an account of the unpleasantness of pain. In doing this, I shed light on the nature of pain and unpleasantness. I propose to understand the unpleasantness of pain based on the determinable-determinate distinction. Unpleasantness is a determinable phenomenal property of mental states that entails badness. I propose that an unpleasant pain experience has two phenomenal properties: i) the phenomenal property of being a pain, and ii) a phenomenal determinate property (u1, u2, u3, etc.) of the (...) unpleasantness determinable. According to this theory unpleasant pains feel bad, and this explains why we are motivated and justified in avoiding them. This explains, for example, why we are motivated and justified to take painkillers. This theory allows us to account for the heterogeneity of unpleasantness, i.e., we can explain how different unpleasant experiences feel unpleasant even if they feel so different. -/- The thesis is organised into seven chapters and divided by three main themes: i) what the unpleasantness of pain consists in, ii) how we can account for the great phenomenal diversity among experiences of unpleasantness, and iii) which cases suggest that there could be pains that are not unpleasant. Broadly, the first two chapters deal with the first theme, where I analyse two reductive accounts of unpleasantness: the content theories and the desire theories. I deal with the second theme in the third and fourth chapter, where I analyse different theories that try to account for the phenomenal property of unpleasantness. In the fifth and sixth chapter, I focus on the third theme, where I consider different cases that suggest the existence of pains that are not unpleasant. In the final chapter, I offer a conclusion of the three main themes by providing my own view on the unpleasantness of pain. (shrink)

The subject of interest of this article is procedural acts considered as double-conventionalized acts. It is assumed in this article that in the case of procedural acts, one can distinguish two levels of conventionalization: the level of a speech act and the level of a procedural act. Both above-mentioned levels affect each other in various ways, what is discussed in the article. As assumed in the article, the analysis of acts characterized by this particular trait and with due account of (...) this trait allows one to observe phenomena that can be hard or even impossible to notice in the process of analyzing acts that are deprived of this trait. Furthermore, it seems that the description of this type of acts may particularly enrich the current discussion on some properties of speech acts held on the grounds of philosophy of language or pragmalinguistics. The research material used in this article as an illustration consists of actual utterances of participants of Polish court proceedings used by them at a hearing. (shrink)

On many occasions, irony is used to communicate emotions, to criticise or to tease other people. Irony comprehension consists in identifying an utterance as ironical and detecting its implied meaning. Existing research has investigated irony comprehension as a pragma-linguistic phenomenon, which has led to several theoretical accounts and interesting empirical results. However, given that irony comprehension is situated in a social context and has the purpose to communicate the mental states of the speaker/writer indirectly, it is reasonable to assume that (...) social cognition and emotional processes play an important role. Until very recently, this has been largely overlooked by research in the field. Furthermore, an overarching framework that can integrate theoretical insights and empirical data on the component processes of irony comprehension is still lacking. The purpose of this paper is to help close this gap. The positive proposal is that the predictive processing framework provides the theoretical resources and conceptual tools to describe relevant aspects of irony comprehension. According to predictive processing, perception, action, cognition, and emotion can be described as a continuous attempt to minimise prediction error. Irony comprehension, I will show, can be depicted as a special case of prediction error minimisation. The neuro-functional mechanism postulated by predictive processing is apt to account for the realisation of the pragma-linguistic, social, and emotional processes that jointly give rise to irony comprehension. The emerging perspective can elucidate why and how people comprehend ironical utterances. (shrink)

In this paper, I take a critical look at the Davidsonian argument that metaphorical sentences do not express propositions because of the phenomenological experience—seeing one thing as another thing—involved in understanding them as metaphors. According to Davidson, seeing-as is not seeing-that. This verdict is aimed at dislodging metaphor from the position of being assessed with the semantic notions of propositions, meaning, and truth. I will argue that the phenomenological or perceptual experience associated with metaphors does not determine the propositional contentfulness (...) or truth-evaluability of metaphors. Truth-evaluability is not inconsistent but compatible with a perceptual model for metaphors. I argue for this partly by showing that seeing-as does not constitute understanding of metaphors when understanding is appropriately construed in terms of being able to use an expression. (shrink)