Infallibilism is commonly rejected because it is apparently subject to easy counter-examples. I describe a strategy that infallibilists can use to resist this objection. Because the sentences used in the counter-examples to express evidence and belief are context-sensitive, the infallibilist can insist that such counter-examples trade on a vacillation between different readings of these sentences. I describe what difficulties await those who try to produce counter-examples against which the proposed strategy is ineffective.

This squib attempts to constrain semantic theories of agree wh constructions by broadening the data set and collecting naive speakers’ intuitions. Overall, our data suggest relatively permissive truth-conditions for these constructions. They also suggest a previously undiscussed presupposition for agree wh and also indicate that agree wh is not straightforwardly reducible to agree that. Although some accounts suggest differences in truth conditions among different asymmetrical agree with constructions and symmetrical agree constructions, we do not find any indication of such truth-conditional (...) distinctions. In the course of our exploration of the data, we offer a new approach to distinguishing between truth, falsity and presuppositional failure. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that knowledge is factive. This claim is typically justified linguistically: ascribing knowledge of a falsehood sounds contradictory. But linguistic arguments can be problematic. In a recent article, Brent G. Kyle argues that the factivity of knowledge can be proved deductively, without appeal to ordinary language. I argue, however, that his proof relies on a premise that can only be justified linguistically.

A recent focus on philosophical methodology has reinvigorated ordinary language philosophy with the contention that philosophical inquiry is better served by attending to the ordinary use of language. Taking cues from findings in the social sciences that deploy methods utilizing language, various ordinary language philosophers embrace a guiding mandate: that ordinary language usage is more reflective of our linguistic and conceptual competencies than standard philosophical methods. We analyze two hypotheses that are implicit in the research from which ordinary language approaches (...) take their cues. This pair of optimistic assumptions (a) bind word meanings to properties of their corresponding concepts and (b) regard language as a direct reflection of our underlying cognitive processes and competencies. Polysemy and pragmatics complicate each assumption. Because the ordinary language philosopher’s methodological mandate compels us to consider how individuals process the utterances they encounter in deciphering the communicative intentions of speakers, failing to attend to the import of polysemy and pragmatics in philosophical and empirical methods has the potential to frustrate the aims of their insightful mandate. The significance of those two complications is worked out with the case study of knowledge. (shrink)

This paper falls into three parts. The first looks at wh-constructions, focussing on the so-called factual whs, ‘X knows where… ’, ‘when’, ‘who’, ‘what’ etc. I suggest, drawing on both linguistic considerations and evidence from developmental psychology, that these constructions take things as their objects, not propositions; and that this may be why they are learned before those taking sentential complements. The second part moves to the case of telling-wh: to constructions such as telling someone who is at the door. (...) This construction brings a very particular set of requirements, not just to tell the truth, but to tell all the relevant truths and nothing but. The third section, in a critical discussion of Katherine Hawley's work, argues that an account of trust and testimony focussing on the telling-wh construction brings better results than one focussed on the blander idea of assertion. (shrink)

It is often proposed that the unacceptability of a semantically interpretable sentence can be rooted in its meaning. Elaborating on Oshima New frontiers in artificial intelligence, Springer, Berlin, 2007), we argue that the meaning-driven unacceptability of factive islands must make reference to felicity conditions, and cannot be reduced to the triviality of propositional content. We also observe, again elaborating on Oshima, that the triviality of factive islands need not be logical, but can be relative to a listener’s background assumptions. These (...) findings call for a revision of a prevalent view about meaning-driven unacceptability, according to which unacceptability results from triviality that is both propositional and logical. (shrink)

Since the early 1980s, there has been a debate in the semantics literature pertaining to whether wh-interrogatives can be directly disjoined, as main clauses and as complements. Those who held that the direct disjunction of wh-interrogatives was in conflict with certain theoretical considerations proposed that they could be disjoined indirectly. Indirect disjunction proceeds by first lifting both wh-interrogatives and then disjoining them; it assigns matrix-level scope to OR. As we will see, the notorious theoretical need for indirect disjunction has disappeared (...) by today. But the factual question remains. Are wh-complements disjoined directly or indirectly? What is the fact of the matter? This paper argues that the case for indirect disjunction remains reasonably strong. (shrink)

The notion of measurement plays a central role in human cognition. We measure people’s height, the weight of physical objects, the length of stretches of time, or the size of various collections of individuals. Measurements of height, weight, and the like are commonly thought of as mappings between objects and dense scales, while measurements of collections of individuals, as implemented for instance in counting, are assumed to involve discrete scales. It is also commonly assumed that natural language makes use of (...) both types of scales and subsequently distinguishes between two types of measurements. This paper argues against the latter assumption. It argues that natural language semantics treats all measurements uniformly as mappings from objects (individuals or collections of individuals) to dense scales, hence the Universal Density of Measurement (UDM). If the arguments are successful, there are a variety of consequences for semantics and pragmatics, and more generally for the place of the linguistic system within an overall architecture of cognition. (shrink)

Propositional attitude verbs, such as think and want, have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the granularity with which these verbs’ semantic and pragmatic properties are recoverable from their syntactic distributions, using three behavioral experiments aimed at explicitly quantifying the relationship between these two sets of properties. Experiment 1 gathers a measure of 30 (...) propositional attitude verbs’ syntactic distributions using an acceptability judgment task. Experiments 2a and 2b gather measures of semantic similarity between those same verbs using a generalized semantic discrimination task and an ordinal scale task, respectively. Two kinds of analyses are conducted on the data from these experiments. The first compares both the acceptability judgments and the semantic similarity judgments to previous classifications derived from the syntax and semantics literature. The second kind compares the acceptability judgments to the semantic similarity judgments directly. Through these comparisons, we show that there is quite fine-grained information about propositional attitude verbs’ semantics carried in their syntactic distributions—whether one considers the sorts of discrete qualitative classifications that linguists traditionally work with or the sorts of continuous quantitative classifications that can be derived experimentally. (shrink)

A semantic universal, which we here dub the Veridical Uniformity Universal, has recently been argued to hold of responsive verbs (those that take both declarative and interrogative complements). This paper offers a preliminary explanation of this universal: verbs satisfying it are easier to learn than those that do not. This claim is supported by a computational experiment using artificial neural networks, mirroring a recent proposal for explaining semantic universals of quantifiers. This preliminary study opens up many avenues for future work (...) on explaining semantic universals more generally, which are discussed in the conclusion. (shrink)

In most cases, a wh-question calls for an answer that names an entity in the set denoted by the extension of the wh-complement. However, evidence from questions with necessity modals and questions with collective predicates argues that sometimes a wh-question must be interpreted with a higher-order reading, in which this question calls for an answer that names a generalized quantifier. This paper investigates the distribution and compositional derivation of higher-order readings of wh-questions. First, I argue that the generalized quantifiers that (...) can serve as semantic answers to wh-questions must be homogeneously positive. Next, on the distribution of higher-order readings, I observe that questions in which the wh-complement is singular-marked or numeral-modified can be answered by elided disjunctions but not by conjunctions. I further present two ways to account for this disjunction–conjunction asymmetry. In the uniform account, these questions admit disjunctions because disjunctions may satisfy the atomicity requirement of singular-marking and the cardinality requirement of numeral modification. In the reconstruction account, the wh-complement is syntactically reconstructed, which gives rise to local uniqueness and yields a contradiction for conjunctive answers. (shrink)

Clause-embedding predicates come in three major varieties: responsive predicates are compatible with both declarative and interrogative complements; rogative predicates are only compatible with interrogative complements; and anti-rogative predicates are only compatible with declarative complements. It has been suggested that these selectional properties are at least partly semantic in nature. In particular, it has been proposed that the anti-rogativity of neg-raising predicates like believe comes from the triviality in meaning that would arise with interrogative complements. This paper puts forward a similar (...) semantic explanation for non-veridical preferential predicates such as hope, which are anti-rogative, unlike their veridical counterparts such as be happy, which are responsive. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to explore the presuppositionality of factive verbs, with special emphasis on the verbs know and regret. The hypothesis put forward here is that the factivity related to know and the factivity related to regret are two different phenomena, as the former is a semantic implication that is licensed by the conventional meaning of know, while the latter is a purely pragmatic phenomenon that arises conversationally. More specifically, it is argued that know is factive in (...) the sense that it both entails and presupposes p, while regret is factive in the sense that it only presupposes p. In a recent article, Hazlett, 497–522, 2010) shows with authentic examples how know is used non-factively in ordinary language, and he observes in these examples, as he says, “a threat to Factivity.” I argue that non-factive uses of factive verbs, such as know and regret, far from being a threat to factivity, show that, on the one hand, know is ambiguous between a factive and a non-factive sense; on the other hand, in the case of regret, the presupposition of factivity has to be intended as a merely pragmatic implication which can be suspended by the speaker herself. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of the German discourse particle denn that captures the meaning contribution of this particle in polar questions, wh-questions, and certain conditional antecedents in a unified way. It is shown that the behavior of denn exhibits an asymmetry between polar and wh-interrogatives, which can be captured by treating the particle as sensitive to the property highlighted by its containing clause, in the sense of Roelofsen and Farkas :359–414, 2015). In addition, the paper argues that highlighting-sensitivity should (...) be incorporated in the account of another discourse particle, German überhaupt, and discusses how the proposed account of discourse particle denn may be extended to also cover the use of denn as a causal conjunction. (shrink)

A simple model accounting for semantic properties of propositional attitude operators in negative contexts with no reference to possible worlds is proposed. Verbs occurring in such operators denote relations between individuals and specific sets of sentences (of a given natural language) and their negation is defined as the complement within a specific set of cognitively determined sentences. This approach avoids in particular the problem of intensionality of propositional attitude operators and allows to use many tools from the generalised quantifier theory. (...) In that way the negation giving rise to factive presuppositions and to the neg-raising is defined in a natural way. (shrink)

Questions embedded under responsive predicates and definite descriptions both give rise to a variety of phenomena which can be grouped under the term plurality effects: quantificational variability, cumulativity, and homogeneity effects. This similarity has not gone unnoticed, and many proposals have taken inspiration in theories of definite plurals to account for these effects with embedded questions. Recently these phenomena have received less attention, as the field has focused on the so-called intermediate exhaustive reading of embedded questions instead, after Spector called (...) into question the traditional dichotomy between weak and strong exhaustive readings. As a result, the intermediate exhaustive reading has been accounted for at the expense of empirical coverage in other areas. In this paper, I propose a modular theory which derives the currently much discussed exhaustive readings without giving up the rich semantics necessary to account for plurality effects. My account of quantificational variability, cumulativity, and homogeneity effects builds on recent work on these phenomena in the nominal domain by adopting a categorial approach to embedded questions, while the strong and intermediate exhaustive readings are implemented using an independent strengthening mechanism suggested in Klinedinst and Rothschild :1–23, 2011). The resulting theory not only recovers important results on plurality effects; it offers new, simple solutions for some puzzles presented in George :166–177, 2013) and Paillé and Schwarz Proceedings of WCCFL 36, vol 36, Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, 2018), naturally derives readings that had been postulated in previous literature, makes correct predictions in many unexplored cases, and is compatible with recent results in psycholinguistics. In the last sections I justify my assumptions and show how possible limitations I inherit from the theories I build on can be accommodated under standard assumptions. (shrink)

Emotive-factive predicates, such as surprise or be happy, are a source of empirical and theoretical puzzles in the literature on embedded questions. Although they embed wh-questions, they seem not to embed whether-questions. They have complex interactions with negative polarity items such as any or even, and they have been argued to preferentially give rise to weakly exhaustive readings with embedded questions. We offer an empirical overview of the situation in three experiments collecting acceptability judgments, monotonicity judgments, and truth-value judgments. The (...) results straightforwardly confirm the special selectional properties of emotive-factive predicates. More interestingly, they reveal the existence of strongly exhaustive readings for surprise. The results also suggest that the special properties of emotive-factives cannot be solely explained by their monotonicity profiles, because they were not found to differ from the profiles of other responsive predicates. (shrink)

The projection pattern of the existential/uniqueness presupposition of a wh-complement varies depending on the predicate that embeds it. This variation poses problems for existing accounts that treat the presupposition as a semantic contribution of an operator merging with the wh-complement or of the embedding predicate. I propose that the problems can be solved if the existential/uniqueness presupposition is contributed by the propositions corresponding to the answers of the embedded question, under the Hamblin/Karttunen semantics for questions.