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  1. Categorizing Art.Kiyohiro Sen - 2024 - Dissertation, University of Tokyo
    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 (...)
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  • Who’s afraid of common knowledge?Giorgio Sbardolini - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (4):859-877.
    Some arguments against the assumption that ordinary people may share common knowledge are sound. The apparent cost of such arguments is the rejection of scientific theories that appeal to common knowledge. My proposal is to accept the arguments without rejecting the theories. On my proposal, common knowledge is shared by ideally rational people, who are not just mathematically simple versions of ordinary people. They are qualitatively different from us, and theorizing about them does not lead to predictions about our behavior. (...)
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  • Processes as variable embodiments.Nicola Guarino & Giancarlo Guizzardi - 2024 - Synthese 203 (4):1-27.
    In a number of papers, Kit Fine introduced a theory of embodiment which distinguishes between rigid and variable embodiments, and has been successfully applied to clarify the ontological nature of entities whose parts may or may not vary in time. In particular, he has applied this theory to describe a process such as the erosion of a cliff, which would be a variable embodiment whose manifestations are the different states of erosion of the cliff. We find this theory very powerful, (...)
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  • How do lines of inquiry unfold? Insights from journalism.Susanna Siegel - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Epistemology: Special Issue on Applied Epistemology.
    I analyze a type of practice related to inquiry: treating things as zetetically relevant to questions, and argue that this practice is a central normatively evaluable way to extend lines of inquiry. My strategy is to introduce the practice and its normative features by examining its relationship to something already well-understood: the ways that news stories produced by journalists frame events. I then argue that the same core zetetic practice can be found across domains, just not in journalism. Finding the (...)
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  • Practical (un)cancellability.Fabrizio Macagno - 2023 - Journal of Pragmatics 215:84-95.
    Cancellability is an essential feature of implicatures. However, its reliability has been challenged by several cases and examples in which conversational implicatures seem to be hard or even impossible to cancel. Should it then be concluded that not all implicatures are cancellable, and therefore Grice's cancellability test should be weakened or abandoned? The present paper addresses this problem by drawing a distinction between theoretical and practical cancellability, where the latter concept captures the (un)reasonableness of explicit or contextual cancellation. By analyzing (...)
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  • The boundaries of lying: Casuistry and the pragmatic dimension of interpretation.Fabrizio Macagno & Giovanni Damele - 2023 - Journal of Argumentation in Context 12:19–58.
    The Holy Scriptures can be considered a specific kind of normative texts, whose use to assess practical moral cases requires interpretation. In the field of ethics, this interpretative problem results in the necessity of bridging the gap between the normative source – moral precepts – and the specific cases. In the history of the Church, this problem was the core of the so-called casuistry, namely the decision-making practice consisting in applying the Commandments and other principles of the Holy Scriptures to (...)
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  • What is Art? The Role of Intention, Beauty, and Institutional Recognition.Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė & Markus Kneer - 2023 - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 45:3039-3047.
    In two experiments (N=888), we explore to what extent the folk concept of art is compatible with the leading philosophical definitions of art, and whether it is an essentialist or a non-essentialist concept. We manipulate three factors: whether an object is created intentionally, whether it has aesthetic value, and whether it is institutionally recognized. In addition, we also manipulate the artistic domain (visual art or music). The results suggest that none of the three properties is seen by the folk as (...)
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  • Machines and metaphors: Challenges for the detection, interpretation and production of metaphors by computer programs.Jacob Hesse - 2023 - Theoria 89 (5):607-624.
    Powerful transformer models based on neural networks such as GPT-4 have enabled huge progress in natural language processing. This paper identifies three challenges for computer programs dealing with metaphors. First, the phenomenon of Twice-Apt-Metaphors shows that metaphorical interpretations do not have to be triggered by syntactical, semantic or pragmatic tensions. The detection of these metaphors seems to involve a sense of aesthetic pleasure or a higher-order theory of mind, both of which are difficult to implement into computer programs. Second, the (...)
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  • Luck and the Value of Communication.Megan Hyska - 2023 - Synthese 201 (96):1-19.
    Those in the Gricean tradition take it that successful human communication features an audience who not only arrives at the intended content of the signal, but also recognizes the speaker’s intention that they do so. Some in this tradition have also argued that there are yet further conditions on communicative success, which rule out the possibility of communicating by luck. Supposing that both intention-recognition and some sort of anti-luck condition are correctly included in an analysis of human communication, this article (...)
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  • How to Express Implicit Attitudes.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):251-272.
    I argue that what speakers mean or express can be determined by their implicit or unconscious states, rather than explicit or conscious states. Further, on this basis, I show that the sincerity conditions for utterances can also be fixed by implicit states. This is a surprising result which goes against common assumptions about speech acts and sincerity. Roughly, I argue that the result is implied by two plausible and independent theories of the metaphysics of speaker meaning and, further, that this (...)
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  • Demonstrations as actions.Piotr Tomasz Makowski & Tadeusz Ciecierski - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-25.
    This paper presents a dual intention model (DIM) of demonstrations as actions to show the agentive nature of demonstrations. According to the DIM, demonstrations are complex actions that contain as components at least three elements: an abductive intention, a deictic intention, and a basic ostensive act of indication. This paper unpacks these three components and discusses their roles from the viewpoint of the philosophy of action and the philosophy of language. It also shows how the DIM applies in selected practical (...)
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  • Syntactic structures and pragmatic meanings.Robyn Carston - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-28.
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  • Defining Communication and Language from Within a Pluralistic Evolutionary Worldview.Nathalie Gontier - 2022 - Topoi 41 (3):609-622.
    New definitions are proposed for communication and language. Communication is defined as the evolution of physical, biochemical, cellular, community, and technological information exchange. Language is defined as community communication whereby the information exchanged comprises evolving individual and group-constructed knowledge and beliefs, that are enacted, narrated, or otherwise conveyed by evolving rule-governed and meaningful symbol systems, that are grounded, interpreted, and used from within evolving embodied, cognitive, ecological, sociocultural, and technological niches. These definitions place emphasis on the evolutionary aspects of communication (...)
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  • Introduction: Language and Worldviews.Nathalie Gontier, Diana Couto, Matthieu Fontaine, Lorenzo Magnani & Selene Arfini - 2022 - Topoi 41 (3):439-445.
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  • The Origins of Species Concepts.John Simpson Wilkins - 2003 - Dissertation, University of Melbourne
    The longstanding species problem in biology has a history that suggests a solution, and that history is not the received history found in many texts written by biologists or philosophers. The notion of species as the division into subordinate groups of any generic predicate was the staple of logic from Aristotle through the middle ages until quite recently. However, the biological species concept during the same period was at first subtly and then overtly different. Unlike the logic sense, which relied (...)
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  • The Social Epistemology of Introspection.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (3):925-942.
    I argue that introspection recruits the same mental mechanism as that which is required for the production of ordinary speech acts. In introspection, in effect, we intentionally tell ourselves that we are in some mental state, aiming thereby to produce belief about that state in ourselves. On one popular view of speech acts, however, this is precisely what speakers do when speaking to others. On this basis, I argue that every bias discovered by social epistemology applies to introspection and other (...)
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  • Diagnosing Misattribution of Commitments: A Normative and Pragmatic Model of for Assessing Straw Man.Fabrizio Macagno & Douglas Walton - 2019 - In Alessandro Capone, Marco Carapezza & Franco Lo Piparo (eds.), Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 2 Theories and Applications. Springer Verlag. pp. 111-136.
    This paper builds a nine-step method for determining whether a straw man fallacy has been committed in a given case or not, by starting with some relatively easy textbook cases and moving to more realistic and harder cases. The paper shows how the type of argument associated with the fallacy can be proved to be a fallacy in a normative argumentation model, and then moves on to the practical task of building a hands-on method for applying the model to real (...)
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  • Presuppositions as Cancellable Inferences.Fabrizio Macagno - 2016 - In Keith Allan, Alessandro Capone & Istvan Kecskes (eds.), Pragmemes and theories of language use. Springer International Publishing. pp. 45-68.
    The phenomenon of presupposition suspension can be analyzed in terms of explicatures and the corresponding non-presumptive interpretative reasoning underlying it. On the view presented in this paper, the polyphonic articulation of an utterance at different levels can be used to explain cases in which presuppositions are suspended. Presuppositional suspensions indicate that the presumptive reading does not hold and a different interpretation is needed. Utterances can display various types of polyphonic structures, accounting for the speaker’s and the hearer’s commitments. A speaker (...)
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  • Implicatures as Forms of Argument.Fabrizio Macagno & Douglas Walton - 2013 - In Alessandro Capone, Franco Lo Piparo & Marco Carapezza (eds.), Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy. Cham: Springer. pp. 203-224.
    In this paper, we use concepts, structure and tools from argumentation theory to show how conversational implicatures are triggered by conflicts of presumptions. Presumptive implicatures are shown to be based on defeasible forms of inference used in conditions of lack of knowledge, including analogical reasoning, inference to the best explanation, practical reasoning, appeal to pity, and argument from cause. Such inferences are modelled as communicative strategies to knowledge gaps that shift the burden of providing the missing contrary evidence to the (...)
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  • Is Honesty Rational?1.Giorgio Sbardolini - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (4):979-1001.
    According to the Maxim of Quality, rational agents tend to speak honestly. Due to the influence of Grice, a connection between linguistic rationality and honesty is often taken for granted. However, the connection is not obvious: structural rationality in language use does not require honesty, any more than it requires dishonesty. In particular, Quality does not follow from the Cooperative Principle and structural rationality. But then what is honest rational speech? I propose to move the discussion in the context of (...)
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  • Metaphors and problematic understanding in chronic care communication.Fabrizio Macagno & Maria Grazia Rossi - 2019 - Journal of Pragmatics 151:103-117.
    Metaphors can be used as crucial tools for reaching shared understanding, especially where an epistemic imbalance of knowledge is at stake. However, metaphors can also represent a risk in intercultural or cross-cultural interactions, namely in situations characterised by little or deficient common ground between interlocutors. In such cases, the use of metaphors can lead to misunderstandings and cause communicative breakdowns. The conditions defining when metaphors promote, and hinder understanding have not been analyzed in detail, especially in intracultural contexts. This study (...)
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  • Creativity, Humour, and Cognition.Mario Gensollen & Marc Jiménez-Rolland - 2021 - Debats (6):107-119.
    This paper explores some aspects of the scientific study of creativity by focusing on intentional attempts to create instances of linguistic humour. We argue that this sort of creativity can be accounted for within an influential cognitive approach but that said framework is not a recipe for producing novel instances of humour and may even preclude them. We start by identifying three great puzzles that arise when trying to pin down the core traits of creativity, and some of the ways (...)
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  • Communication before communicative intentions.Josh Armstrong - 2021 - Noûs 57 (1):26-50.
    This paper explores the significance of intelligent social behavior among non-human animals for philosophical theories of communication. Using the alarm call system of vervet monkeys as a case study, I argue that interpersonal communication (or what I call “minded communication”) can and does take place in the absence of the production and recognition of communicative intentions. More generally, I argue that evolutionary theory provides good reasons for maintaining that minded communication is both temporally and explanatorily prior to the use of (...)
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  • Language and Intelligence.Carlos Montemayor - 2021 - Minds and Machines 31 (4):471-486.
    This paper explores aspects of GPT-3 that have been discussed as harbingers of artificial general intelligence and, in particular, linguistic intelligence. After introducing key features of GPT-3 and assessing its performance in the light of the conversational standards set by Alan Turing in his seminal paper from 1950, the paper elucidates the difference between clever automation and genuine linguistic intelligence. A central theme of this discussion on genuine conversational intelligence is that members of a linguistic community never merely respond “algorithmically” (...)
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  • The Double Framing Effect of Emotive Metaphors in Argumentation.Francesca Ervas - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 12:628460.
    In argumentation, metaphors are often considered as ambiguous or deceptive uses of language leading to fallacies of reasoning. However, they can also provide useful insights into creative argumentation, leading to genuinely new knowledge. Metaphors entail a framing effect that implicitly provides a specific perspective to interpret the world, guiding reasoning and evaluation of arguments. In the same vein, emotions could be in sharp contrast with proper reasoning, but they can also be cognitive processes of affective framing, influencing our reasoning and (...)
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  • On the logical form and ontology of inferences in conversational implicatures.Denis Perrin - 2021 - Semiotica 2021 (240):285-315.
    This paper is about the pragmatic inferences in play as conversational implicatures (Grice, P. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) occur. First, it constructs the deductivism versus abductivism debate that transpires from the extant literature but is rarely elaborated. Against deductivism, the paper argues that implicating inferences in conversational implicatures can instantiate an abductive logical form, as abductivism suggests. Against abductivism, however, it grants to deductivism that implicating inferences can have a deductive form provided (...)
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  • Inference and the structure of concepts.Matías Osta Vélez - 2020 - Dissertation, Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München
    This thesis studies the role of conceptual content in inference and reasoning. The first two chapters offer a theoretical and historical overview of the relation between inference and meaning in philosophy and psychology. In particular, a critical analysis of the formality thesis, i.e., the idea that rational inference is a rule-based and topic-neutral mechanism, is advanced. The origins of this idea in logic and its influence in philosophy and cognitive psychology are discussed. Chapter 3 consists of an analysis of the (...)
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  • Animal Brains and the Work of Words: Daniel Dennett on Natural Language and the Human Mind.Sofia Miguens - 2021 - Topoi 41 (3):599-607.
    In this article I discuss Daniel Dennett’s view of the role of natural language in the evolution of the human mind. In contrast with defenders of the Language of Thought Hypothesis, Dennett claims that natural language is an evolved tool for communication, originating in behavioural habits of which users were initially not aware. Once in place, such habits changed access to information in human brains and were crucial for the evolution of human consciousness. I assess Dennett’s approach from the viewpoint (...)
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  • Assertoric content, responsibility, and metasemantics.Andrew Peet - 2021 - Mind and Language 37 (5):914-932.
    I argue that assertoric content functions as a means for us to track the responsibilities undertaken by communicators, and that distinctively assertoric commitments are distinguished by being generated directly in virtue of the words the speaker uses. This raises two questions: (a) Why are speakers responsible for the content thus generated? (b) Why is it important for us to distinguish between commitments in terms of their manner of generation? I answer the first question by developing a novel responsibility based metasemantics. (...)
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  • Finding Written Law.Benjamin L. S. Nelson - manuscript
    In this paper I argue that textualism is far less attractive as a theory of written law than some of its modern proponents think. For it is not usually sensible to expect the grammatical meaning of a provision to determine its appropriate legal meaning. Factors that are unrelated to grammar in the identification of law (e.g., legal theory, context) do too much of the work. **Draft -- acknowledgments welcome, but please do not cite.**.
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  • Meaning and Emotion: The Extended Gricean Model and What Emotional Signs Mean.Constant Bonard - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Geneva and University of Antwerp
    This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first part is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the Gricean (pragmatic) model and the code (semantic) model. In particular, I show that these latter two models cannot (...)
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  • Girl Talk: Understanding Negative Reactions to Female Vocal Fry.Monika Chao & Julia R. S. Bursten - 2021 - Hypatia 36 (1):42-59.
    Vocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Claiming that a phonation (...)
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  • Speaking, Inferring, Arguing. On the Argumentative Character of Speech.Cristina Corredor - 2020 - Studia Semiotyczne 34 (2):43-64.
    Within the Gricean framework in pragmatics, communication is understood as an inferential activity. Other approaches to the study of linguistic communication have contended that language is argumentative in some essential sense. My aim is to study the question of whether and how the practices of inferring and arguing can be taken to contribute to meaning in linguistic communication. I shall suggest a two-fold hypothesis. First, what makes of communication an inferential activity is given with its calculability, i.e. with the possibility (...)
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  • Narrative introductions: discourse competence of children with autistic spectrum disorders.Olga Solomon - 2004 - Discourse Studies 6 (2):253-276.
    This article examines the discourse competence of high-functioning children with autistic spectrum disorders to participate in narrative introduction sequences with family members. The analysis illuminates the children’s own efforts to launch narratives, as well as their ability to build upon the contributions of others. Ethnographic, discourse analytic methodology is integrated with the theory of discourse organization and the weak central coherence account of autism. Introductions of both personal experience narratives as well as fictional narratives are examined. The children were especially (...)
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  • Questions and explanations in French and Anglo-American Usenet newsgroups.Florimond Rakotonoelina & Patricia von Münchow - 2010 - Discourse Studies 12 (3):311-329.
    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 (...)
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  • The Geneva Model of discourse analysis: an interactionist and modular approach to discourse organization.Eddy Roulet & Laurent Filliettaz - 2002 - Discourse Studies 4 (3):369-393.
    This article presents recent developments in the Geneva modular and interactionist approach to discourse organization. The first section analyses the main epistemological, theoretical and methodological properties of the Geneva Model by examining its relationship to data, communicative action, complexity and discourse organization, and then outlines the Geneva Model's modular methodology. The second section of the article focuses on a text extract from a service encounter and applies some aspects of the modular methodology to the analysis of request sequences. The authors (...)
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  • Discourse, Pragmatics, Conversation, Analysis.Emanuel A. Schegloff - 1999 - Discourse Studies 1 (4):405-435.
    In a period given to emphasizing diversity among humans, we would do well to explore diversity among forms of discourse and among forms of talk-in-interaction in particular. Among the speech-exchange systems, ordinary conversation has been claimed to be distinctive and fundamental, but questions have been raised about both claims. The resources for discriminating among speech-exchange systems are located in such generic organizations of practice as turn-taking, sequence organization, the organization of repair and the overall structural organization of episodes of interaction. (...)
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  • How is Sociological Realism Possible?: Sociology after Cognitive Science.Patrick Pharo - 2007 - European Journal of Social Theory 10 (3):481-496.
    This article explores the limits of social constructionism and criticizes the `demiurgic conception of society' associated with it. It contemplates the possibility of sociological realism by investigating the intrinsic and objective properties of action, cognition and morality. The incorporation of intrinsic meanings and intentions in social actions, the objective information supporting cognitive processes and human sensitivity to pleasure and pain as well as the normative rejection of undue suffering, delineate the objective core of social facts, which can be interpreted or (...)
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  • An Argumentativist Point of View in Cognitive Sociology.Alban Bouvier - 2007 - European Journal of Social Theory 10 (3):465-480.
    Methodological Individualism and Rational Choice Theory (broadly understood) can integrate various research programmes in cognitive sociology (itself broadly understood). This article sets out two different but closely related conceptions, depending on the focus of the analysis (macro-sociological or micro-sociological) and the goals, although both deal — to some extent — with the bridge between these levels. Raymond Boudon's programme is relevant when the focus is the macro-sociological level but can be considered as weakly `cognitive'. Alban Bouvier presents a slightly stronger (...)
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  • Analyzing the pragmatic structure of dialogues.Sarah Bigi & Fabrizio Macagno - 2017 - Discourse Studies 19 (2):148-168.
    In this article, we describe the notion of dialogue move intended as the minimal unit for the analysis of dialogues. We propose an approach to discourse analysis based on the pragmatic idea that the joint dialogical intentions are also co-constructed through the individual moves and the higher-order communicative intentions that the interlocutors pursue. In this view, our goal is to bring to light the pragmatic structure of a dialogue as a complex net of dialogical goals, which represent the communicative purposes (...)
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  • Your word against mine: the power of uptake.Lucy McDonald - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3505-3526.
    Uptake is typically understood as the hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s communicative intention. According to one theory of uptake, the hearer’s role is merely as a ratifier. The speaker, by expressing a particular communicative intention, predetermines what kind of illocutionary act she might perform. Her hearer can then render this act a success or a failure. Thus the hearer has no power over which act could be performed, but she does have some power over whether it is performed. Call this (...)
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  • A computational model of the cultural co-evolution of language and mindreading.Marieke Woensdregt, Chris Cummins & Kenny Smith - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1347-1385.
    Several evolutionary accounts of human social cognition posit that language has co-evolved with the sophisticated mindreading abilities of modern humans. It has also been argued that these mindreading abilities are the product of cultural, rather than biological, evolution. Taken together, these claims suggest that the evolution of language has played an important role in the cultural evolution of human social cognition. Here we present a new computational model which formalises the assumptions that underlie this hypothesis, in order to explore how (...)
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  • The Linguistic Formulation of Fallacies Matters: The Case of Causal Connectives.Jennifer Schumann, Sandrine Zufferey & Steve Oswald - 2020 - Argumentation 35 (3):361-388.
    While the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them as a unified group having similar effects on argumentation. Based on an empirical study of the straw man fallacy, we argue that a more fine-grained approach is needed to explain the role of each connective and illustrate their specificities. We first present an original corpus study detailing the main features of four causal connectives in French that (...)
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  • Efficient communication and indexicality.Toru Suzuki - 2020 - Mathematical Social Sciences 108 (November).
    Since sending explicit messages can be costly, people often utilize “what is not said,” i.e., informative silence, to economize communication. This paper studies the efficient communication rule, which is fully informative while minimizing the use of explicit messages, in cooperative environments. It is shown that when the notion of context is defined as the finest mutually self-evident event that contains the current state, the efficient use of informative silence exhibits the defining property of indexicals in natural languages. While the efficient (...)
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  • Rationalising framing effects: at least one task for empirically informed philosophy.Sarah Fisher - 2020 - Crítica, Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía 52 (156):5-30.
    Human judgements are affected by the words in which information is presented —or ‘framed’. According to the standard gloss, ‘framing effects’ reveal counter-normative reasoning, unduly affected by positive/negative language. One challenge to this view suggests that number expressions in alternative framing conditions are interpreted as denoting lower-bounded (minimum) quantities. However, it is unclear whether the resulting explanation is a rationalising one. I argue that a number expression should only be interpreted lower-boundedly if this is what it actually means. I survey (...)
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  • Underspecification, Parsing Mismatches and Routinisation: The Historical Development of the Clitic Systems of Greek Dialects.Stergios Chatzikyriakidis - 2020 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 30 (2):277-304.
    In this paper, the historical development of the clitic systems of Standard Modern, Cypriot and Pontic Greek is discussed. These three varieties not only present the whole range of variation one can find across clitic systems in Greek but, furthermore, derive from a common linguistic ancestor, i.e. Koine Greek. This paper argues that the transition from Koine Greek to the Medieval varieties and from the Medieval varieties to the respective modern ones can be explained by making the assumption that routinisation (...)
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  • Interpreting the Arguments of China and the Philippines in the South China Sea Territorial Dispute: A Relevance-Theoretic Perspective.Justine Iscah F. Madrilejos & Rachelle Ballesteros-Lintao - 2020 - International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 35 (2):519-564.
    The South China Sea territorial dispute has been a contentious issue in the international community. In the course of 3 years, China and the Philippines had undergone arbitral proceedings over the maritime rights and entitlements in the South China Sea. As the Permanent Court of Arbitration reached its decision, this paper aims to examine the interpretation process of the Arbitral Tribunal in the judgment of the South China Sea conflict between China and the Philippines. The primary objective of the study (...)
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  • Semantics without semantic content.Daniel W. Harris - 2020 - Mind and Language 37 (3):304-328.
    I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. This system’s role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence’s semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this thesis into a (...)
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  • The History and Prehistory of Natural-Language Semantics.Daniel W. Harris - 2017 - In Sandra Lapointe & Christopher Pincock (eds.), Innovations in the History of Analytical Philosophy. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 149--194.
    Contemporary natural-language semantics began with the assumption that the meaning of a sentence could be modeled by a single truth condition, or by an entity with a truth-condition. But with the recent explosion of dynamic semantics and pragmatics and of work on non- truth-conditional dimensions of linguistic meaning, we are now in the midst of a shift away from a truth-condition-centric view and toward the idea that a sentence’s meaning must be spelled out in terms of its various roles in (...)
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  • Compositional Idioms.David Pitt & Jerrold J. Katz - 2000 - Language 76:409-432.
    In this paper we argue that there is a large class of expressions, typified by ‘plastic flower’, ‘stuffed animal’ and ‘kosher bacon’, that have a unique semantics combining compositional, idiomatic and decompositional interpretation. These expressions are compositional because their constituents contribute their meanings to the meanings of the wholes; they are idiomatic because their interpretation involves assigning dictionary entries to non-terminal elements in their syntactic structure; and they are decompositional because their meanings have proper parts that are not the meanings (...)
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