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  1. Meaning, modulation, and context: a multidimensional semantics for truth-conditional pragmatics.Guillermo Del Pinal - 2018 - Linguistics and Philosophy 41 (2):165-207.
    The meaning that expressions take on particular occasions often depends on the context in ways which seem to transcend its direct effect on context-sensitive parameters. ‘Truth-conditional pragmatics’ is the project of trying to model such semantic flexibility within a compositional truth-conditional framework. Most proposals proceed by radically ‘freeing up’ the compositional operations of language. I argue, however, that the resulting theories are too unconstrained, and predict flexibility in cases where it is not observed. These accounts fall into this position because (...)
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  • Might anything be plain good?Thomas Byrne - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (12):3335-3346.
    G.E. Moore said that rightness was obviously a matter of maximising plain goodness. Peter Geach and Judith Thomson disagree. They have both argued that ‘good’ is not a predicative adjective, but only ever an attributive adjective: just like ‘big.’ And just as there is no such thing as plain bigness but only ever big for or as a so-and-so, there is also no such thing as plain goodness. They conclude that Moore’s goodness is thus a nonsense. However attention has been (...)
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  • Moving parts: a new indexical treatment of context-shifting predication.Daniel Giberman - 2016 - Synthese 193 (1):95-124.
    A context-shifting example involves a putatively non-ambiguous, non-elliptical, non-indexical declarative sentence, some distinct utterances of which differ in truth value despite sameness of place, time, surrounding objects, and other physical factors. Charles Travis has spawned a large literature by arguing that such examples undermine compositional truth-conditional semantics. After explaining how prior responses to Travis’s examples fail in the metaphysical details, the present essay develops a new approach that treats a wide range of subject terms as disguised indexicals sensitive to mereological (...)
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  • Perceptual Variation, Color Language, and Reference Fixing. An Objectivist Account.Mario Gómez-Torrente - 2016 - Noûs 50 (1):3-40.
    I offer a new objectivist theory of the contents of color language and color experience, intended especially as an account of what normal intersubjective variation in color perception and classification shows about those contents. First I explain an abstract account of the contents of color and other gradable adjectives; on the account, these contents are certain objective properties constituted in part by contextually intended standards of application, which are in turn values in the dimensions of variation associated with the adjectives. (...)
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  • Just What Is It That Makes Travis's Examples So Different, So Appealing?Nat Hansen - 2018 - In Tamara Dobler & John Collins (eds.), The Philosophy of Charles Travis: Language, Thought, and Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Odd and memorable examples are a distinctive feature of Charles Travis's work: cases involving squash balls, soot-covered kettles, walls that emit poison gas, faces turning puce, ties made of freshly cooked linguine, and people grunting when punched in the solar plexus all figure in his arguments. One of Travis's examples, involving a pair of situations in which the leaves of a Japanese maple tree are painted green, has even spawned its own literature consisting of attempts to explain the context sensitivity (...)
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  • The Laws of Thought and the Power of Thinking.Matthias Haase - 2009 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (S1):249-297.
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  • How Meaning Might Be Normative.Alan Millar - unknown
    The aim is (i) to outline an account what it is to grasp the meaning of a predicative term, and (ii) to draw on that account in an attempt to shed light on what the normativity of meaning might amount to. Central to the account is that grasping the meaning of a predicative term is a practical matter—it is knowing how to use it correctly in a way that implicates having an ability to use it correctly. This calls for an (...)
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  • Négation, contrariété et contradiction.Jean-Philippe Narboux - 2005 - Archives de Philosophie 3 (3):419-446.
    L’auteur discerne trois intuitions majeures dans la théorie éliminativiste de la négation développée par les idéalistes anglais, d’après laquelle une négation est l’élimination d’une alternative au sein d’un ensemble complet d’alternatives disjonctivement affirmées du sujet de la négation : premièrement, la détermination du sens d’une proposition est l’assignation à une proposition de coordonnées logiques dans un espace logique ; deuxièmement, le sens d’une proposition entretient une relation interne avec le sens de sa négation ; troisièmement, l’espace logique dans lequel une (...)
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  • Reference, Truth, and Biological Kinds.Marcel Weber - 2014 - In: J. Dutant, D. Fassio and A. Meylan (Eds.) Liber Amicorum Pascal Engel.
    This paper examines causal theories of reference with respect to how plausible an account they give of non-physical natural kind terms such as ‘gene’ as well as of the truth of the associated theoretical claims. I first show that reference fixism for ‘gene’ fails. By this, I mean the claim that the reference of ‘gene’ was stable over longer historical periods, for example, since the classical period of transmission genetics. Second, I show that the theory of partial reference does not (...)
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  • A slugfest of intuitions: contextualism and experimental design.Nat Hansen - 2013 - Synthese 190 (10):1771-1792.
    This paper considers ways that experimental design can affect judgments about informally presented context shifting experiments. Reasons are given to think that judgments about informal context shifting experiments are affected by an exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments and by experimenter bias. Exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments may produce experimental artifacts by obscuring important differences of degree between the phenomena being investigated. Experimenter bias is an effect generated when, for example, experimenters disclose (even unconsciously) their own beliefs (...)
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  • On an Alleged Truth/Falsity Asymmetry in Context Shifting Experiments.Nat Hansen - 2012 - Philosophical Quarterly 62 (248):530-545.
    Keith DeRose has argued that context shifting experiments should be designed in a specific way in order to accommodate what he calls a ‘truth/falsity asymmetry’. I explain and critique DeRose's reasons for proposing this modification to contextualist methodology, drawing on recent experimental studies of DeRose's bank cases as well as experimental findings about the verification of affirmative and negative statements. While DeRose's arguments for his particular modification to contextualist methodology fail, the lesson of his proposal is that there is good (...)
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  • Color Adjectives and Radical Contextualism.Nat Hansen - 2011 - Linguistics and Philosophy 34 (3):201-221.
    Radical contextualists have observed that the content of what is said by the utterance of a sentence is shaped in far-reaching ways by the context of utterance. And they have argued that the ways in which the content of what is said is shaped by context cannot be explained by semantic theory. A striking number of the examples that radical contextualists use to support their view involve sentences containing color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.). In this paper, I show how the (...)
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  • Experimenting on Contextualism.Nat Hansen & Emmanuel Chemla - 2013 - Mind and Language 28 (3):286-321.
    This paper concerns the central method of generating evidence in support of contextualist theories, what we call context shifting experiments. We begin by explaining the standard design of context shifting experiments, which are used in both quantitative surveys and more traditional thought experiments to show how context affects the content of natural language expressions. We discuss some recent experimental studies that have tried and failed to find evidence that confirms contextualist predictions about the results of context shifting experiments, and consider (...)
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  • John Cook Wilson.Mathieu Marion - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...)
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  • Compositionality.Zoltán Gendler Szabó - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Thinking with maps.Elisabeth Camp - 2007 - Philosophical Perspectives 21 (1):145–182.
    Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...)
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  • Color Eliminativism (2006 Manuscript).Adam Pautz - manuscript
    This paper (from 2006) is now defunct. I argue against "realist primitivism". One of my arguments is a kind of "evolutionary debunking argument". Some of the material of this was incorporated into “Can Disjunctivists Explain Our Access to the Sensible World?” and "How Does Color Experience Represent the World?".
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  • Nonconceptual content.Josefa Toribio - 2007 - Philosophy Compass 2 (3):445–460.
    Nonconceptualists maintain that there are ways of representing the world that do not reflect the concepts a creature possesses. They claim that the content of these representational states is genuine content because it is subject to correctness conditions, but it is nonconceptual because the creature to which we attribute it need not possess any of the concepts involved in the specification of that content. Appeals to nonconceptual content have seemed especially useful in attempts to capture the representational properties of perceptual (...)
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  • The Riddle of Understanding Nonsense.Krystian Bogucki - 2023 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 30 (4):372–411.
    Typically, if I understand a sentence, then it expresses a proposition that I entertain. Nonsensical sentences don’t express propositions, but there are contexts in which we talk about understanding nonsensical sentences. For example, we accept various kinds of semantically defective sentences in fiction, philosophy, and everyday life. Furthermore, it is a standard assumption that if a sentence is nonsensical, then it makes no sense to say that it implies anything or is implied by other sentences. Semantically uninterpreted sentences don’t have (...)
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  • Underspecifying Desires.Richard Jefferson Booth - 2023 - Linguistics and Philosophy (5):1-30.
    According to a simple theory of the relationship between 'want' ascriptions and the desires they ascribe, when I learn that ⌜A wants p⌝ is true, I learn that the truth of p is necessary and sufficient for satisfying one of A’s desires. I argue that this simple theory is false: ⌜A wants p⌝ can be true and underspecific: p may be necessary but not sufficient for the satisfaction of one of A’s desires. I show that existing semantics for 'want' cannot (...)
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  • Excluded entailments and the de se/de re partition.Tom Roeper & Hazel Pearson - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (7):858-886.
    ABSTRACT We show that some PRO-sentences appear to receive de re interpretations when they occur in suitable discourse contexts or linguistic environments. This finding is surprising given the received view that such sentences are unambiguously de se [Morgan. 1970. “On the Criterion of Identity for Noun Phrase Deletion.” Papers from the Sixth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, Chicago, IL, 380–389; Chierchia. 1990. “Anaphora and Attitudes de se.” In Semantics and Contextual Expression, edited by R. Bartsch, J. van Benthem, (...)
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  • Extensional Superposition and Its Relation to Compositionality in Language and Thought.Chris Thornton - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (5):e12929.
    Semantic composition in language must be closely related to semantic composition in thought. But the way the two processes are explained differs considerably. Focusing primarily on propositional content, language theorists generally take semantic composition to be a truth‐conditional process. Focusing more on extensional content, cognitive theorists take it to be a form of concept combination. But though deep, this disconnect is not irreconcilable. Both areas of theory assume that extensional (i.e., denotational) meanings must play a role. As this article demonstrates, (...)
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  • Mapas, lenguaje y conceptos: hacia una teoría pluralista del formato de los conceptos.Mariela Aguilera - 2020 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 24 (1):121-146.
    A great number of investigations suggest that cognition involves both linguistic and cartographic representations. These researches have motivated a pluralist conception of cognition; also, they have been used to clarify how maps differ from linguistic representations. However, the computational processes underlying the interphase between both kinds of representations deserve further attention. In this paper, I argue that, despite their differences, cartographic representations coexist and interact with linguistic representations in interesting ways.
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  • Talking our way to systematicity.Léa Salje - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (10):2563-2588.
    Do we think in a language-like format? Taking the marker of language-like formats to be the property of unconstrained systematicity, this paper considers the following master argument for the claim that we do: language is unconstrainedly systematic, if language is unconstrainedly systematic then so is thought, so thought is unconstrainedly systematic. It is easy to feel that there is something right about this argument, that there will be some way of filling in its details that will vindicate the idea that (...)
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  • Consciousness and content in perception.Bill Brewer - 2017 - Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1):41-54.
    Normal perception involves conscious experience of the world. What I call the Content View, (CV), attempts to account for this in terms of the representational content of perception (Brewer, 2011, esp. ch. 4). I offer a new argument here against this view. Ascription of personal level content, either conceptual or nonconceptual, depends on the idea that determinate predicational information is conveyed to the subject. This determinate predication depends upon the exercise of certain personal level capacities for categorization and discrimination. Exercise (...)
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  • Color, context, and compositionality.Christopher Kennedy & Louise Mcnally - 2010 - Synthese 174 (1):79-98.
    Color adjectives have played a central role in work on language typology and variation, but there has been relatively little investigation of their meanings by researchers in formal semantics. This is surprising given the fact that color terms have been at the center of debates in the philosophy of language over foundational questions, in particular whether the idea of a compositional, truth-conditional theory of natural language semantics is even coherent. The challenge presented by color terms is articulated in detail in (...)
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  • Objectivism about Color and Comparative Color Statements. Reply to Hansen.Mario Gómez-Torrente - 2017 - Noûs 51 (2):429-435.
    Nat Hansen builds a new argument for subjectivism about the semantics of color language, based on a potential kind of intersubjective disagreements about comparative color statements. In reply, I note that the disagreements of this kind are merely hypothetical, probably few if actual, and not evidently relevant as test cases for a semantic theory. Furthermore, even if they turned out to be actual and semantically relevant, they would be intuitively unusable by the subjectivist.
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  • The Structure of Semantic Competence: Compositionality as an Innate Constraint of The Faculty of Language.Guillermo Del Pinal - 2015 - Mind and Language 30 (4):375–413.
    This paper defends the view that the Faculty of Language is compositional, i.e., that it computes the meaning of complex expressions from the meanings of their immediate constituents and their structure. I fargue that compositionality and other competing constraints on the way in which the Faculty of Language computes the meanings of complex expressions should be understood as hypotheses about innate constraints of the Faculty of Language. I then argue that, unlike compositionality, most of the currently available non-compositional constraints predict (...)
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  • Experimenting on Contextualism.Emmanuel Chemla Nat Hansen - 2013 - Mind and Language 28 (3):286-321.
    In this article we refine the design ofcontext shifting experiments, which play a central role in contextualist debates, and we subject a large number of scenarios involving different types of expressions of interest to contextualists, including ‘know’ and color adjectives like ‘green’, to experimental investigation. Our experiment (i) reveals an effect of changing contexts on the evaluation of uses of the sentences that we examine, thereby overturning the absence of results reported in previous experimental studies (so‐callednull results), (ii) uncovers evidence (...)
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  • Varieties of the generality constraint.Lenny Clapp & Laura Duhau - 2011 - Manuscrito 34 (2):397-434.
    Since its introduction by Evans , the generality constraint has been invoked by various philosophers for different purposes. Our purpose here is, first, to clarify what precisely the GC states by way of an interpretive framework, the GC Schema, and second, to demonstrate in terms of this framework some problems that arise if one invokes the GC without clearly specifying an appropriate interpretation. By utilizing the GC Schema these sorts of problems can be avoided, and we thus propose it as (...)
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  • Color adjectives and radical contextualism.Nathaniel Hansen - 2011 - Linguistics and Philosophy 34 (3):201 - 221.
    Radical contextualists have observed that the content of what is said by the utterance of a sentence is shaped in far-reaching ways by the context of utterance. And they have argued that the ways in which the content of what is said is shaped by context cannot be explained by semantic theory. A striking number of the examples that radical contextualists use to support their view involve sentences containing color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.). In this paper, I show how the (...)
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  • Indexical Color Predicates: Truth Conditional Semantics vs. Truth Conditional Pragmatics.Lenny Clapp - 2012 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42 (2):71-100.
    Truth conditional semantics is the project of ‘determining a way of assigning truth conditions to sentences based on A) the extension of their constituents and B) their syntactic mode of combination’. This research program has been subject to objections that take the form of underdetermination arguments, an influential instance of which is presented by Travis: … consider the words ‘The leaf is green,’ speaking of a given leaf, and its condition at a given time, used so as to mean what (...)
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  • Three Challenges for Indexicalism.Lenny Clapp - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (4):435-465.
    Indexicalism is a strategy for defending truth-conditional semantics from under-determination arguments. According to indexicalism the class of indexical expressions includes not only the obvious indexicals, e.g. demonstratives and personal pronouns, but also unobvious indexical expressions, expressions which allegedly have been discovered to be indexicals. This paper argues that indexicalism faces significant obstacles that have yet to be overcome. The issue that divides indexicalism and truth-conditional pragmatics is first clarified. And then three general problems for indexicalism are presented, and some potential (...)
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  • Critical Study of Mark Eli Kalderon (ed.) Fictionalism in Mataphysics.Zoltán Gendler Szabó - 2011 - Noûs 45 (2):375-385.
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  • Indexical Predicates.Daniel Rothschild & Gabriel Segal - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (4):467-493.
    We discuss the challenge to truth-conditional semantics presented by apparent shifts in extension of predicates such as ‘red’. We propose an explicit indexical semantics for ‘red’ and argue that our account is preferable to the alternatives on conceptual and empirical grounds.
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  • The determination of content.Zoltán Szabó - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 148 (2):253 - 272.
    I identify a notion of compositionality at the intersection of the different notions philosophers, linguists, and psychologists are concerned with. The notion is compositionality of expression content: the idea that the content of a complex expression in a context of its utterance is determined by its syntactic structure and the contents of its constituents in the contexts of their respective utterances. Traditional arguments from productivity and systematicity cannot establish that the contents of linguistic expressions are compositionally determined in this sense. (...)
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