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 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)

Divine law theories of metaethics claim that moral rightness is grounded in God’s commands, wishes and so forth. Expressivist theories, by contrast, claim that to call something morally right is to express our own attitudes, not to report on God’s. Ostensibly, such views are incompatible. However, we shall argue that a rapprochement is possible and beneficial to both sides. Expressivists need to explain the difference between reporting and expressing an attitude, and to address the Frege-Geach problem. Divine law theorists need (...) to get past the Euthyphro dilemma, and to avoid moral externalism. This paper shows how a combined theory helps us to achieve this. (shrink)

Predicates of personal taste (fun, tasty) and epistemic modals (might, must) share a similar analytical difficulty in determining whose taste or knowledge is being expressed. Accordingly, they have parallel behavior in attitude reports and in a certain kind of disagreement. On the other hand, they differ in how freely they can be linked to a contextually salient individual, with epistemic modals being much more restricted in this respect. I propose an account of both classes using Lasersohn’s (Linguistics and Philosophy 28: (...) 643–686, 2005) “judge” parameter, at the same time arguing for crucial changes to Lasersohn’s view in order to allow the extension to epistemic modals and address empirical problems faced by his account. (shrink)

Mental-content verbs such as think, believe, imagine and hope seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these diYculties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a diVerent, perhaps complementary, proposal, a major contributor to the diYculty of these items lies with the informational requirements for identifying them from the contexts in which they appear. The experiments reported here (...) explore the implications of these proposals by investigating the contribution of observational and linguistic cues to the acquisition of mental predicate vocabulary. We Wrst demonstrate that particular observed situations can be helpful in prompting reference to mental contents, speciWcally, contexts that include a salient and/or unusual mental state such as a false belief. We then compare the potency of such observational support to the reliability of alternate or concomitant syntactic information (e.g., sentential complementation) in tasks where both children and adults are asked to hypothesize the meaning of novel verbs. The Wndings support the eYcacy of false belief situations for increasing the saliency of mental state descriptions, but also show that.. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: What explains first-person authority? What explains the presumption that an utterance is true when it is a sincere intelligible determinate first-person singular simple present-tense ascription of intentional state? According to Rockney Jacobsen, self-ascriptions each enjoy a presumption of truth because they are systematically reliable. They are systematically reliable because they are typically both truth-assessable and expressive. Such self-ascriptions, if sincere, are certain to be true. This article presents a defence and a critique of Jacobsen's theory. It is argued that (...) the purported prevalence of expressive self-ascriptions is at best contingent. This contingency cannot explain why self-ascriptions are necessarily authoritative.RÉSUMÉ: Comment expliquer l'autorité de la première personne? Comment expliquer la présomption qu'un énoncé est vrai lorsque c'est une attribution d'un état intentionnel, sincère et intelligible, à la première personne du singulier de l'indicatif présent. Selon Rockney Jacobsen, les auto-attributions jouissent d'une présomption de vérité parce qu'elles sont systématiquement fiables. Elles sont systématiquement fiables parce qu'elles ont pour caractéristique d'être à la fois expressives et évaluables en termes de vérité. Si de telles auto-attributions sont sincères, elles sont certainement vraies. Cet article présente une défense et une critique de la théorie deJacobsen. L'auteur soutient que la prétendue prévalence des auto-attributions expressives est au mieux contingente. Cette contingence ne peut pas expliquer pourquoi il est nécessaire que les auto-attributions fassent autorité. (shrink)

According to a widely held view of assertion and belief, they are each governed by a tacitly acknowledged epistemic norm, and the norm on assertion and norm on belief are so related that believing p is epistemically permissible only if asserting it is. I call it the Same Norm View. A very common type of utterance raises a puzzle for this view, viz. utterances in which we say ‘I believe p' to convey somehow guarded affirmation of the proposition that p. (...) For example, one might respond to a query for directions to the station by saying ‘I believe it is down the first street on your left.' Often, when we reply in this way, it would have been pragmatically preferable simply to assert that p, had we been epistemically warranted in doing so. One's guarded reply thus suggests one is not so warranted. Nevertheless, if one believes what one, at face value, says one believes, one believes p. Contrary to what might seem to be suggested by the Same Norm View, one does not seem to portray oneself as irrational or epistemically beyond the pale in replying in this way. The paper develops this puzzle in detail, and examines a variety of options for a resolving it consistently with the Same Norm view. The most promising of these options, I argue, is to see ‘I believe' guarded affirmations as a form merely approximately correct speech. They would, though, be a form of such speech that interestingly differs from paradigm cases of loose use or conventional hyperbole in that speakers would be comparatively unaware of engaging in approximation. I conclude ‘I believe’—guarded affirmations either show the Same Norm View to be false or must be recognised as such an interestingly distinctive form of merely approximately correct speech. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first we outline a version of non‐descriptivism, ‘minimal expressivism’, leaving aside certain long‐standing problems associated with conventional expressivist views. Second, we examine the way in which familiar expressivist results can be accommodated within this framework, through a particular interpretation that the expressive realm lends to a theory of meaning. Expressivist theories of meaning address only a portion of the classical problems attributed to this position when they seek to explain why the expressions they (...) deal with have a given meaning. A position can nevertheless be termed ‘expressivist’ – in the minimal sense that we favor – based simply on the following key features of the meaning of these expressions: they can be used as functions of propositions, and they are not used to describe the way the world is. (shrink)

Gilbert Harman, in Logic and Reasoning (Synthese 60 (1984), 107–127) describes an unsuccessful attempt ... to develop a theory which would give logic a special role in reasoning. Here reasoning is psychological, a procedure for revising one''s beliefs. In the present paper, I construe reasoning sociologically, as a process of linguistic interaction; and show how both reasoning in the psychologistic sense and logic are related to that process.

Sentences with slifting parentheticals The formal analysis of natural language, Mouton, The Hague, 1973) grammaticalize an intriguing interaction between truth-conditional meaning and speech act function. In such sentences, the assertion strength of the slifted clause is modulated by the parenthetical, which provides evidential support :480–496, 1952; Asher in J Semant 17:31–50, 2000; Rooryck in Glot Int 5:125–133, 2001; Jayez and Rossari in: Corblin, de Swart Handbook of French semantics, CSLI, Stanford, 2004; Davis et al. in Proc Semant Linguist Theory 17:71–88, (...) 2007; Simons in Lingua 117:1034–1056, 2007; Murray in Semant Pragmat 7:1–53, 2014; Maier and Bary in: Brochhagen et al. Proceedings of the 20th Amsterdam colloquium, 2015; AnderBois in Semant Pragmat 9:1–55, 2016; Hunter in Dialogue Discourse 7:1–35, 2016). Starting with the idea that assertability comes in degrees, this paper develops a probabilistic updatemodel that captures the role of parentheticality as a language tool for qualifying commitments. A crucial role here is played by the rule of Jeffrey conditionalization, which factors in the uncertainty of the parenthetical information itself. The model also derives certain effects of parenthetical modification not found in regular embedding constructions, including the fact that slifting parentheticals are limited to creating upward-entailing environments. (shrink)

This note attempts first to broaden the investigation of ties expressed by ?my? and ?mine?, which was initiated in ?The Concept of ?Mine?; ? (Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 3). Socially accepted types of use ties (active and passive), worth ties and other sorts are distinguished from the previously noted ties of ownership, agency, etc. These further distinctions of ties, it is argued, also deserve the attention of philosophers and conceptually oriented social scientists. The analysis of ?mine? is then applied to (...) the much disputed concept of ?imagining?: some major clusters of divergent facts and phenomena called human imaginings are mapped and related to ?mine? (shrink)

This is a review of Tim Henning's 'From a Rational Point of View' (Oxford 2019).

I have proposed that the complementizerthat has a pragmatic property of demonstrativity, analogous to that ascribed by demonstrative analyses of the semantics of the complementizer but not impinging on the syntactic analysis of sentential embedding. My account explains a number of phenomena, including the illocutionary peculiarities of parentheticals, the pragmatics ofthat-omission, and consequently the distributional statistics ofthat-omission and related grammatical features of embeddings reported in the literature. By this means these phenomena are theoretically unified under a single hypothesis.Furthermore, this demonstrativity (...) is a matter of degree. There is a spectrum of distinct pragmatic manifestations of this demonstrativity, ranging from the purely paratactic-like interpretation that ascribes no illocutionary relation between the speaker and the complement, and is highly incompatible withthat-omission, to the purely parenthetical interpretation where illocutionary force attaches to the complement and is highly conducive tothat-omission.A more general moral appears when the minimally revisionist syntactic consequences of my proposal are compared to the radical syntactic consequences of Thompson and Mulac's. Even if we hold that the syntactic structure of a natural language cannot be grasped outside of its general communicative contexts, we need not connect syntax and pragmatics so immediately as Thompson and Mulac seem to think. By resisting the idea that the syntax of parentheticals isipso facto different from the syntax of compositional embeddings, we allow some “slack” between syntax and pragmatics, thereby enabling us to analyze such subtle syntax-pragmatics interactions as negative-raised parentheticals. The methodological moral is to avoid too facile a connection between syntactic and pragmatic analyses. (shrink)

How do children learn the meanings of propositional attitude verbs? We argue that children use information contained in both syntactic distribution and pragmatic function to zero in on the appropriate meanings. Specifically, we identify a potentially universal link between semantic subclasses of attitude verbs, their syntactic distribution and the kinds of indirect speech acts they can be used to perform. As a result, children can use the syntax as evidence about the meaning, which in turn constrains the kinds of pragmatic (...) enrichments they do and do not make in understanding these verbs in conversation. (shrink)

Illocutionary force and semantic content are widely held to occupy utterly different categories in at least two ways: Any expression serving as an indicator of illocutionary force must be without semantic content, and no such expression can embed. A refined account of the force/content distinction is offered here that does the explanatory work that the standard distinction does, while, in accounting for the behavior of a range of parenthetical expressions, shows neither nor to be compulsory. The refined account also motivates (...) a development of the "scorekeeping model" of conversation, helps to isolate a distinction between illocutionary force and illocutionary commitment, and reveals one precise respect in which meaning is only explicable in terms of use. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first we outline a version of non-descriptivism, ‘minimal expressivism’, leaving aside certain long-standing problems associated with conventional expressivist views. Second, we examine the way in which familiar expressivist results can be accommodated within this framework, through a particular interpretation that the expressive realm lends to a theory of meaning. Expressivist theories of meaning address only a portion of the classical problems attributed to this position when they seek to explain why the expressions they (...) deal with have a given meaning. A position can nevertheless be termed ‘expressivist’ – in the minimal sense that we favor – based simply on the following key features of the meaning of these expressions: they can be used as functions of propositions, and they are not used to describe the way the world is. (shrink)

To be a proposition is to possess propositional properties and to stand in inferential relations. This is the organic intuition, [OI], concerning propositional recognition. [OI] is not a circular characterization as long as those properties and relations that signal the presence of propositions are independently identified. My take on propositions does not depart from the standard approach widely accepted among philosophers of language. Propositions are truth-bearers, the arguments of truth-functions (‘not’, ‘or’, ‘and’, ‘if’), the arguments of propositional-attitude verbs (‘know’, ‘believe’, (...) ‘doubt’, ‘assume’, ‘reject’) and the kind of entity capable of standing in inferential relations (which are basically implication and incompatibility). The aim of this paper is to argue for [OI]. In doing so, I will show that even what is probably the most repeated argument against non-descriptivism, the so-called Frege-Geach Argument (FGA), presupposes something like [OI], a presupposition that Geach shares with his critics. Despite the huge success of FGA, a thorough analysis of the actual scope of this argument has yet to be given. I will provide such an analysis in section 3 below. In this paper, I argue that [OI] is a meta-theoretical principle which is neutral with respect to specific metaphysical debates about the nature of propositions, as well as specific proposals about the semantics of declarative sentences. (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 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)

It has frequently been observed that typical utterances of the form “I believe that P” are assertions of the embedded proposition P. Yet that the matrix clause “I believe that” should be semantically idle creates an interesting puzzle: linguistic orthodoxy holds that the utterance is an assertion about one’s doxastic state, not about the content of this state. In response to the puzzle, Tim Henning has recently proposed a new semantic theory, parentheticalism, according to which “S believes that P” expresses (...) P from S’s point of view: the at-issue content in belief ascriptions is the embedded proposition P. The puzzle is then claimed to be resolved as follows: as speaker and doxastic subject are identical in the first-person case, “I believe that P” expresses P from the speaker’s own point of view. In this paper, I argue, first, that parentheticalism is highly doubtful and, second, that even if parentheticalism were true, it would be unable to resolve the transparency puzzle. (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)

A widespread view in philosophy claims that inner speech is closely tied to human metacognitive capacities. This so-called format view of inner speech considers that talking to oneself allows humans to gain access to their own mental states by forming metarepresentation states through the rehearsal of inner utterances (section 2). The aim of this paper is to present two problems to this view (section 3) and offer an alternative view to the connection between inner speech and metacognition (section 4). According (...) to this alternative, inner speech (meta)cognitive functions derivate from the set of commitments we mobilize in our communicative exchanges. After presenting this commitment-based approach, I address two possible objections (section 5). (shrink)

In recent years, some authors have shown a renewed interest in interpretivist theories of folk psychological ascription [Hutto 2013. “Fictionalism About Folk Psychology.” The Monist 96 (4): 582–604.; Mölder 2010. Mind Ascribed: An Elaboration and Defence of Interpretivism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Sanchez-Curry 2020. “Interpretivism and Norms.” Philosophical Studies 177 (4): 905– 930.; Mölder 2021. “Interpretivism Without Judgement- Dependence.” Philosophia 49 (2): 611–615.; Slors 2015. "Interpretivism and the Meaning of Mental State Ascriptions." Studia Philosophica Estonica, 10 (2): 18–27.]. Part of the (...) virtue of interpretivism lies in its ability to provide an answer to elminativist arguments without falling into the assumptions and problems of intentional realism. However, some recent developments in semantic expressivism applied to normative expressions could help to build an alternative theory to interpretivism that would enjoy the same virtues. The aim of this paper is to present and defend an expressivist approach to the status of folk psychological ascriptions. According to this view, mental states ascriptions are evaluative and non-descriptive statement that express or reflect certain normative standards or values of the attributor. After presenting the view and contrasting it with interpretivist positions, with which expressivism shares important motivations and claims, I present two arguments to favor the expressivist analysis. In line with the first argument, expressivism can account for fundamental aspects of disagreements regarding mental attributions while the second highlights the capacity of the view to explain the widespread justificatory and exculpatory uses of mental states ascriptions. (shrink)

Defining qualified reasoning as reasoning containing such loose qualifying words as 'probably,' 'usually,' 'probable, 'likely,' 'ceteris paribus,' and 'primafacie, Ennis argues that typical cases of qualified reasoning, though they might be good arguments, are deductively invalid, implying that such arguments fail soundness standards. He considers and rejects several possible alternative ways of viewing such cases, ending with a proposal for applying qualified soundness standards, which requires employment of sufficient background knowledge, sensitivity, experience and understanding of the situation. All of this (...) takes place as part of the process, introduced elsewhere, of successively applying different legitimate sets of standards until one is found that is satisfied, or none is found, the latter calling for rejection of the argument, the former calling for its acceptance. (shrink)

How should knowledge be analyzed? Compositionally, as having constituents like belief and justification, or as an atomic concept? In making arguments for or against these perspectives, epistemologists have begun to use experimental evidence from developmental psychology and developmental linguistics. If we were to conclude that knowledge were developmentally prior to belief, then we might have a good basis to claim that belief is not a constituent of knowledge. In this review, I present a broad range of developmental evidence from the (...) past decade and discuss some of the implications it has for the proper analysis of knowledge. The orthodox perspective from the developmental literature was one where children fail to understand belief and knowledge concepts until later in childhood, with typical asymmetries in belief attribution and knowledge attribution. But what emerges from both a discussion of newer findings and a contextualization of older findings is a picture of development whereby core competence with belief and knowledge concepts emerges much earlier than previously thought that apparent failures in later childhood may be explained by other aspects of development than conceptual development and that there is no clear evidence that knowledge attributions emerge earlier than belief attributions. (shrink)

This is a study of the syntax and semantics of reports containing speech-act and propositional attitude verbs with quotational complements. I make the case that while the quotational complements of some verbs, including _utter_, are nominal and metalinguistic, those of others, including _assert_ and _believe_, are clausal and nonmetalinguistic. Quotational reports with ‘say’ are ambiguous. When quotational complements are clausal, they are like _that_-clauses in being subordinate content clauses with main-clause form. Unlike _that_-clauses, quote-clauses force deictic shift and are unambiguously (...) opaque. I also argue that quotation marks serve a different function in “mixed” reports, and that use of the traditional “direct” and “indirect” is not consistent with their traditional definitions. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a renewed concern about the dangers of eliminative materialism, as well as several attempts to discuss alternative positions such as new versions of interpretivism or fictionalism. Although expressivism has also emerged as a possibility, the problems with hybrid versions of expressivism in applying it to attitude ascriptions have led to a strong rejection of the proposal. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it argues that there are still theoretical tools available to defend (...) an expressivist analysis of mental state ascriptions. Second, the article contends that three of the most influential arguments in expressivism in meta-ethics and meta-epistemology are applicable to the case of mental state ascriptions. (shrink)

In recent years, some authors have shown a renewed interest in interpretivist theories of folk psychological ascription [Hutto 2013. “Fictionalism About Folk Psychology.” The Monist 96 (4): 582–604.; Mölder 2010. Mind Ascribed: An Elaboration and Defence of Interpretivism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Sanchez-Curry 2020. “Interpretivism and Norms.” Philosophical Studies 177 (4): 905–930.; Mölder 2021. “Interpretivism Without Judgement-Dependence.” Philosophia 49 (2): 611–615.; Slors 2015. "Interpretivism and the Meaning of Mental State Ascriptions." Studia Philosophica Estonica, 10 (2): 18–27.]. Part of the virtue of (...) interpretivism lies in its ability to provide an answer to elminativist arguments without falling into the assumptions and problems of intentional realism. However, some recent developments in semantic expressivism applied to normative expressions could help to build an alternative theory to interpretivism that would enjoy the same virtues. The aim of this paper is to present and defend an expressivist approach to the status of folk psychological ascriptions. According to this view, mental states ascriptions are evaluative and non-descriptive statement that express or reflect certain normative standards or values of the attributor. After presenting the view and contrasting it with interpretivist positions, with which expressivism shares important motivations and claims, I present two arguments to favor the expressivist analysis. In line with the first argument, expressivism can account for fundamental aspects of disagreements regarding mental attributions while the second highlights the capacity of the view to explain the widespread justificatory and exculpatory uses of mental states ascriptions. (shrink)

The fact that we can engage in first-person discourse about our own mental states seems, intuitively, to be bound up with consciousness. David Rosenthal draws upon this intuition in arguing for his higher-order thought theory of consciousness. Rosenthal's argument relies upon the assumption that the truth-conditions for "p" and "I think that p" differ. It is argued here that the truth-conditional schema debars "I think" from playing one of its roles and thus is not a good test for what is (...) asserted when "I think" is employed in making an assertoric utterance. The critique of Rosenthal's argument allows us to make explicit the intuitions which shape higher-order representation theories of consciousness in general. Consciousness and first-person mental discourse seem to be connected primarily because consciousness is an epistemic term, used to denote first-person knowledge of minds. Higher-order thought theories of consciousness draw upon this epistemic notion of consciousness, and because self-knowledge seems to involve higher-order representation, the higher-order theorist can deploy what is in effect an "error theory" about conscious experience disguised as a kind of conceptual analysis of our ordinary concept of a conscious mental state. The conclusion reached is that there is unlikely to be a simple or direct path from considerations about mental discourse to conclusions about the nature of consciousness. (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)

Whither the philosophy of intuition?Herman Cappelen’s Philosophy Without Intuitions (PWI) is a novel study in philosophical sociology—or, as Cappelen at one point suggests, “intellectual anthropology” (96).All undated references are to Cappelen (2012). Its target is the thesis that intuition is central, in the descriptive sense that contemporary analytic philosophers rely on intuitions for evidence—or, more generally, positive epistemic status. Cappelen labels the target thesis Centrality.If Centrality is true, then especially urgent are two questions in the rapidly growing field that is (...) the philosophy of intuition:[Q1] What are intuitions?[Q2] Can intuitions serve as evidence?There are of course others, but in chapter one Cappelen singles out these two as The Burning Questions about intuition. He then summarizes the overall upshot of PWI as follows:In this book I argue that Centrality, on any reasonable interpretation, is false. If you share that view, the Burning Questions will no lo .. (shrink)

a comprehensive, somewhat Gricean theory of speech acts, including an account of communicative intentions and inferences, a taxonomy of speech acts, and coverage of many topics in pragmatics -/- .

Mindreading capacity has been widely understood as the human ability to gain knowledge about the inner processes and states of others that bring about the behavior of these agents. This paper argues against this epistemic view of mindreading on the basis of different empirical studies in linguistics and social and developmental psychology: we are systematically biased in attributing mental states, and many everyday uses of mental ascription sentences do not reflect an epistemic function in our social interactions. We introduce an (...) alternative view of mental ascriptions, the social cover view, which is consistent with the evidence. The social cover view holds that the main function of mental ascriptions is to cover the social status and reputation of an agent rather than to gain knowledge about her inner processes and states. Finally, we discuss two possible objections to our proposal. (shrink)

We argue that knowledge is not the norm of belief given that ‘I believe’ is used to hedge. We explore the consequences of this argument for the normative relationship between belief and assertion.

This paper advances the following criticisms against the received view of implicatures: (1) implicatures are relations of pragmatic implication and not attempts to convey particular speaker meanings; (2) conversational implicatures are non-cancellable; (3) generalised conversational implicatures and conventional implicatures are necessary to preserve the cooperative assumption employing a conversational maxim of conveyability; (4) implicatures should be divided into utterance implicatures and assumption implicatures, not speaker implicatures and sentence implicatures; (5) trivial implicatures are genuine implicatures; (6) Grice’s theory of conversation cannot (...) explain most of his examples of particularised conversational implicatures; (7) the apparent attempts of explicit cancellation of implicatures are apologies, not attempts to avoid misunderstandings. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on a recently discussed phenomenon illustrated by sentences containing predicates of taste: the phenomenon of " perspectival plurality " , whereby sentences containing two or more predicates of taste have readings according to which each predicate pertains to a different perspective. This phenomenon has been shown to be problematic for (at least certain versions of) relativism. My main aim is to further the discussion by showing that the phenomenon extends to other perspectival expressions than predicates (...) of taste and by proposing a general solution to the problem raised by it on behalf of the relativist. The core claim of the solution (" multiple indexing ") is that utterances of sentences containing perspectival expressions should be evaluated with respect to (possibly infinite) sequences of perspective parameters. (shrink)

Arguably the biggest challenge in analyzing English tense is to account for the double access interpretation, which arises when a present tensed verb is embedded under a past attitude—e.g., "John said that Mary is pregnant". Present-under-past does not always result in a felicitous utterance, however—cf. "John believed that Mary is pregnant". While such oddity has been noted, the contrast has never been explained. In fact, English grammars and manuals generally prohibit present-under-past. Work on double access, on the other hand, has (...) either disregarded the oddity (e.g., Abusch 1997: 39) or treated it as a reflex of a particular dialect (e.g., Kratzer 1998: 14). The goal of the paper is to argue—based on a corpus study—that a present-under-past sentence is grammatical, but modulated by two, interacting pragmatic phenomena: cessation and parentheticality. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to defend the deductive-nomological model of explanation against a number of criticisms that have been made of it. It has traditionally been thought that scientific explanations were causal and that scientific explanations involved deduction from laws. In recent years, however, this three-fold identity has been challenged: there are, it is argued, causal explanations that are not scientific, scientific explanations that are not deductive, deductions from laws that are neither causal explanations nor scientific explanations, and (...) causal explanations that involve no deductions from laws. The aim of the present essay is to defend the traditional identities, and to show that the more recent attempts at invalidating them fail in their object. More specifically, this essay argues that a Humean version of the deductive-nomological model of explanation can be defended as the correct account of scientific explanation of individual facts and processes, and as the correct account of causal explanations of individual facts and processes. The deductive-nomological model holds that to explain an event E, say that a is G, one must find some initial conditions C, say that a is F, and a law or theory T such that T and C jointly entail E, and both are essential to the deduction. (shrink)

The author argues that is not obvious what it means for our beliefs and assertions to be "truth-directed", and that we need to weaken our ordinary notion of a belief if we are to deal with radical scepticism without surrendering to idealism. Topics examined also include whether there could be alien conceptual schemes and what might happen to us if we abandoned genuine belief in place of mere pragmatic acceptance. A radically new "ecological" model of knowledge is defended.

In this collection of essays, Bromberger explores the centrality of questions and predicaments they create in scientific research. He discusses the nature of explanation, theory, and the foundations of linguistics.

Moorean constructions are famously odd: it is infelicitous to deny that you believe what you claim to be true. But what about claiming that p, only to immediately put into question your evidence in support of p? In this paper, we identify and analyse a class of quasi-Moorean constructions, which we label counterevidentials. Although odd, counterevidentials can be accommodated as felicitous attempts to mitigate one’s claim right after making it. We explore how counterevidentials differ from lexicalised mitigation operators, parentheticals, and (...) anaphoric mitigation devices, and consider some cognate non-assertoric constructions. We conclude by exploring the implications of our analysis for theorising about linguistic responsibility, assertion, and lying. (shrink)

Inspired by the work of Sellars, Cumpa (2014, 2018) and Buonomo (2021) have argued that we can evaluate our metaphysical proposals on fundamental categories in terms of their capacity for reconciling the scientific and the manifest image of the world. This criterion of fundamentality would allow us to settle the question of which categories among those proposed in the debate—e.g., substance, structure or facts—have a better explanatory value. The aim of this essay is to argue against a central assumption of (...) the criterion: semantic descriptivism. Specifically, I aim at showing that the criterion rests on the idea that the manifest picture is mostly a description of the world, and thus, it commits us with certain realism. Instead, I argue that at least some of the vocabulary we use to construct our manifest picture of the world, mental vocabulary, is evaluative rather than descriptive and thus creates problems in reconcile the manifest picture with scientific psychology and neurosciences. I conclude with some remarks on alternatives that could provide a way out of the fundamentality criterion. (shrink)