It is advisable to treat some sorts of discourse about fiction with the aid of an intensional operator "in such-And-Such fiction...." the operator may appear either explicitly or tacitly. It may be analyzed in terms of similarity of worlds, As follows: "in the fiction f, A" means that a is true in those of the worlds where f is told as known fact rather than fiction that differ least from our world, Or from the belief worlds of the community in (...) which the fiction originated. (shrink)

Mark Sainsbury presents an original account of how language works when describing mental states, based on a new theory of what is involved in attributing attitudes like thinking, hoping, and wanting. He offers solutions to longstanding puzzles about how we can direct our thought to such a diversity of things, including things that do not exist.

Stefano Predelli defends a semantics of proper names which has simplicity and common sense in its favour: proper names are non-indexical devices of rigid and direct reference. He grounds this view in accounts of the shape and form of names, and of their introduction within language use, and he responds to widespread misconceptions and objections.

In this book the author treats art as an action performed by the artist as agent, rather than examining it from the point of view of its audience as ...

Fictional names present unique challenges for semantic theories of proper names, challenges strong enough to warrant an account of names different from the standard treatment. The theory developed in this paper is motivated by a puzzle that depends on four assumptions: our intuitive assessment of the truth values of certain sentences, the most straightforward treatment of their syntactic structure, semantic compositionality, and metaphysical scruples strong enough to rule out fictional entities, at least. It is shown that these four assumptions, taken (...) together, are inconsistent with referentialism, the common view that names are uniformly associated with ordinary individuals as their semantic value. Instead, the view presented here interprets names as context-sensitive expressions, associated in a context of utterance with a particular act of introduction, or dubbing, which is then used to determine their semantic value. Some dubbings are referential, which associate names with ordinary individuals as their semantic values; others are fictional, which associate names, instead, with sets of properties. Since the semantic values of names can be of different sorts, the semantic rule interpreting predication must be complex as well. In the body of the paper, I show how this new treatment of names allows us to solve our original puzzle. I defend the complexity of the semantic predication rule, and address additional worries about ontological commitment. (shrink)

Conceiving of fictional characters as types allows us to reconcile intuitions of sameness and difference about characters such as Batman that appear in different fictional worlds. Sameness occurs at the type level while difference occurs at the token level. Yet, the claim that fictional characters are types raises three main issues. Firstly, types seem to be eternal forms whereas fictional characters seem to be the outcome of a process of creation. Secondly, the tokens of a type are concrete particulars in (...) the actual world whereas the alleged tokens of a fictional character are concrete particulars in a fictional world. Thirdly, many fictional characters, unlike Batman, only appear in one work of fiction, and therefore one can wonder whether it does make sense to treat them as types. The main aim of this paper is to address these issues in order to defend a creationist account of fictional characters as types. (shrink)

Stephen Schiffer presents a groundbreaking account of meaning and belief, and shows how it can illuminate a range of crucial problems regarding language, mind, knowledge, and ontology. He introduces the new doctrine of 'pleonastic propositions' to explain what the things we mean and believe are. He discusses the relation between semantic and psychological facts, on the one hand, and physical facts, on the other; vagueness and indeterminacy; moral truth; conditionals; and the role of propositional content in information acquisition and explanation. (...) This radical new treatment of meaning will command the attention of everyone who works on fundamental questions about language, and will attract much interest from other areas of philosophy. (shrink)

This paper articulates two constraints on an acceptable account of meaning: (i) accessibility: sameness of meaning affords an immediate appearance of de jure co-reference, (ii) flexibility: sameness of meaning tolerates open-ended variation in speakers' substantive understanding of the reference. Traditional accounts of meaning have trouble simultaneously satisfying both constraints. I suggest that relationally individuated meanings provide a promising way of avoiding this tension. On relational accounts, we bootstrap our way to de jure co-reference: the subjective appearance of de jure co-reference (...) helps make it the case that two token representations really do co-refer. (shrink)

This paper is about intentional identity, the phenomenon of intentional attitudes having a common focus. I present an argument against an approach to explaining intentional identity, defended by Nathan Salmon, Terence Parsons and others, that involves positing exotic objects. For example, those who adopt this sort of view say that when two astronomers had beliefs about Vulcan, their attitudes had a common focus because there is an exotic object that both of their beliefs were about. I argue that countenancing these (...) exotic objects does not help us explain intentional identity. (shrink)

Geach points out that some pairs of beliefs have a common focus despite there being, apparently, no object at that focus. For example, two or more beliefs can be directed at Vulcan even though there is no such planet. Geach introduced the label ‘intentional identity’ to pick out the relation that holds between attitudes in these cases; Geach says that ’[w]e have intentional identity when a number of people, or one person on different occasions, have attitudes with a common focus, (...) whether or not there actually is something at that focus’. In this paper, I propose a novel theory of intentional identity, the triangulation theory, and argue that it has considerable advantages over its principal rivals. My approach centers on agents’ metarepresentational beliefs about what it takes for intentional attitudes to be about particular objects. (shrink)

When are two tokens of a name tokens of the same name? According to this paper, the answer is a matter of the historical connections between the tokens. For each name, there is a unique originating event, and subsequent tokens are tokens of that name only if they derive in an appropriate way from that originating event. The conditions for a token being a token of a given name are distinct from the conditions for preservation of the reference of a (...) name. Hence a name may change its reference. Defending the theory requires considerations about the identity of acts, and about empty names and disagreement. The upshot is a causal theory of the identity of names, but not what would normally be counted as a causal theory of the reference of names. Although reference is often transmitted causally, what determines semantic reference is conventionalized speaker-reference. (shrink)

My responses to seven critical reviews of my book *Mental Files* published in a special issue of the journal Disputatio, edited by F. Salis. The reviewers are: Keith Hall, David Papineau, Annalisa Coliva and Delia Belleri, Peter Pagin, Thea Goodsell, Krista Lawlor and Manuel Garcia-Carpintero.

There seems to be a perfectly ordinary sense in which different speakers can use an empty name to talk about the same thing. Call this fictional coreference. It is a constraint on an adequate theory of empty names that it provide a satisfactory account of fictional coreference. The main claim of this paper is that the pretense theory of empty names does not respect this constraint.

It is usually taken for granted, in discussions about fiction, that real things or events can occur as referents of fictional names . In this paper, I take issue with this view, and provide several arguments to the effect that it is better to take the names in fiction to refer to fictional surrogates of real objects. Doing so allows us to solve a series of problems that arise on the reference-continuity view. I also show that the arguments philosophers usually (...) rely on in order to ban surrogates are not as serious as they have been taken to be. In the first part of the paper, I describe the two conflicting views. In the second part, I discuss several specific arguments in favor of surrogates. In the third part I take up the kind of reasons ordinarily offered against them. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAssuming there are fictional objects, what sorts of properties do they have? Intuitively, most of their properties involve being represented—appearing in works of fiction, being depicted as clever, being portrayed by actors, being admired or feared, and so on. But several philosophers, including Saul Kripke, Peter van Inwagen, Kendall Walton, and Amie Thomasson, argue that even if there are fictional objects, they are not really represented in some or all of these cases. I reconstruct four kinds of arguments for this (...) unexpected conclusion; they concern the semantics of names, pragmatic force, creation, and representations’ qualitative content. But I find all the arguments flawed. I then argue for the contrary, employing a new perspective: representation of fictional objects begins with the works of fiction that originate them. A work of fiction represents its “native” objects because our culture bestows that property on it. I sketch conditions for such property bestowal and argue that they are satisfied in this case. (shrink)

Peter Geach's puzzle of intentional identity is to explain how the claim ‘Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob's sow’ is compatible with there being no such witch. I clarify the puzzle and reduce it to the familiar problem of negative existentials. That problem is a paradox of representations that seem to include denials of commitment , to carry commitment to what they deny commitment to, and to be true. The best proposed (...) solutions can be understood through this paradox; I evaluate them, and defend a new solution. (shrink)

I provide a novel semantic analysis of proper names and indexicals, combining insights from the competing traditions of referentialism, championed by Kripke and Kaplan, and descriptivism, introduced by Frege and Russell, and more recently resurrected by Geurts and Elbourne, among others. From the referentialist tradition, I borrow the proof that names and indexicals are not synonymous to any definite description but pick their referent from the context directly. From the descriptivist tradition, I take the observation that names, and to some (...) extent indexicals, have uses that are best understood by analogy with anaphora and definite descriptions, that is, following Geurts, in terms of presupposition projection. The hybrid analysis that I propose is couched in Layered Discourse Representation Theory. Proper names and indexicals trigger presuppositions in a dedicated layer, which is semantically interpreted as providing a contextual anchor for the interpretation of the other layers. For the proper resolution of DRSs with layered presuppositions, I add two constraints to van der Sandt's algorithm. The resulting proposal accounts for both the classic philosophical examples and the new linguistic data, preserving a unified account of the preferred rigid interpretation of both names and indexicals, while leaving room for non-referential readings under contextual pressure. (shrink)

What is the semantic contribution of anaphoric links in sentences like, ‘A physicist was late to the party. He brought some bongos’? A natural first thought is that the passage entails a wide-scope existential claim that there is something that both (i) was late to the party and (ii) brought some bongos. Intentional identity sentences are counter-examples to this natural thought applied to anaphora in general. Some have tried to rescue the thought and accommodate the counter-examples by positing mythical objects. (...) I present a new intentional identity sentence that cannot be so accommodated. I then propose a new account of intentional identity and other anaphoric sentences that does not appeal to mythical objects, but instead draws on traditional accounts of definite descriptions. (shrink)

Contrary to frequent declarations that descriptivism as a theory of how names refer is dead and gone, such a descriptivism is, to all appearances, alive and well. Or rather, a descendent of that doctrine is alive and well. This new version—neo-descriptivism, for short—is supposedly immune from the usual arguments against descriptivism, in large part because it avoids classical descriptivism’s emphasis on salient, first-come-to-mind properties and holds instead that a name’s reference-fixing content is typically given by egocentric properties specified in terms (...) of broadly causal relationships between a speaker and his environment: properties like being the actual individual called ‘Aristotle’ referred to by my informants’ use of the name, being the actual individual called ‘George Bush’ whom I have seen/heard described as the U.S. President who started the second Gulf War, and so on. names is not in contention.) What these neo-descriptivists claim is that the usual modal, semantical, and epistemological arguments against classical descriptivism don’t get much of a foothold against this new version, especially if we don’t insist that speakers be able to state these properties on demand. It is enough that these are properties implicit in the semantic judgments of speakers. Recent attacks notwithstanding, such a neo-descriptivism has struck many philosophers as a credible and worthy successor to classical descriptivism. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Some stage setting on the value of understanding words and plans Agreement and shared understandings Davidson's challenge to representation Are we confusing semantics and pragmatics? Why we need possible worlds Voyages through logical space How to finesse the issue in analytic ontology The need for centered worlds Getting information from sentences with centered content Saying things a new now that centering is in the story Where to now?

Conversational exculpature is a pragmatic process whereby information is subtracted from, rather than added to, what the speaker literally says. This pragmatic content subtraction explains why we can say “Rob is six feet tall” without implying that Rob is between 5'0.99" and 6'0.01" tall, and why we can say “Ellen has a hat like the one Sherlock Holmes always wears” without implying Holmes exists or has a hat. This article presents a simple formalism for understanding this pragmatic mechanism, specifying how, (...) in context, the result of such subtractions is determined. And it shows how the resulting theory of conversational exculpature accounts for a varied range of linguistic phenomena. A distinctive feature of the approach is the crucial role played by the question under discussion in determining the result of a given exculpature. (shrink)

Recanati’s (2007, 2009) argues for a Lewisian subjectless view of the content of “implicit” de se thought, on the basis that we can thus better explain the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. The paper argues that this is not the case, and suggests that such a view is in tension with Recanati’s mental files approach to de re thought in general and the SELF concept in particular.

This paper argues for a version of metalinguistic descriptivism, the Mill-Frege view, comparing it to a currently popular alternative, predicativism. The Mill-Frege view combines tenets of Fregean views with features of the theory of direct reference. According to it, proper names have metalinguistic senses, known by competent speakers on the basis of their competence, which figure in ancillary presuppositions. In support of the view the paper argues that the name-bearing relation—which predicativists cite to account for the properties that they take (...) names to express—depends on acts of naming with a semantic significance. Acts of naming create particular words specifically designed for referential use, which they perform whether or not the language has other words articulated with the same sound or orthography. Like other forms of metalinguistic descriptivism, the Mill-Frege view affords responses to Kripke’s semantic and epistemic arguments against descriptivism. The view is prima facie more complex than predicativism; but the additional complexity is independently attested in natural languages and well-motivated. Finally, the Mill-Frege proposal deals well with Kripke’s modal argument, and accounts for modal intuitions about names, both issues that pose serious trouble to predicativism. (shrink)