Results for 'Metasemantics'

96 found
Order:
  1. The Metasemantics of Contextual Sensitivity.Jeffrey C. King - 2014 - In Alexis Burgess & Brett Sherman (eds.), Metasemantics: New Essays on the Foundations of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 97-118.
    Some contextually sensitive expressions are such that their context independent conventional meanings need to be in some way supplemented in context for the expressions to secure semantic values in those contexts. As we’ll see, it is not clear that there is a paradigm here, but ‘he’ used demonstratively is a clear example of such an expression. Call expressions of this sort supplementives in order to highlight the fact that their context independent meanings need to be supplemented in context for them (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   56 citations  
  2. Metasemantics, moderate inflationism, and correspondence truth.Graham Seth Moore - 2023 - Dissertation, University of British Columbia
    An object-based correspondence theory of truth holds that a truth-bearer is true whenever its truth conditions are met by objects and their properties. In order to develop such a view, the principal task is to explain how truth-bearers become endowed with their truth conditions. Modern versions of the correspondence theory see this project as the synthesis of two theoretical endeavours: basic metasemantics and compositional semantics. Basic metasemantics is the theory of how simple, meaningful items (e.g. names and concepts) (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. What the metasemantics of "know" is not.Peter van Elswyk - 2020 - Linguistics and Philosophy 43 (1):69-82.
    Epistemic contextualism in the style of Lewis (1996) maintains that ascriptions of knowledge to a subject vary in truth with the alternatives that can be eliminated by the subject’s evidence in a context. Schaffer (2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2015), Schaffer and Knobe (2012), and Schaffer and Szabo ́ (2014) hold that the question under discussion or QUD always determines these alternatives in a context. This paper shows that the QUD does not perform such a role for "know" and uses this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  4. Metasemantics for the Relaxed.Christine Tiefensee - 2021 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 16. Oxford University Press. pp. 108-133.
    In this paper, I develop a metasemantics for relaxed moral realism. More precisely, I argue that relaxed realists should be inferentialists about meaning and explain that the role of evaluative moral vocabulary is to organise and structure language exit transitions, much as the role of theoretical vocabulary is to organise and structure language entry transitions.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  5. Relativism, metasemantics, and the future.Derek Ball - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10):1036-1086.
    ABSTRACT Contemporary relativists often see their view as contributing to a semantic/post-semantic account of linguistic data about disagreement and retraction. I offer an independently motivated metasemantic account of the same data, that also handles a number of cases and empirical results that are problematic for the relativist. The key idea is that the content of assertions and beliefs is determined in part by facts about other times, including times after the assertion is made or the belief is formed. On this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  6. Metasemantic ethics.Derek Ball - 2020 - Ratio 33 (4):206-219.
    The idea that experts (especially scientific experts) play a privileged role in determining the meanings of our words and the contents of our concepts has become commonplace since the work of Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge, and others in the 1970s. But if experts have the power to determine what our words mean, they can do so responsibly or irresponsibly, from good motivations or bad, justly or unjustly, with good or bad effects. This paper distinguishes three families of metasemantic views based (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  7. Meta-Metasemantics, or the Quest for the One True Metasemantics.Ethan Nowak & Eliot Michaelson - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1):135-154.
    What determines the meaning of a context-sensitive expression in a context? It is standardly assumed that, for a given expression type, there will be a unitary answer to this question; most of the literature on the subject involves arguments designed to show that one particular metasemantic proposal is superior to a specific set of alternatives. The task of the present essay will be to explore whether this is a warranted assumption, or whether the quest for the one true metasemantics (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  8. Metasemantics, Moral Realism and Moral Doctrines.Christine Tiefensee - 2022 - In Mark McBride & Visa A. J. Kurki (eds.), Without Trimmings: The Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy of Matthew Kramer. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 189-204.
    In this paper, I consider the relationship between Matthew Kramer’s moral realism as a moral doctrine and expressivism, understood as a distinctly non-representationalist metasemantic theory of moral vocabulary. More precisely, I will argue that Kramer is right in stating that moral realism as a moral doctrine does not stand in conflict with expressivism. But I will also go further, by submitting that advocates of moral realism as a moral doctrine must adopt theories such as expressivism in some shape or form. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. The Euthyphro Challenge in Metasemantics.Bar Luzon - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (1):217-237.
    This paper argues that functionalist metasemantic views, such as Conceptual Role Semantics and Interpretivism, face a Euthyphro challenge. The challenge, put roughly, is this: functionalist metasemantic views reverse the order of explanation. According to such views, representational mental states have the contents that they do partly because they play certain roles in our mental lives. According to an intuitive picture of the roles that representational mental states play in our mental lives, however, these states play the roles they do partly (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  10. Against Metasemantics-First Moral Epistemology.Jesse Hambly & Shang Long Yeo - forthcoming - The Journal of Ethics:1-21.
    Moral metasemantic theories explain how our moral thought and talk are about certain properties. Given the connection between what our moral terms are about and which moral claims are true, it might be thought that metasemantic theorising can justify first-order ethical conclusions, thus providing a novel way of doing moral epistemology. In this paper, we spell out one kind of argument from metasemantic theories to normative ethical conclusions, and argue that it fails to transmit justification from premises to conclusion. We (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  11. Metasemantic Quandaries.Nate Charlow - 2021 - In Billy Dunaway & David Plunkett (eds.), Meaning, Decision, and Norms: Themes From the Work of Allan Gibbard. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Maize Books. pp. 171-202.
    This paper advocates a generalized form of Expressivism, as a strategy for resolving certain metasemantic puzzles about identifying the semantic value of a context-sensitive expression in context. According to this form of Expressivism, speakers express properties of semantic parameters, and they do so in order to proffer those properties for cognitive adoption (acceptance) by their addressees. Puzzles arising from the pressure to say what a putatively context-sensitive expression refers to or denotes in contexts that do not seem to specify a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  12. Externalism, metasemantic contextualism, and self-knowledge.Henry Jackman - 2015 - In Sanford Goldberg (ed.), Externalism, Self-Knowledge, and Skepticism: New Essays. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. pp. 228-247.
    This paper examines some of the interactions between holism, contextualism, and externalism, and will argue that an externalist metasemantics that grounds itself in certain plausible assumptions about self- knowledge will also be a contextualist metasemantics, and that such a contextualist metasemantics in turn resolves one of the best known problems externalist theories purportedly have with self-knowledge, namely the problem of how the possibility of various sorts of ‘switching’ cases can appear to undermine the ‘transparency’ of our thoughts (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  13. A Metasemantic Analysis of Gödel's Slingshot Argument.Hans-Peter Leeb - manuscript
    Gödel’s slingshot-argument proceeds from a referential theory of definite descriptions and from the principle of compositionality for reference. It outlines a metasemantic proof of Frege’s thesis that all true sentences refer to the same object—as well as all false ones. Whereas Frege drew from this the conclusion that sentences refer to truth-values, Gödel rejected a referential theory of definite descriptions. By formalising Gödel’s argument, it is possible to reconstruct all premises that are needed for the derivation of Frege’s thesis. For (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  14. 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 (...). I answer the second by reference to the conflicting pressures governing the resources we have available for appraising speech. (shrink)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  15. Zebras, Intransigence & Semantic Apocalypse: Problems for Dispositional Metasemantics.James Andow - 2016 - Philosophia 44 (1):53-62.
    Complete information dispositional metasemantics says that our expressions get their meaning in virtue of what our dispositions to apply those terms would be given complete information. The view has recently been advanced and argued to have a number of attractive features. I argue that that it threatens to make the meanings of our words indeterminate and doesn’t do what it was that made a dispositional view attractive in the first place.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  16. Metasemantics and Metaethics.Laura Schroeter & Francois Schroeter - 2016 - In Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics. New York: Routledge. pp. 519-535.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  17. A New Interpretivist Metasemantics for Fundamental Legal Disagreements.François Schroeter, Laura Schroeter & Kevin Toh - 2020 - Legal Theory 26 (1):62-99.
    What does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  18. Getting a Moral Thing Into a Thought: Metasemantics for Non-Naturalists.Preston J. Werner - 2010 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 140-169.
    Non-naturalism is the view that normative properties are response-independent, irreducible to natural properties, and causally inefficacious. An underexplored question for non-naturalism concerns the metasemantics of normative terms. Ideally, the non-naturalist could remain ecumenical, but it appears they cannot. Call this challenge the metasemantic challenge. This chapter suggests that non-naturalists endorse an epistemic account of reference determination of the sort recently defended by Imogen Dickie, with some modifications. An important implication of this account is that, if correct, a fully fleshed (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  19. The informational profile of valence: The metasemantic argument for imperativism.Manolo Martínez & Luca Barlassina - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Some mental states have valence—they are pleasant or unpleasant. According to imperativism, valence depends on imperative content, while evaluativism tells us that it depends on evaluative content. We argue that if one considers valence’s informational profile, it becomes evident that imperativism is superior to evaluativism. More precisely, we show that if one applies the best available metasemantics to the role played by (un)pleasant mental states in our cognitive economy, then these states turn out to have imperative rather than evaluative (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  20. Conceptual Engineering, Topics, Metasemantics, and Lack of Control.Herman Cappelen - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (5):594-605.
    Conceptual engineering is now a central topic in contemporary philosophy. Just 4-5 years ago it wasn’t. People were then engaged in the engineering of various philosophical concepts (in various sub-disciplines), but typically not self-consciously so. Qua philosophical method, conceptual engineering was under-explored, often ignored, and poorly understood. In my lifetime, I have never seen interest in a philosophical topic grow with such explosive intensity. The sociology behind this is fascinating and no doubt immensely complex (and an excellent case study for (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  21. Rigidity, natural kind terms and metasemantics.Corine Besson - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. New York: Routledge. pp. 25--44.
    A paradigmatic case of rigidity for singular terms is that of proper names. And it would seem that a paradigmatic case of rigidity for general terms is that of natural kind terms. However, many philosophers think that rigidity cannot be extended from singular terms to general terms. The reason for this is that rigidity appears to become trivial when such terms are considered: natural kind terms come out as rigid, but so do all other general terms, and in particular all (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  22. Are We Playing a Moral Lottery? Moral Disagreement from a Metasemantic Perspective.Sinan Dogramaci - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (1):523-550.
    If someone disagrees with my moral views, or more generally if I’m in a group of n people who all disagree with each other, but I don’t have any special evidence or basis for my epistemic superiority, then it’s at best a 1-in-n chance that my views are correct. The skeptical threat from disagreement is thus a kind of moral lottery, to adapt a similar metaphor from Sharon Street. Her own genealogical debunking argument, as I discuss, relies on a premise (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  23. AI with Alien Content and Alien Metasemantics.Herman Cappelen & Joshua Dever - 2023 - In Ernest Lepore & Luvell Anderson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  24. Meaning without content: on the metasemantics of register.Thorsten Sander - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    What, exactly, is the difference between words such as ‘dead’ and ‘deceased’? In this paper, I argue that such differences in register, or style, ought to be construed as genuine differences in non-truth-conditional meaning. I also show that register cannot plausibly accounted for in terms of either presupposition or conventional implicature. Register is, rather, an instance of what I call pure use-conditional meaning. In the case of register, a difference in meaning does not correspond to a difference in the contents (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  25. Yet another victim of Kripkenstein’s monster: dispositions, meaning, and privilege.Andrea Guardo - 2022 - Ergo 8 (55):857-882.
    In metasemantics, semantic dispositionalism is the view that what makes it the case that, given the value of the relevant parameters, a certain linguistic expression refers to what it does are the speakers’ dispositions. In the literature, there is something like a consensus that the fate of dispositionalism hinges on the status of three arguments, first put forward by Saul Kripke ‒ or at least usually ascribed to him. This paper discusses a different, and strangely neglected, anti-dispositionalist argument, which (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  26. Words by convention.Gail Leckie & Robert Williams - 2019 - In Ernie Lepore & David Sosa (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language, Volume 1. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    Existing metasemantic projects presuppose that word- (or sentence-) types are part of the non-semantic base. We propose a new strategy: an endogenous account of word types, that is, one where word types are fixed as part of the metasemantics. On this view, it is the conventions of truthfulness and trust that ground not only the meaning of the words (meaning by convention) but also what the word type is of each particular token utterance (words by convention). The same treatment (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  27. A Simple Escape from Moral Twin Earth.Pekka Väyrynen - 2018 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 7 (2):109-118.
    This paper offers a simple response to the Moral Twin Earth (MTE) objection to Naturalist Moral Realism (NMR). NMR typically relies on an externalist metasemantics such as a causal theory of reference. The MTE objection is that such a theory predicts that terms like ‘good’ and ‘right’ have a different reference in certain twin communities where it’s intuitively clear that the twins are talking about the same thing when using ‘good’. I argue that Boyd’s causal regulation theory, the original (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  28. Making Meaning: A study in foundational semantics.Jaakko Reinikainen - 2024 - Dissertation, Tampere University
    This is a work in the philosophy of language and metasemantics. Its purpose is to help answer the question about how words acquire their meanings. The work is divided into two parts. The purpose of Part One is to defend the claim that, despite numerous attempts, the so-called Kripkenstein’s sceptical challenge, and especially the problem of finitude, has not been offered a successful straight solution. The purpose of Part Two is to critically examine Robert Brandom’s philosophy, which can be (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  29. Practical Commitment in Normative Discourse.Pekka Vayrynen - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (2).
    Many normative judgments play a practical role in our thought. This paper concerns how their practical role is reflected in language. It is natural to wonder whether the phenomenon is semantic or pragmatic. The standard assumption in moral philosophy is that at least terms which can be used to express “thin” normative concepts – such as 'good', 'right', and 'ought' – are associated with certain practical roles somehow as a matter of meaning. But this view is rarely given explicit defense (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  30. AI and Alien Languages.Matti Eklund - manuscript
    In this paper, I focus on AIs as very different, or at least potentially very different, kinds of language users from what humans are. Is the metasemantics for AI language use different, in the way Cappelen and Dever argue? Is it reasonable to think that AIs will come to use languages importantly different from human languages, what I call alien languages?
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  31. Non-Naturalism and Reference.Jussi Suikkanen - 2017 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 11 (2):1-24.
    Metaethical realists disagree about the nature of normative properties. Naturalists think that they are ordinary natural properties: causally efficacious, a posteriori knowable, and usable in the best explanations of natural and social sciences. Non-naturalist realists, in contrast, argue that they are sui generis: causally inert, a priori knowable and not a part of the subject matter of sciences. It has been assumed so far that naturalists can explain causally how the normative predicates manage to refer to normative properties, whereas non-naturalists (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  32. Coordination, Content, and Conflation.Kyle Landrum - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):638-652.
    Coordination is the presumption that distinct representations have the same referential content. Philosophers have discussed ways in which the presence of coordination might bear on the metasemantic determination of content. One test case for exploring the relationship between coordination and content is the phenomenon of conflation — the situation in which representations are about distinct things but are nevertheless coordinated. In this paper, I use observations about conflation to develop an anaphoric metasemantics for some representations in which coordination plays (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  33. Deciding What We Mean.Andrew Peet - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Stipulation gives us a degree of control over meaning. By stipulating how I will use a term I am able to determine the meaning it will receive on future occasions of use. My stipulation will affect the truth conditional content of my future utterances. But the mechanisms of stipulation are mysterious. As Cappelen (2018) argues, meaning is typically determined in an inscrutable way by a myriad of external factors beyond our control. How does stipulation override these factors? And the powers (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  34. Inferentialist Truth Pluralism.Herman Veluwenkamp - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (1):107-121.
    Metasemantic inferentialismhas gained popularity in the last few decades. Traditionally, inferentialism is combined with a deflationary attitude towards semantic terms such as truth and reference, i.e., many inferentialists hold that when we use these semantic terms we do not purport to refer to substantive properties. This combination makes inferentialism attractive for philosophers who see themselves as antirealists. Although the attractions of combining inferentialism and deflationism are easy to see, deflationism is also a controversial position. For one, deflationists maintain that truth (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  35. Meaning in time: on temporal externalism and Kripkenstein’s skeptical challenge.Jaakko Reinikainen - 2022 - Synthese 200 (288):1-27.
    The main question of metasemantics, or foundational semantics, is why an expression token has the meaning (semantic value) that it in fact has. In his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, Saul Kripke presented a skeptical challenge that threatened to make the foundational question unanswerable. My first contention in this paper is that the skeptical challenge indeed poses an insoluble paradox, but only for a certain kind of metasemantic theory, against which the challenge effectively works as a reductio ad (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  36. 'Law'.Jules L. Coleman & Ori Simchen - 2003 - Legal Theory 9 (1):1-41.
    We explore the relationship between jurisprudential theories pertaining to the nature of law and semantic and metasemantic theories pertaining to the meaning of ‘law’ in the wake of Dworkin’s notorious Semantic Sting argument in Law’s Empire (HUP 1986). Along the way we delineate various aspects of the semantic and metasemantic underpinnings of ‘law’ as an artifact term and advance the general methodological point that jurisprudential inquiry is only negligibly constrained by the findings of semantic and metasemantic inquiry.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  37. Safety and Pluralism in Mathematics.James Andrew Smith - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-19.
    A belief one has is safe if either (i) it could not easily be false or (ii) in any nearby world in which it is false, it is not formed using the method one uses to form one’s actual belief. It seems our mathematical beliefs are safe if mathematical pluralism is true: if, loosely put, almost any consistent mathematical theory is true. It seems, after all, that in any nearby world where one’s mathematical beliefs differ from one’s actual beliefs, one (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  38. Informational Theories of Content and Mental Representation.Marc Artiga & Miguel Ángel Sebastián - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (3):613-627.
    Informational theories of semantic content have been recently gaining prominence in the debate on the notion of mental representation. In this paper we examine new-wave informational theories which have a special focus on cognitive science. In particular, we argue that these theories face four important difficulties: they do not fully solve the problem of error, fall prey to the wrong distality attribution problem, have serious difficulties accounting for ambiguous and redundant representations and fail to deliver a metasemantic theory of representation. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  39. Semantic Externalism and Psychological Externalism.Åsa Wikforss - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (1):158-181.
    Externalism is widely endorsed within contemporary philosophy of mind and language. Despite this, it is far from clear how the externalist thesis should be construed and, indeed, why we should accept it. In this entry I distinguish and examine three central types of externalism: what I call foundational externalism, externalist semantics, and psychological externalism. I suggest that the most plausible version of externalism is not in fact a very radical thesis and does not have any terribly interesting implications for philosophy (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  40. 'Ought': OUT OF ORDER.Stephen Finlay - 2016 - In Nate Charlow & Matthew Chrisman (eds.), Deontic Modality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    This paper argues that the innovation of an ordering source parameter in the standard Lewis-Kratzer semantics for modals was a mistake, at least for English auxiliaries like ‘ought’, and that a simpler dyadic semantics (as proposed in my earlier work) provides a superior account of normative uses of modals. I programmatically investigate problems arising from (i) instrumental conditionals, (ii) gradability and “weak necessity”, (iii) information-sensitivity, and (iv) conflicts, and show how the simpler semantics provides intuitive solutions given three basic moves: (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  41. Essential Contestability and Evaluation.Pekka Väyrynen - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (3):471-488.
    Evaluative and normative terms and concepts are often said to be "essentially contestable". This notion has been used in political and legal theory and applied ethics to analyse disputes concerning the proper usage of terms like democracy, freedom, genocide, rape, coercion, and the rule of law. Many philosophers have also thought that essential contestability tells us something important about the evaluative in particular. Gallie (who coined the term), for instance, argues that the central structural features of essentially contestable concepts secure (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  42. Speaker's reference, semantic reference, sneaky reference.Eliot Michaelson - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (5):856-875.
    According to what is perhaps the dominant picture of reference, what a referential term refers to in a context is determined by what the speaker intends for her audience to identify as the referent. I argue that this sort of broadly Gricean view entails, counterintuitively, that it is impossible to knowingly use referential terms in ways that one expects or intends to be misunderstood. Then I sketch an alternative which can better account for such opaque uses of language, or what (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  43. The Wrong of Lying and the Good of Language: A Reply to “What’s the Good of Language?”.Brian Haas - 2023 - Ethics 133 (4):558-572.
    Sam Berstler has recently argued for a fairness-based moral difference between lying and misleading. According to Berstler, the liar, but not the misleader, unfairly free rides on the Lewisian conventions which ground public-language meaning. Although compelling, the pragmatic and metasemantic backdrop within which this moral reason is located allows for the generation of a vicious explanatory circle. Simply, this backdrop entails that no speaker has ever performed an assertion. As I argue, escaping the circle requires rejecting Berstler’s fairness-based reason against (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  44. Imperative Statics and Dynamics.Nate Charlow - manuscript
    Imperatives are linguistic devices used by an authority (speaker) to express wishes, requests, commands, orders, instructions, and suggestions to a subject (addressee). This essay's goal is to tentatively address some of the following questions about the imperative. -/- METASEMANTIC. What is the menu of options for understanding fundamental semantic notions like satisfaction, truth-conditions, validity, and entailment in the context of imperatives? Are there good imperative arguments, and, if so, how are they to be characterized? What are the options for understanding (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  45. Eligibility and inscrutability.J. Robert G. Williams - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (3):361-399.
    Inscrutability arguments threaten to reduce interpretationist metasemantic theories to absurdity. Can we find some way to block the arguments? A highly influential proposal in this regard is David Lewis’ ‘ eligibility ’ response: some theories are better than others, not because they fit the data better, but because they are framed in terms of more natural properties. The purposes of this paper are to outline the nature of the eligibility proposal, making the case that it is not ad hoc, but (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   87 citations  
  46. Rationalizing Self-Interpretation.Laura Schroeter & Francois Schroeter - 2015 - In Chris Daly (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 419–447.
    A characteristic form of philosophical inquiry seeks to answer ‘what is x?’ questions. In this paper, we ask how philosophers do and should adjudicate debates about the correct answer to such questions. We argue that philosophers do and should rely on a distinctive type of pragmatic and meta-representational reasoning – a form of rationalizing self-interpretation – in answering ‘what is x?’ questions. We start by placing our methodological discussion within a broader theoretical framework. We posit a necessary connection between epistemic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  47. Epistemic Modality and Hyperintensionality in Mathematics.David Elohim - unknown
    This book concerns the foundations of epistemic modality and hyperintensionality and their applications to the philosophy of mathematics. I examine the nature of epistemic modality, when the modal operator is interpreted as concerning both apriority and conceivability, as well as states of knowledge and belief. The book demonstrates how epistemic modality and hyperintensionality relate to the computational theory of mind; metaphysical modality and hyperintensionality; the types of mathematical modality and hyperintensionality; to the epistemic status of large cardinal axioms, undecidable propositions, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  48. A Relationist Theory of Intentional Identity.Dilip Ninan - 2024 - Mind 133 (531):761-792.
    This essay argues for a 'relationist' treatment of intentional identity sentences like (1) "Hob believes that a witch blighted Bob's mare and Nob believes that she killed Cob's sow" (Geach 1967). According to relationism, facts of the form "a believes that p and b believes that q" are not in general reducible to facts of the form "c believes that r". We first argue that extant, non-relationist treatments of intentional identity are unsatisfactory, and then go on to motivate and explore (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  49. Reference magnetism and the reduction of reference.J. R. G. Williams - manuscript
    *This work has turned into a bigger project, and some of it is published in "Lewis on reference".* Some things, argues Lewis, are just better candidates to be referents than others. Even at the cost of attributing false beliefs, we interpret people as referring to the most interesting kinds in their vicinity. How should this be accounted for? In section 1, I look at Lewis’s interpretationism, and the reference magnetism it builds in (not just for ‘perfectly natural’ properties, but for (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  50. Mental filing.Rachel Goodman & Aidan Gray - 2022 - Noûs 56 (1):204-226.
    We offer an interpretation of the mental files framework that eliminates the metaphor of files, information being contained in files, etc. The guiding question is whether, once we move beyond the metaphors, there is any theoretical role for files. We claim not. We replace the file-metaphor with two theses: the semantic thesis that there are irreducibly relational representational facts (viz. facts about the coordination of representations); and the metasemantic thesis that processes tied to information-relations ground those facts. In its canonical (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
1 — 50 / 96