The first degree entailment (FDE) family is a group of logics, a many-valued semantics for each system of which is obtained from classical logic by adding to the classical truth-values true and false any subset of {both, neither, indeterminate}, where indeterminate is an infectious value (any formula containing a subformula with the value indeterminate itself has the value indeterminate). In this paper, we see how to extend a version of star semantics for the logics whose many-valued (...) class='Hi'>semantics lack indeterminate to star semantics for logics whose many-valued semantics include indeterminate. The equivalence of the many-valued semantics and star semantics is established by way of a soundness and completeness proof. The upshot of the novel semantics in terms of the applied semantics of these logics, and specifically infectiousness, is explored, settling on the idea that infectiousness concerns ineffability. (shrink)

This paper presents a new semantics for the weak relevant logic DW that makes the role of the infamous Routley star more explicable. Central to this rewriting is combining aspects of both the American and Australian plan for understanding negations in relevance logics.

Chenyang Li argues, in an article originally published in Hypatia, that the ethics of care and Confucian ethics constitute similar approaches to ethics. The present paper takes issue with this claim. It is more accurate to view Confucian ethics as a kind of virtue ethics, rather than as a kind of care ethics. In the process of criticizing Li's claim, the distinctiveness of care ethics is defended, against attempts to assimilate it to virtue ethics.

This paper explores the generally overlooked relevance of an important contemporary debate in mainstream epistemology to philosophers working within ethics on questions concerning moral knowledge. It is argued that this debate, between internalists and externalists about the accessibility of epistemic justification, has the potential to be both significantly influenced by, and have a significant impact upon, the study of moral knowledge. The moral sphere provides a particular type of strong evidence in favour of externalism, and mainstream epistemologists might benefit from (...) paying attention to this fact. At the same time, the terrain of moral epistemology (approached as a sub-field of metaethics) needs to be reshaped by the realisation that externalists can steal the thunder of intuitionists when it comes to knowledge constituted by seemingly self-evident beliefs.1. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a two level account of moral thinking that, unlike other accounts, does justice to three very plausible propositions that seem to form an inconsistent triad: (1) People can be morally virtuous without the aid of philosophy. (2) Morally virtuous people non-accidentally act for good reasons, and work out what it is that they ought to do on the basis of considering such reasons. (3) Philosophers engaged in the project of normative ethics are (...) not wasting their time when they search after highly general moral principles which could not be discovered or be justifiably accepted through non-philosophical thinking, and which specify the good reasons that virtuous people act on, as well as provide a criterion or criteria for determining what it is that people ought to do. (shrink)

Joseph Raz’s much discussed service conception of practical authority has recently come under attack from Stephen Darwall, who proposes that we instead adopt a second- personal conception of practical authority.1 We believe that the best place to start understanding practical authority is with a pared back conception of it, as simply a species of normative authority more generally, where this species is picked out merely by the fact that the normative authority in question is authority in relation to action, rather (...) than belief. We do not wish to deny that there might be properties of practical authority (as distinct from the species of authority that is concerned with belief) that are peculiar to it, but, unlike both Raz and Darwall, we do not believe that such features play a role in defining or delimiting practical authority. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue for a particular informative and unified analysis of normative reasons. According to this analysis, a fact F is a reason to act in a certain way just in case it is evidence that one ought to act in that way. Similarly, F is a reason to believe a certain proposition just in case it is evidence for the truth of this proposition. Putting the relatively uncontroversial claim about reasons for belief to one side, we present (...) several arguments in favor of our analysis of reasons for action. We then turn to consider a series of objections to the analysis. We conclude that there are good reasons to accept the analysis and that the objections do not succeed. (shrink)

This paper is a response to two sets of published criticisms of the 'Reasons as Evidence’ thesis concerning normative reasons, proposed and defended in earlier papers. According to this thesis, a fact is a normative reason for an agent to Φ just in case this fact is evidence that this agent ought to Φ. John Broome and John Brunero have presented a number of challenging criticisms of this thesis which focus, for the most part, on problems that it appears to (...) confront when it comes to the topic of the weighing of reasons. Our paper responds to all of the criticisms that these critics have provided, shedding fresh light on this interesting topic in the process. (shrink)

Post-Fregean theorists use 'quotation' to denote indifferently both colloquially called quotations (repetitions of prior utterances) and what I call 'displays': 'Rot' means red. Colloquially, quotation is a strictly historical property, not semantic or syntactic. Displays are semantically and syntactically distinctive sentential elements. Most displays are not quotations. Pure echo quotations (Cosmological arguments involve "an unnecessary shuffle") aren't displays. Frege-inspired formal languages stipulate that enquotation forms a singular term referring to the enquoted expression (type). Formalist enquotations differ semantically and syntactically from (...) natural language displays. Call them autonomes, and mark them with stars: *Rot* means red. In formal languages, an unenstarred expression has only one meaning, and an autonome has only one meaning viz., a name (or indexical) designating the unenstarred expression (type). Stars have semantic content and can’t disambiguate. Display punctuation only disambiguates; it says only: This material is displayed. Displays have a semantic function; their marks don't.nDisplays are not terms or lexical items. Displays are objects incorporable into utterances. Such incorporation enables them to be linguistically appropriated much as we appropriate speech-external objects by extrasentential supplementation (e.g., gesturing) to identify the extension of a term by ostending the object -- but now without any extrasentential supplement. Displays are always adjunctive to an (implicit or explicit) ostensionable term, a term whose extension is identifiable by ostending an object. The display-ostensionable term extension relations are various. A display may (1) be the term's referent, or (2) represent the term's extension by (a) replicating or (b) instantiating or (c) expressing the term's referent, or (e) instantiating the property the term predicates. (shrink)

Are Fregean thoughts compositionally complex and composed of senses? We argue that, in Begriffsschrift, Frege took 'conceptual contents' to be unstructured, but that he quickly moved away from this position, holding just two years later that conceptual contents divide of themselves into 'function' and 'argument'. This second position is shown to be unstable, however, by Frege's famous substitution puzzle. For Frege, the crucial question the puzzle raises is why "The Morning Star is a planet" and "The Evening Star (...) is a planet" have different contents, but his second position predicts that they should have the same content. Frege's response to this antinomy is of course to distinguish sense from reference, but what has not previously been noticed is that this response also requires thoughts to be compositionally complex, composed of senses. That, however, raises the question just how thoughts are composed from senses. We reconstruct a Fregean answer, one that turns on an insistence that this question must be understood as semantic rather than metaphysical. It is not a question about the intrinsic nature of residents of the third realm but a question about how thoughts are expressed by sentences. (shrink)

This paper is the twin of (Duží and Jespersen, in submission), which provides a logical rule for transparent quantification into hyperprop- ositional contexts de dicto, as in: Mary believes that the Evening Star is a planet; therefore, there is a concept c such that Mary be- lieves that what c conceptualizes is a planet. Here we provide two logical rules for transparent quantification into hyperpropositional contexts de re. (As a by-product, we also offer rules for possible- world propositional contexts.) (...) One rule validates this inference: Mary believes of the Evening Star that it is a planet; therefore, there is an x such that Mary believes of x that it is a planet. The other rule validates this inference: the Evening Star is such that it is believed by Mary to be a planet; therefore, there is an x such that x is believed by Mary to be a planet. Issues unique to the de re variant include partiality and existential presupposition, sub- stitutivity of co-referential (as opposed to co-denoting or synony- mous) terms, anaphora, and active vs. passive voice. The validity of quantifying-in presupposes an extensional logic of hyperinten- sions preserving transparency and compositionality in hyperinten- sional contexts. This requires raising the bar for what qualifies as co-denotation or equivalence in extensional contexts. Our logic is Tichý’s Transparent Intensional Logic. The syntax of TIL is the typed lambda calculus; its highly expressive semantics is based on a procedural redefinition of, inter alia, functional abstraction and application. The two non-standard features we need are a hyper- intension (called Trivialization) that presents other hyperintensions and a four-place substitution function (called Sub) defined over hy- perintensions. (shrink)

Post-Fregean theorists use 'quotation' to denote indifferently both colloquially called quotations (repetitions of prior utterances) and what I call 'displays': 'Rot' means red. Colloquially, quotation is a strictly historical property, not semantic or syntactic. Displays are semantically and syntactically distinctive sentential elements. Most displays are not quotations. Pure echo quotations (Cosmological arguments involve "an unnecessary shuffle") aren't displays. Frege-inspired formal languages stipulate that enquotation forms a singular term referring to the enquoted expression (type). Formalist enquotations differ semantically and syntactically from (...) natural language displays. Call them autonomes, and mark them with stars: *Rot* means red. In formal languages, an unenstarred expression has only one meaning, and an autonome has only one meaning viz., a name (or indexical) designating the unenstarred expression (type). Stars have semantic content and can’t disambiguate. Display punctuation only disambiguates; it says only: This material is displayed. Displays have a semantic function; their marks don't. Displays are not terms or lexical items. Displays are objects incorporable into utterances. Such incorporation enables them to be linguistically appropriated much as we appropriate speech-external objects by extrasentential supplementation (e.g., gesturing) to identify the extension of a term by ostending the object -- but now without any extrasentential supplement. Displays are always adjunctive to an (implicit or explicit) ostensionable term, a term whose extension is identifiable by ostending an object. The display-ostensionable term-extension relations are various. A display may (1) be the term's referent, or (2) represent the term's extension by (a) replicating or (b) instantiating or (c) expressing the term's referent, or (e) instantiating the property the term predicates. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the ethical themes and theory portrayals by particular characters in Star Trek: Into Darkness. It is concluded that the film can be understood as explicating the pros and cons of both "male" and "female" ethical perspectives, and that a comprehensive understanding of morality requires some synthesis of both perspectives.

In 1966 Gene Roddenberry, then a relatively unknown TV writer, created what was to become a cultural sensation. From cell phones and tablets, to MRI machines and medical jet injectors, Star Trek has undoubtedly anticipated much of the technology that we take for granted today. Moreover, the disagreements, fights and jokes between Captain Kirk (William Shatner), Dr Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy (DeForest Kelley) and Mr Spock (Leonard Nimoy) were expertly crafted for dramatic impact. But I’m not writing this to confess (...) to you my obsessive infatuation with the Star Trek universe. Instead I want to discuss how the beliefs and practices of Vulcans like Spock are similar to those of the Stoic school of philosophy. (shrink)

This paper challenges the negative attitudes towards labelled proof systems, usually referred to as semantic pollution, by arguing that such critiques overlook the full potential of labelled calculi. The overarching objective is to develop a practice-based philosophical analysis of labelled calculi to provide insightful considerations regarding their proof-theoretic and philosophical value. To achieve this, successful applications of labelled calculi and related results will be showcased, and comparisons with other relevant works will be discussed. The paper ends by advocating for a (...) more practice-based approach towards the philosophical understanding of proof systems and their role in structural proof theory. (shrink)

Science fiction fandoms tend to contain significant numbers of fans who feel angry and resentful about the handling of the franchise they are fans of, because of the stories the franchises owners have told. The paper addresses the question of when, if ever, such anger and resentment are justified. Special attention will be paid to Star Trek fandom, but other fandoms will be considered, including those for Star Wars and Doctor Who. Various proposed justifications for anger and resentment (...) will be considered, including that franchise owners have misled fans about the stories they would tell, have wasted opportunities to produce good art, have reduced the value of older art, have engaged in a form of cultural appropriation by repurposing old characters, have caused needless offense of a sort akin to the offense of religious sensibilities, have offended against the principle of utility, and have taken advantage of unjust copyright laws. The paper does not champion a conclusion about when, if ever, fan anger and resentment are justified. However, it is concluded that, contrary to what is often assumed, it is not obvious that fan anger and resentment are always unjustified, and so fan anger and resentment cannot always be dismissed out of hand. (shrink)

I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. This system’s role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence’s semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this thesis into (...) a detailed compositional-semantic theory based on the influential framework of Heim and Kratzer. This approach situates semantics within an independently motivated account of human cognitive architecture and reveals the semantics–pragmatics interface to be grounded in the underlying interface between modular and central systems. (shrink)

In “Is semantics possible?” Putnam connected two themes: the very possibility of semantics (as opposed to formal model theory) for natural languages and the proper semantic treatment of common nouns. Putnam observed that abstract semantic accounts are modeled on formal languages model theory: the substantial contribution is rules for logical connectives (given outside the models), whereas the lexicon (individual constants and predicates) is treated merely schematically by the models. This schematic treatment may be all that is needed for (...) an account of validity in a formal setting, but it does not help to understand how proper and common nouns function in reality (not in models). Putnam then initiated the empirical study of such nouns to indicate, (i), that the popular Frege-Carnap account of them as (“disguised” compound) predicates is empirically incorrect, and, (ii), that they offer a new paradigm for a naturalistic semantics of natural languages. We take Putnam’s program a couple of steps further. First, we investigate the semantics of common nouns and argue that they refer (to kinds), rather than apply by satisfaction/truth to a designation/denotation. Second, we point to general results about semantics as a theory whose fulcrum is the reference relation rather than satisfaction in models and validity across them. (shrink)

Relationship between default semantics and modularity of mind (in particular mind reading through the principle of Relevance).

Big History provides a unique opportunity to consider the development of the Universe as a single process. Within Big History studies one can distinguish some common evolutionary laws and principles. However, it is very important to recognize that there are many more such integrating principles, laws, mecha-nisms and patterns of evolution at all its levels than it is usually supposed. In the meantime, we can find the common traits in development, functioning, and interaction of apparently rather different processes and phenomena (...) of Big History. Of special importance is the point that many principles, patterns, regularities, and rules of evolution, which we tend to find relevant only for the biological and social levels of evolution, may be also applied to the cosmic phase of evolution. The present article attempts (within such a framework for the first time in the Big History framework) at combining Big History potential with the potential of Evolutionary Studies. It does not only analyze the history of the Cosmos. It studies similarities between evolutionary laws, principles, and mechanisms at various levels and phases of Big History. Such an approach opens up some new perspectives for our understanding of evolution and Big History, their driving forces, vectors, and trends; it creates a consolidated field for interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

Big History provides a unique opportunity to consider the development of the Universe as a single process. Within Big History studies one can distinguish some common evolutionary laws and principles. However, it is very important to recognize that there are many more such integrating principles, laws, mechanisms and patterns of evolution at all its levels than it is usually supposed. In the meantime, we can find the common traits in development, functioning, and interaction of apparently rather different processes and phenomena (...) of Big History. Of special importance is the point that many principles, patterns, regularities, and rules of evolution, which we tend to find relevant only for the biological and social levels of evolution, may be also applied to the cosmic phase of evolution. The present article attempts (within such a framework for the first time in the Big History framework) at combining Big History potential with the potential of Evolutionary Studies. It does not only analyze the history of the Cosmos. It studies similarities between evolutionary laws, principles, and mechanisms at various levels and phases of Big History. Such an approach opens up some new perspectives for our understanding of evolution and Big History, their driving forces, vectors, and trends; it creates a consolidated field for interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

It seems possible to see a star that no longer exists. Yet it also seems right to say that what no longer exists cannot be seen. We therefore face a puzzle, the traditional answer to which involves abandoning naïve realism in favour of a sense datum view. In this article, however, I offer a novel exploration of the puzzle within a naïve realist framework. As will emerge, the best option for naïve realists is to embrace an eternalist view of (...) time, and claim that in the relevant case, one sees a still existent star‐stage located somewhere in the distant past. (shrink)

Intellectual humility is an interesting but underexplored disposition. The claim “I am (intellectually) humble” seems paradoxical in that someone who has the disposition in question would not typically volunteer it. There is an explanatory gap between the meaning of the sentence and the meaning the speaker expresses by uttering it. We therefore suggest analyzing intellectual humility semantically, using a psycholexical approach that focuses on both synonyms and antonyms of ‘intellectual humility’. We present a thesaurus-based method to map the semantic space (...) of intellectual humility as a heuristic to support philosophical and psychological analysis of this disposition. We find three semantic clusters that compose intellectual humility: the sensible self, the discreet self, and the inquisitive self; likewise, we find three clusters that compose its contraries: the overrated self, the underrated other, and the underrated self. (shrink)

At the heart of semantics in the 20th century is Frege’s distinction between sense and force. This is the idea that the content of a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One part, the sense, is the proposition that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it as its semantic interpretation. The second component is S’s illocutionary force. Illocutionary forces correspond to the three basic kinds of sentential speech acts: assertions, orders, and questions. (...) Forces are then kinds of acts in which propositions are deployed with certain purposes. I sketch a speech-act theoretic semantics in which that distinction does not hold. Instead of propositions and forces, the theory proposes proto-illocutionary acts and illocutionary acts. The orthodox notion of a proposition plays no role in the framework, which is a good thing, since that notion is deeply problematic. The framework also shows how expressionists, who embrace a sophisticated speech-act framework, face no Frege-Geach embedding problem, since the latter assumes the Sense/Force distinction. (shrink)

I develop and defend a truthmaker semantics for the relevant logic R. The approach begins with a simple philosophical idea and develops it in various directions, so as to build a technically adequate relevant semantics. The central philosophical idea is that truths are true in virtue of specific states. Developing the idea formally results in a semantics on which truthmakers are relevant to what they make true. A very natural notion of conditionality is added, giving us relevant (...) implication. I then investigate ways to add conjunction, disjunction, and negation; and I discuss how to justify contraposition and excluded middle within a truthmaker semantics. (shrink)

Philosophers and cognitive scientists have worried that research on animal mind-reading faces a ‘logical problem’: the difficulty of experimentally determining whether animals represent mental states (e.g. seeing) or merely the observable evidence (e.g. line-of-gaze) for those mental states. The most impressive attempt to confront this problem has been mounted recently by Robert Lurz. However, Lurz' approach faces its own logical problem, revealing this challenge to be a special case of the more general problem of distal content. Moreover, participants in this (...) debate do not agree on criteria for representation. As such, future debate should either abandon the representational idiom or confront underlying semantic disagreements. (shrink)

Philosophers have spilled a lot of ink over the past few years exploring the nature and significance of grounding. Kit Fine has made several seminal contributions to this discussion, including an exact treatment of the formal features of grounding [Fine, 2012a]. He has specified a language in which grounding claims may be expressed, proposed a system of axioms which capture the relevant formal features, and offered a semantics which interprets the language. Unfortunately, the semantics Fine offers faces a (...) number of problems. In this paper, I review the problems and offer an alternative that avoids them. I offer a semantics for the pure logic of ground that is motivated by ideas already present in the grounding literature, and for which a natural axiomatization capturing central formal features of grounding is sound and complete. I also show how the semantics I offer avoids the problems faced by Fine’s semantics. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a new semantic framework designed to capture a distinctly cognitive or epistemic notion of meaning akin to Fregean senses. Traditional Carnapian intensions are too coarse-grained for this purpose: they fail to draw semantic distinctions between sentences that, from a Fregean perspective, differ in meaning. This has led some philosophers to introduce more fine-grained hyperintensions that allow us to draw semantic distinctions among co-intensional sentences. But the hyperintensional strategy has a flip-side: it risks drawing semantic distinctions (...) between sentences that, from a Fregean perspective, do not differ in meaning. This is what we call the ‘new problem’ of hyperintensionality to distinguish it from the ‘old problem’ that faced the intensional theory. We show that our semantic framework offers a joint solution to both these problems by virtue of satisfying a version of Frege’s so-called ‘equipollence principle’ for sense individuation. Frege’s principle, we argue, not only captures the semantic intuitions that give rise to the old and the new problem of hyperintensionality, but also points the way to an independently motivated solution to both problems. (shrink)

In several recent contributions to the growing literature on slurs, Hedger draws upon Kaplan’s distinction between descriptive and expressive content to argue that slurs are expressions with purely expressive content. The distinction between descriptive and expressive content and the view that slurs are expressions with purely expressive content has been widely acknowledged in prior work, and Hedger aims to contribute to this tradition of scholarship by offering novel arguments in support of his ‘‘pure expressivist’’ account of slurs. But the account (...) that PE offers is explanatorily inadequate, resting on suspect a priori intuitions which also commit one to denying many basic facts about slurs, such as that slurs largely display systematic differential application and that slurs can be used non-offensively between in-group speakers. In this article I provide clear reasons for rejecting PE, arguing particularly against Hedger as one of PE’s most explicit and recent proponents. In showing that PE is inadequate in at least 11 ways, I argue in favor of a mixed or hybrid approach. (shrink)

Coreferentialism refers to the common assumption in the literature that slurs and descriptors are coreferential expressions with precisely the same extension. For instance, Vallee recently writes that “If S is an ethnic slur in language L, then there is a non-derogatory expression G in L such that G and S have the same extension”. The non-derogatory expression G is commonly considered the nonpejorative correlate of the slur expression S and it is widely thought that every S has a coreferring G (...) that possesses precisely the same extension. Yet here I argue against this widespread assumption by first briefly introducing what slurs are and then considering four sources of supporting evidence showing that slurs and descriptors are in fact not coreferential expressions with precisely the same extension. I argue that since slurs and descriptors differ in their extension they thereby differ in their meaning or content also. This article additionally introduces the notion of a conceptual anchor in order to adequately account for the relationship between slurs and descriptors actually evidenced in the empirical data, and further considers the inadequacy of common dictionary definitions of slurs. This article therefore contributes to the literature on slurs by demonstrating that previous accounts operating on the assumption that slurs and descriptors are coreferential expressions with the same extension, and that they thereby have the same meaning or content, are inconsistent with empirical data and that an alternative account in accord with Croom better fits the facts concerning their actual meaning and use. (shrink)

Moeser suggested participants default to linear ordering elements but they can be primed to impose either linear or partial ordering. This study seems problematic insofar as ‘greater than’ might be understood to incline participants to favor linear orderings. Recent follow-up studies strongly suggest participants do not default to linear ordering. It seems plausible, moreover, that the observed priming effect is far more pervasive than Moeser countenanced. The present work explores the extent to which priming for linear or partial orders conflicts (...) with the construction of linear or partial ordering lists. Our two experiments suggest friction between priming and task, and also show once the priming tasks are cleared of potentially confounding semantic content, participants perform equally with respect to constructing linear or partial orders under similar priming conditions. (shrink)

Eliminativism is a position most readily associated with the eliminative materialism of the Churchlands, denying that there are such things as propositional states. This position has created much controversy, despite the fact that intentionality has long been seen as perhaps the core problem for naturalistic philosophy. There is a more radical interpretation of eliminativism, however, denying not only mental states, such as beliefs and desires, but also intentionality (i.e., aboutness) on a global level. This position traces its contemporary origin back (...) to Quine, but has generally been assumed to undermine naturalism or, worse, to be incoherent by the majority of philosophers who maintain that there clearly are things or mental states that are about others. In a recent paper, Hutto and Satne (2015a) offer an update that tries to revive John Haugeland’s baseball analogy from his influential 1990 review paper The Intentionality All-Stars on the state of the game to argue that the failure of Neo-Cartesians, Neo- Behaviorists, and Neo-Pragmatists should urge us to make them work together to naturalize content and “win the game.” But Hutto and Satne misunderstand what the game is ultimately about. The goal of the Intentionality All-Stars is not to naturalize content against eliminativism but to defend a naturalist “thirdperson” view of the problem against first-person phenomenalists. For this goal, a naturalist defense of global content eliminativism would equally enable them to emerge victorious. Revisiting Haugeland, I will offer my own analysis of the current state of play to argue that global content eliminativism has not received sufficient attention and deserves a more prominent place in the debate than it currently occupies. (shrink)

The epistemic modal auxiliaries must and might are vehicles for expressing the force with which a proposition follows from some body of evidence or information. Standard approaches model these operators using quantificational modal logic, but probabilistic approaches are becoming increasingly influential. According to a traditional view, must is a maximally strong epistemic operator and might is a bare possibility one. A competing account—popular amongst proponents of a probabilisitic turn—says that, given a body of evidence, must \ entails that \\) is (...) high but non-maximal and might \ that \\) is significantly greater than 0. Drawing on several observations concerning the behavior of must, might and similar epistemic operators in evidential contexts, deductive inferences, downplaying and retractions scenarios, and expressions of epistemic tension, I argue that those two influential accounts have systematic descriptive shortcomings. To better make sense of their complex behavior, I propose instead a broadly Kratzerian account according to which must \ entails that \ = 1\) and might \ that \ > 0\), given a body of evidence and a set of normality assumptions about the world. From this perspective, must and might are vehicles for expressing a common mode of reasoning whereby we draw inferences from specific bits of evidence against a rich set of background assumptions—some of which we represent as defeasible—which capture our general expectations about the world. I will show that the predictions of this Kratzerian account can be substantially refined once it is combined with a specific yet independently motivated ‘grammatical’ approach to the computation of scalar implicatures. Finally, I discuss some implications of these results for more general discussions concerning the empirical and theoretical motivation to adopt a probabilisitic semantic framework. (shrink)

Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it is taken for granted that externalist accounts of meaning and mental content are, in principle, orthogonal to the matter of whether cognition itself is bound within the biological brain or whether it can constitutively include parts of the world. Accordingly, Clark and Chalmers (1998) distinguish these varieties of externalism as ‘passive’ and ‘active’ respectively. The aim here is to suggest that we should resist the received way of thinking about these dividing lines. With reference (...) to Brandom’s (1994; 2000; 2008) broad semantic inferentialism, we show that a theory of meaning can be at the same time a variety of active externalism. While we grant that supporters of other varieties of content externalism (e.g., Putnam 1975 and Burge 1986) can deny active externalism, this is not an option for semantic inferentialists: On this latter view, the role of the environment (both in its social and natural form) is not ‘passive’ in the sense assumed by the alternative approaches to content externalism. (shrink)

nated discussion of the semantics of such verbs. I will call this view.

There is something peculiar about aesthetic testimony. It seems more difficult to gain knowledge of aesthetic properties based solely upon testimony than it is in the case of other types of property. In this paper, I argue that we can provide an adequate explanation at the level of the semantics of aesthetic language, without defending any substantive thesis in epistemology or about aesthetic value/judgement. If aesthetic predicates are given a non-invariantist semantics, we can explain the supposed peculiar difficulty (...) with aesthetic testimony. (shrink)

In this paper, we do two things. First, we provide some support for adopting a version of the meaningless strategy with respect to the liar paradox, and, second, we extend that strategy, by providing, albeit tentatively, a solution to that paradox—one that is semantic, rather than logical.

I use the principle of truth-maker maximalism to provide a new solution to the semantic paradoxes. According to the solution, AUS, its undecidable whether paradoxical sentences are grounded or ungrounded. From this it follows that their alethic status is undecidable. We cannot assert, in principle, whether paradoxical sentences are true, false, either true or false, neither true nor false, both true and false, and so on. AUS involves no ad hoc modification of logic, denial of the T-schema's validity, or obvious (...) revenge. (shrink)

Semantic information is usually supposed to satisfy the veridicality thesis: p qualifies as semantic information only if p is true. However, what it means for semantic information to be true is often left implicit, with correspondentist interpretations representing the most popular, default option. The article develops an alternative approach, namely a correctness theory of truth (CTT) for semantic information. This is meant as a contribution not only to the philosophy of information but also to the philosophical debate on the nature (...) of truth. After the introduction, in Sect. 2, semantic information is shown to be translatable into propositional semantic information (i). In Sect. 3, i is polarised into a query (Q) and a result (R), qualified by a specific context, a level of abstraction and a purpose. This polarization is normalised in Sect. 4, where [Q + R] is transformed into a Boolean question and its relative yes/no answer [Q + A]. This completes the reduction of the truth of i to the correctness of A. In Sects. 5 and 6, it is argued that (1) A is the correct answer to Q if and only if (2) A correctly saturates Q by verifying and validating it (in the computer science’s sense of “verification” and “validation”); that (2) is the case if and only if (3) [Q + A] generates an adequate model (m) of the relevant system (s) identified by Q; that (3) is the case if and only if (4) m is a proxy of s (in the computer science’s sense of “proxy”) and (5) proximal access to m commutes with the distal access to s (in the category theory’s sense of “commutation”); and that (5) is the case if and only if (6) reading/writing (accessing, in the computer science’s technical sense of the term) m enables one to read/write (access) s. Sect. 7 provides some further clarifications about CTT, in the light of semantic paradoxes. Section 8 draws a general conclusion about the nature of CTT as a theory for systems designers not just systems users. In the course of the article all technical expressions from computer science are explained. (shrink)

This paper establishes a sound and complete semantics for the impure logic of ground. Fine (Review of Symbolic Logic, 5(1), 1–25, 2012a) sets out a system for the pure logic of ground, one in which the formulas between which ground-theoretic claims hold have no internal logical complexity; and it provides a sound and complete semantics for the system. Fine (2012b) [§§6-8] sets out a system for an impure logic of ground, one that extends the rules of the original (...) pure system with rules for the truth-functional connectives, the first-order quantifiers, and λ-abstraction. However, no semantics has yet been provided for this system. The present paper partly fills this lacuna by providing a sound and complete semantics for a system GG containing the truth-functional operators that is closely related to the truth-functional part of the system of Fine (2012b). (shrink)

Virtual environments engage millions of people and billions of dollars each year. What is the ontological status of the virtual objects that populate those environments? An adequate answer to that question requires a developed semantics for virtual environments. The truth-conditions must be identified for “tree”-sentences when uttered by speakers immersed in a virtual environment (VE). It will be argued that statements about virtual objects have truth-conditions roughly comparable to the verificationist conditions popular amongst some contemporary antirealists. This does not (...) mean that the virtual objects lack ontological standing. There is an important sense in which virtual objects are no less real for being mind-dependent. (shrink)

In The Philosophy of Information, Luciano Floridi presents a theory of “strongly semantic information”, based on the idea that “information encapsulates truth” (the so-called “veridicality thesis”). Starting with Popper, philosophers of science have developed different explications of the notion of verisimilitude or truthlikeness, construed as a combination of truth and information. Thus, the theory of strongly semantic information and the theory of verisimilitude are intimately tied. Yet, with few exceptions, this link has virtually pass unnoticed. In this paper, we briefly (...) survey both theories and offer a critical comparison of strongly semantic information and related notions, like truth, verisimilitude, and partial truth. (shrink)

Expressivists about epistemic modals deny that ‘Jane might be late’ canonically serves to express the speaker’s acceptance of a certain propositional content. Instead, they hold that it expresses a lack of acceptance. Prominent expressivists embrace pragmatic expressivism: the doxastic property expressed by a declarative is not helpfully identified with that sentence’s compositional semantic value. Against this, we defend semantic expressivism about epistemic modals: the semantic value of a declarative from this domain is the property of doxastic attitudes it canonically serves (...) to express. In support, we synthesize data from the critical literature on expressivism—largely reflecting interactions between modals and disjunctions—and present a semantic expressivism that readily predicts the data. This contrasts with salient competitors, including: pragmatic expressivism based on domain semantics or dynamic semantics; semantic expressivism à la Moss [2015]; and the bounded relational semantics of Mandelkern [2019]. (shrink)

My paper examines the popular idea, defended by Kripke, that meaning is an essentially normative notion. I consider four common versions of this idea and suggest that none of them can be supported, either because the alleged normativity has nothing to do with normativity or because it cannot plausibly be said that meaning is normative in the sense suggested. I argue that contrary to received opinion, we don’t need normativity to secure the possibility of meaning. I conclude by considering the (...) repercussions of rejecting semantic normativity on three central issues: justification, communication, and naturalism. (shrink)