This chapter introduces readers to the empirical questions at issue in debates over gendered pronouns and assesses the plausibility of various possible answers to these questions. It has two parts. The first is a general introduction to the linguistics and psychology of grammatical gender. The second focuses on the meanings of gendered pronouns in English. It begins with a discussion of some methodological limitations of empirical approaches to the topic and the normative implications of those limitations. It then argues against (...) three simple theories of the semantics of gendered pronouns in English and proposes an alternative that fares better: the Gender-First View. Finally, it discusses the singular use of 'they' and its connection to nonbinary gender identities. (shrink)

We present an account of semantics that is not construed as a mapping of language to the world but rather as a mapping between individual meaning spaces. The meanings of linguistic entities are established via a “meeting of minds.” The concepts in the minds of communicating individuals are modeled as convex regions in conceptual spaces. We outline a mathematical framework, based on fixpoints in continuous mappings between conceptual spaces, that can be used to model such a semantics. If concepts are (...) convex, it will in general be possible for interactors to agree on joint meaning even if they start out from different representational spaces. Language is discrete, while mental representations tend to be continuous—posing a seeming paradox. We show that the convexity assumption allows us to address this problem. Using examples, we further show that our approach helps explain the semantic processes involved in the composition of expressions. (shrink)

The term 'covert mixed quotation' describes cases in which linguistic material is interpreted in the manner of mixed quotation — that is, used in addition to being mentioned — despite the superficial absence of any commonly recognized conventional devices indicating quotation. After developing a novel theory of mixed quotation, I show that positing covert mixed quotation allows us to give simple and unified treatments of a number of puzzling semantic phenomena, including the projective behavior of conventional implicature items embedded in (...) indirect speech reports and propositional attitude ascriptions, so-called 'c-monsters,' metalinguistic negation, metalinguistic negotiation, and 'in a sense' constructions. (shrink)

Existing work on gaslighting ties it constitutively to facts about the intentions or prejudices of the gaslighter and/or his victim’s prior experience of epistemic injustice. I argue that the concept of gaslighting is more broadly applicable than has been appreciated: what is distinctive about gaslighting, on my account, is simply that a gaslighter confronts his victim with a certain kind of choice between rejecting his testimony and doubting her own basic epistemic competence in some domain. I thus hold that gaslighting (...) is a purely epistemic phenomenon—not requiring any particular set of intentions or prejudices on the part of the gaslighter—and also that it can occur even in the absence of any prior experience of epistemic injustice. Appreciating the dilemmatic character of gaslighting allows us to understand its connection with a characteristic sort of epistemic harm, makes it easier to apply the concept of gaslighting in practice, and raises the possibility that we might discover its structure and the associated harm in surprising places. (shrink)

The inclusion problem for theories of gender arises when those theories inappropriately fail to include certain individuals in the gender categories to which they ought to belong. The inclusion problem affects both of the most influential traditions in feminist theorizing about gender: social-position accounts and identity accounts. I argue that the inclusion problem can be solved by adopting a structured theory of gender which incorporates aspects of both social-position accounts and identity accounts. According to the theory I favor, an individual’s (...) gender is determined by their gender identity if they have one; otherwise, it is determined by their social position. My structured approach to gender offers a more direct solution to the gender inclusion problem than alternatives recently advocated by Barnes (2020), Jenkins (2023), and others. It also points the way to a simple solution to inclusion problems that arise at the level of gendered language. (shrink)

Recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of slurs has explored a variety of ways of explaining their potential to derogate, with the most popular family of approaches appealing to either: (i), the doxastic or evaluative attitudes or commitments expressed by — or (ii), the propositions concerning such attitudes or commitments semantically or pragmatically communicated by — the speakers who use them. I begin by arguing that no such speaker-oriented approach can be correct. I then propose an alternative treatment of (...) slurs, according to which they are semantically associated with both descriptive and directive content. On the view I defend, when speakers use slurs, they simultaneously propose to add an at-issue proposition to the conversational common ground and issue a not-at-issue directive to their interlocutors to adopt a derogatory perspective toward members of the targeted group. This proposal both avoids the problems faced by other accounts and opens up a novel way of thinking about the phenomenon of appropriation. (shrink)

Quotation marks in natural language that do not function straightforwardly as devices for securing reference to linguistic objects have generally been categorized as instances of either mixed quotation or scare quotation. I argue that certain uses of quotation marks in natural language resist assimilation to either of these two theoretical categories, as well as to the more familiar categories of pure and direct quotation. It follows that we must recognize a novel type of quotation in natural language, which I call (...) dummy quotation because it involves the contribution of semantically minimal `dummy meanings' to composition. I develop a semantic theory of dummy quotation and show that it is better able than rival proposals to account for the troublesome examples in question. (shrink)

Can rational communication proceed when interlocutors are uncertain which contents utterances contribute to discourse? An influential negative answer to this question is embodied in the Stalnakerian principle of uniformity, which requires speakers to produce only utterances that express the same content in every possibility treated as live for the purposes of the conversation. The principle of uniformity enjoys considerable intuitive plausibility and, moreover, seems to follow from platitudes about assertion; nevertheless, it has recently proven controversial. In what follows, I defend (...) the principle by developing two arguments for it based on premises reflecting the central aims and assumptions of possibility-carving frameworks for modeling inquiry—that is, frameworks which describe the evolution of individuals’ attitudinal states in terms of set-theoretic operations defined over a domain of objects representing possibilities. (shrink)

Speakers assert in order to communicate information. It is natural, therefore, to hold that the content of an assertion is whatever information it communicates to its audience. In cases involving uncertainty about the semantic values of context-sensitive lexical items, moreover, it is natural to hold that the information an assertion communicates to its audience is whatever information audience members are in a position to recover from it by assuming that the proposition it semantically determines is true. This sort of picture (...) corresponds to an influential and widely endorsed theory of assertoric content: diagonalism. I begin by arguing that, despite its intuitive appeal, diagonalism should be rejected because it conflicts with our intuitive judgments about the circumstances in which the contents of speakers’ assertions would be true or false. I then show that the failure of diagonalism requires us to either abandon a familiar way of thinking about information and rational assertion or hold that the content of an assertion is not always the information it communicates. I suggest that we choose the latter horn of this dilemma — assertoric content is better characterized in terms of the commitments speakers undertake than in terms of the information they communicate. (shrink)

Horizontalism is the thesis that what a speaker asserts in literally and sincerely uttering an indicative sentence is some horizontal proposition of her utterance; diagonalism is the thesis that what a speaker asserts in literally and sincerely uttering an indicative sentence is some diagonal proposition of her utterance. Recent work on assertion has reached no clear consensus favoring either horizontalism or diagonalism. I explore a novel strategy for adjudicating between the two views by considering the advantages and disadvantages which would (...) accrue to a linguistic community as a result of adopting different committal practices—that is, practices of associating utterances with the propositions to which speakers undertake assertoric commitments in uttering them—ultimately concluding that a horizontalist practice has important advantages over its competitors. (shrink)

Replying to Queen Elizabeth II who in November 2008 asked why so few economists had warned about the emerging financial crisis, a group of eminent economists of the British Academy, claimed that while this failure had many causes, the most important was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, to understand the risks to the system as a whole. The paper suggests that this failure is due also to the still heavy influence of the paradigm of (...) rational expectations, that did not provide the intellectual tools to grasp the signs of the impending financial crisis. The paper explores the development of Muth’s rational expectations hypothesis and the parallel development of Simon’s idea of bounded rationality—two opposite views about economic behavior that originated in the same context, during the early 1960s at Carnegie Mellon. It is shown that the latter, while marginalized for decades from the core economic ideas, generated a wide development in cognitive psychology, problem solving and experimental economics that grew up in the last decades and now permit a more profound analysis of human behavior in economic and organizational contexts, that can be the seed of a new thinking in economics. The challenge for economists is to use this new toolbox to incorporate in their models real human behaviors, getting out from the economy of wishful thinking. (shrink)

Let the label binary category terms refer to natural language expressions like ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘female’, and ‘male’. Focusing on ‘woman’ and ‘female’, I develop a novel, empirically supported theory of the meanings of English binary category terms. Given plausible assumptions about the metaphysics of sex and gender, this gender-first theory predicts that the sentence ‘Trans women are women’ expresses a truth in all contexts and the sentence ‘Women are adult human females’ expresses a truth in most ordinary contexts — thus (...) that these two sentences can and usually do express logically consistent contents. The key feature of the proposed theory is that it treats both ‘woman’ and ‘female’ as sensitive to an individual’s gender when that individual belongs to a gendered category and to an individual’s sex otherwise. The existence and plausibility of a gender-first theory of this kind opens up conceptual room for trans-inclusive positions in the philosophy of sex and gender which endorse the claim that women are adult human females, thereby both accounting for trans women’s experiences of their bodies as female and helping to disarm the sentence ‘Women are adult human females’ as a trans-exclusionary slogan. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 143-162, January 2022.

Greg Ray (2014) believes he has discovered a crucial oversight in Donald Davidson’s semantic programme, recognition of which paves the way for a novel approach to Davidsonian semantics. We disagree: Ray’s novel approach involves a tacit appeal to pre-existing semantic knowledge which vitiates its interest as a development of the Davidsonian programme.

Quine’s thesis of underdetermination is significantly weaker than it has been taken to be in the recent literature, for the following reasons: (i) it does not hold for all theories, but only for some global theories, (ii) it does not require the existence of empirically equivalent yet logically incompatible theories, (iii) it does not rule out the possibility that all perceived rivalry between empirically equivalent theories might be merely apparent and eliminable through translation, (iv) it is not a fundamental thesis (...) within Quine’s philosophy, and (v) it does not carry with it the anti-realistic consequences often associated with the thesis in recent debates. The paper analyzes Quine’s views on the matter and the changes they underwent over the years. A conjecture is put forth about why Quine’s thesis has been so widely misrepresented: Quine’s writings up to 1975 tackled primarily the formulation and justification of the thesis, but afterwards were concerned mostly with the question whether empirically equivalent rivals to the theory we hold are to be considered true also. When this latter discussion is read without bearing in mind Quine’s earlier formulation and justification of the thesis, his thesis seems to have stronger epistemic consequences than it actually does. A careful reading of his later writings shows, however, that the formulation of the thesis remained unchanged after 1975, and that his mature and considered views supported only a very mitigated version of the thesis. (shrink)

The paper investigates the role played by pre-scientific experience in the philosophy of Josiah Royce and Edmund Husserl. Such a notion, generally associated with Husserl’s conception of the life-world (Lebenswelt) in the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936), finds an equivalent and historical antecedent in Royce’s distinction between a world of description and a world of appreciation. The final goal is to show how, despite their different philosophical frameworks, Royce and Husserl agree on the idea that, through the (...) rejection of the world given through mere perception (Lebenswelt/world of appreciation), European sciences have somehow failed their task of universality. As it will be shown, this idea is also due to methodological affinities among the two thinkers. The experience of interconnectedness among individual minds, while precluded in the mere scientific explanation of the world, it becomes possible through the enactment of the Lebenswelt or, as in Royce’s case, through a return to the experience of the world of appreciation. (shrink)

Decision-making assisted by algorithms developed by machine learning is increasingly determining our lives. Unfortunately, full opacity about the process is the norm. Would transparency contribute to restoring accountability for such systems as is often maintained? Several objections to full transparency are examined: the loss of privacy when datasets become public, the perverse effects of disclosure of the very algorithms themselves, the potential loss of companies’ competitive edge, and the limited gains in answerability to be expected since sophisticated algorithms usually are (...) inherently opaque. It is concluded that, at least presently, full transparency for oversight bodies alone is the only feasible option; extending it to the public at large is normally not advisable. Moreover, it is argued that algorithmic decisions preferably should become more understandable; to that effect, the models of machine learning to be employed should either be interpreted ex post or be interpretable by design ex ante. (shrink)

Kant’s treatments of incongruent counterparts have been criticized in the recent literature. His 1768 essay has been charged with an ambiguous use of the notion of ‘inner ground’, and his 1770 claim that those differences cannot be apprehended conceptually is thought to be false. The author argues that those two charges rest on an uncharitable reading. ‘Inner ground’ is equivocal only if misread as mapping onto Leibniz notion of quality. Concepts suffice to distinguish counterparts, but are insufficient to specify their (...) spatial forms. Kant’s claims are reasonable and plausible, and have been reaffirmed repeatedly in contemporary discussions of demonstrative identification. (shrink)

A collection of five essays published previously. Partial contents.

This book marks the first publication of celebrated philosopher Donald Davidson's 1970 Locke Lectures. In detailing his work on the theory of meaning, the role of a truth theory, the ontological commitments of a truth theory, and the notion of logical form, these lectures offer a rare insight into Davidson's thought at a key moment in his career.

One of the objections against the thesis of underdetermination of theories by observations is that it is unintelligible. Any two empirically equivalent theories — so the argument goes—are in principle intertranslatable, hence cannot count as rivals in any non-trivial sense. Against that objection, this paper shows that empirically equivalent theories may contain theoretical sentences that are not intertranslatable. Examples are drawn from a related discussion about incommensurability that shows that theoretical non-intertranslatability is possible.

Sceptical theists attempt to meet the challenge to theism posed by evidential arguments from evil by appealing to the limitations of human cognition. Drawing on an exchange between William Rowe and Michael Bergmann, I argue that consistent sceptical theists must be radically insensitive to certain kinds of evidence about prima facie evils – that is, that they must endorse the claim that not even evidence of extreme and pervasive suffering could justify disbelief in theism. I show that Bergmann's attempt to (...) respond to this problem does not succeed and argue that no alternative response is forthcoming, concluding that the threat of radical insensitivity constitutes a serious and underappreciated difficulty for sceptical theism. (shrink)

The paper uses the Neo-Kantian distinction between Natural and Human sciences and its methodological implications to navigate W. E. B. Du Bois’s and Alain L. Locke’s theories of race. In tracing a continuity between these two figures, the paper also shows how their respective reliance on Neo-Kantian categories leads them to different results. The goal is to show how, while Du Bois’s Neo-Kantianism is best understood as a Diltheyan Neo-Kantianism of the psycho-physical unity of human nature influenced by an anti-metaphysical (...) orientation, Locke’s Neo-Kantianism can be seen as a Neo-Kantianism whose focus is the rejection of causality and of the causal nexus between biological and non-biological traits. (shrink)

Integrated assessment models play a major role in the science and policy of climate change. Similarly to other widely used computational tools for addressing socially relevant problems, IAMs need to account for the key uncertainties characterizing processes and socio-economic responses. In the case of climate change, these are particularly complex given the very long-term nature of climate and the deep uncertainty characterizing technological and human systems. Here we draw from philosophical discussion of mathematical modeling of social problems and review the (...) role of uncertainty in climate-economic modeling. In agreement with the literature, we highlight the crucial role of epistemic uncertainty in IAMs. We posit that the normative components of models, more than the physical and socio-techno-economic ones, are the most fraught by uncertainty and yet the least understood. We suggest a research agenda to explore uncertainties of evaluation frameworks, transcending the current implicit normativity of IAMs. (shrink)