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  1. Lexical Negotiations.Ryan Miller - manuscript
    The use of lexical signs like ‘knowledge’ has consequences. Not only do they have direct psychological resonances, but people ascribe beliefs and act based on their semantics. This paper proposes that such consequences are up for negotiation, and introduces a formal framework from financial theory to suggest constraints on those negotiations and implications of those constraints. The upshot is that changing language will be easier sometimes than others, and philosophers’ projects of linguistic change should be aware of those conditions.
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  2. Reasons for Belief in Context.Darren Bradley - forthcoming - Episteme:1-16.
    There is currently a lively debate about whether there are practical reasons for belief, epistemic reasons for belief, or both. I will argue that the intuitions on all sides can be fully accounted for by applying an independently motivated contextualist semantics for normative terms. Specifically, normative terms must be relativized to a goal. One possible goal is epistemic, such as believing truly and not believing falsely, while another possible goal is practical, such as satisfying desires, or maximizing value. I will (...)
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  3. Idealisation in Natural Language Semantics: Truth-Conditions for Radical Contextualists.Gabe Dupre - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    In this paper, I shall provide a novel response to the argument from context-sensitivity against truth-conditional semantics. It is often argued that the contextual influences on truth-conditions outstrip the resources of standard truth-conditional accounts, and so truth-conditional semantics rests on a mistake. The argument assumes that truth-conditional semantics is legitimate if and only if natural language sentences have truth-conditions. I shall argue that this assumption is mistaken. Truth-conditional analyses should be viewed as idealised approximations of the complexities of natural language (...)
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  4. Against Unifying Homology Concepts: Redirecting the Debate.Devin Y. Gouvêa & Ingo Brigandt - 2023 - Journal of Morphology 284 (7):e21599.
    The term ‘homology’ is persistently polysemous, defying the expectation that extensive scientific research should yield semantic stability. A common response has been to seek a unification of various prominent definitions. This paper proposes an alternative strategy, based on the insight that scientific concepts function as tools for research: When analyzing various conceptualizations of homology, we should preserve those distinguishing features that support particular research goals. We illustrate the fruitfulness of our strategy by application to two cases. First, we revisit E. (...)
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  5. Quantification in the Interpretational Theory of Validity.Marco Grossi - 2023 - Synthese 202 (3):1-21.
    According to the interpretational theory of logical validity (IR), logical validity is preservation of truth in all interpretations compatible with the intended meaning of logical expressions. IR suffers from a seemingly defeating objection, the so-called cardinality problem: any instance of the statement ‘There are n things’ is true under all interpretations, since it can be written down using only logical expressions that are not to be reinterpreted; yet ‘There are n things’ is not logically true. I argue that the cardinality (...)
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  6. “Philosophers care about the truth”: Descriptive/normative generics.Olivier Lemeire - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (3):772-786.
    Some generic generalizations have both a descriptive and a normative reading. The generic sentence “Philosophers care about the truth”, for instance, can be read as describing what philosophers in fact care about, but can also be read as prescribing philosophers to care about the truth. On Leslie’s account, this generic sentence has two readings due to the polysemy of the kind term “philosopher”. In this paper, I first argue against this polysemy account of descriptive/normative generics. In response, a contextualist semantic (...)
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  7. Familiy Resemblance and Context.Paul Hasselkuß - 2022 - In Herbert Hrachovec & Jakub Mácha (eds.), Platonism. Contributions of the 43rd International Wittgenstein Symposium. ALWS. pp. 64-66.
    When Wittgenstein introduces the notion of family resemblance in the PI, he claims that family expressions like ‘games’ are applied to things in a very particular way. Speakers do not point to some characteristics found in all games, but, instead, call a thing ‘game’ because it shares some characteristics with some other things already called ‘game’. Contextualists like Charles Travis argue that this supports a contextual theory of meaning. According to Travis, when speakers point to different characteristics for calling some (...)
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  8. A Grammar in Two Dimensions: The Temporal Mechanics of Arrival and the Semantics/Pragmatics Divide.A. G. Holdier - 2022 - Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy 5.
    Within the philosophy of language, contextualists typically hold (and semantic minimalists deny) that pragmatic elements of an utterance can affect its semantic content. This paper concretizes this debate by analogizing both positions to different kinds of time-travel stories: contextualism is akin to Ludovician narratives that deny the possibility of temporal editing (or “the changing of past events”) while semantic minimalism is aligned with stories that allow the past to be literally altered. By focusing particularly on Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival, (...)
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  9. (1 other version)Contextualism vs. Relativism: More empirical data.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer - 2022 - In Jeremy Wyatt, Julia Zakkou & Dan Zeman (eds.), Perspectives on Taste: Aesthetics, Language, Metaphysics, and Experimental Philosophy. Routledge.
    Contextualism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims (involving e.g. predicates of personal taste or epistemic modals) depends on the context of utterance. Relativism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims depends on the context of assessment. Both views make concrete, empirically testable predictions about how such claims are used by ordinary English language speakers. This chapter surveys some of the recent empirical literature on the topic and presents four new experiments (total N=724). Consistent with contextualism (...)
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  10. The Logicality of Language: Contextualism versus Semantic Minimalism.Guillermo Del Pinal - 2022 - Mind 131 (522):381-427.
    The logicality of language is the hypothesis that the language system has access to a ‘natural’ logic that can identify and filter out as unacceptable expressions that have trivial meanings—that is, that are true/false in all possible worlds or situations in which they are defined. This hypothesis helps explain otherwise puzzling patterns concerning the distribution of various functional terms and phrases. Despite its promise, logicality vastly over-generates unacceptability assignments. Most solutions to this problem rest on specific stipulations about the properties (...)
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  11. Context-indexed Counterfactuals.Mariusz Popieluch - 2022 - Studia Semiotyczne 35 (2):89-123.
    It is commonly believed that the role of context cannot be ignored in the analysis of conditionals, and counterfactuals in particular. On truth conditional accounts involving possible worlds semantics, conditionals have been analysed as expressions of relative necessity: “If A, then B” is true at some world w if B is true at all the A-worlds deemed relevant to the evaluation of the conditional at w. A drawback of this approach is that for the evaluation of conditionals with the same (...)
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  12. A defense of reconstructivism.Oliver Toth - 2022 - Hungarian Review of Philosophy 65 (1):51-68.
    The immediate occasion for this special issue was Christia Mercer’s influential paper “The Contextualist Revolution in Early Modern Philosophy”. In her paper, Mercer clearly demarcates two methodologies of the history of early modern philosophy. She argues that there has been a silent contextualist revolution in the past decades, and the reconstructivist methodology has been abandoned. One can easily get the impression that ‘reconstructivist’ has become a pejorative label that everyone outright rejects. Mercer’s examples of reconstructivist historians of philosophy are deceased (...)
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  13. A Defense of Meaning Eliminativism: A Connectionist Approach.Tolgahan Toy - 2022 - Dissertation, Middle East Technical University
    The standard approach to model how human beings understand natural languages is the symbolic, compositional approach according to which the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its constituents. In other words, meaning plays a fundamental role in the model. In this work, because of the polysemous, flexible, dynamic, and contextual structure of natural languages, this approach is rejected. Instead, a connectionist model which eliminates the concept of meaning is proposed.
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  14. Wittgenstein's Later Nonsense.Daniel Whiting - 2022 - In Christoph C. Pfisterer, Nicole Rathgeb & Eva Schmidt (eds.), Wittgenstein and Beyond: Essays in Honour of Hans-Johann Glock. New York: Routledge.
    According to an influential reading of his later philosophy, Wittgenstein thinks that nonsense can result from combining expressions in ways prohibited by the rules to which their use is subject. According to another influential reading, the later Wittgenstein thinks that nonsense only ever results from privation—that is, from a failure to assign a meaning to one or more of the relevant expressions. This chapter challenges Glock’s defence of the view that the later Wittgenstein allows for combinatorial nonsense. In doing so, (...)
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  15. Exploring Linguistic Liability.Emma Borg & Patrick Joseph Connolly - 2021 - In Ernest Lepore & David Sosa (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language Volume 2. Oxford Studies in Philosophy O.
    There is a well-established social practice whereby we hold one another responsible for the things that we say. Speakers are held liable for the truth of the contents they express and they can be sanctioned and/or held to be unreliable or devious if it turns out what they say is false. In this paper chapter we argue that a better understanding of this fundamental socio-linguistic practice – of ascribing what we will term (following Borg (2019)) ‘linguistic liability’ – helps to (...)
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  16. Predicates of personal taste: empirical data.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6455-6471.
    According to contextualism, the extension of claims of personal taste is dependent on the context of utterance. According to truth relativism, their extension depends on the context of assessment. On this view, when the taste preferences of a speaker change, so does the truth value of a previously uttered taste claim, and the speaker might be required to retract it. Both views make strong empirical assumptions, which are here put to the test in three experiments with over 740 participants. It (...)
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  17. The Liar Without Relativism.Poppy Mankowitz - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (1):267-288.
    Some in the recent literature have claimed that a connection exists between the Liar paradox and _semantic relativism_: the view that the truth values of certain occurrences of sentences depend on the contexts at which they are assessed. Sagi (Erkenntnis 82(4):913–928, 2017) argues that contextualist accounts of the Liar paradox are committed to relativism, and Rudnicki and Łukowski (Synthese 1–20, 2019) propose a new account that they classify as relativist. I argue that a full understanding of how relativism is conceived (...)
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  18. Semantics with Assignment Variables.Alex Silk - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    This book combines insights from philosophy and linguistics to develop a novel framework for theorizing about linguistic meaning and the role of context in interpretation. A key innovation is to introduce explicit representations of context — assignment variables — in the syntax and semantics of natural language. The proposed theory systematizes a spectrum of “shifting” phenomena in which the context relevant for interpreting certain expressions depends on features of the linguistic environment. Central applications include local and nonlocal contextual dependencies with (...)
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  19. Tasty roads to Flavour.Axel Barceló Aspeitia - 2020 - Manuscrito 43 (4):1-12.
    The goal of this brief note is to offer a generalisation of Gómez-Torrente argumentative strategy against perspectivism, which he has developed as a defence of color realism in (2016) and (2019) and then apply it to evaluative language. In particular, I want to defend the thesis that at least some aesthetic predicates can have non-evaluative reference. As an example, I will work with the predicate “tasty” (and its antonym “disgusting”) to argue that it some times refers to a non-subjective non-evaluative (...)
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  20. Compositionality in Truth Conditional Pragmatics.Adrian Briciu - 2020 - In Tadeusz Ciecierski & Pawel Grabarczyk (eds.), The Architecture of Context and Context-Sensitivity. Springer. pp. 205-226.
    In the past decade various linguists and philosophers (e.g. Pagin, Pelletier, Recanati, Westerståhl, Lasersohn) have proposed a weakening of the standard interpretation of compositionality for propositional content. Their move is motivated by the desire to accommodate radical forms of context sensitivity within a systematic account of natural languages. In this paper I argue against weakening compositionality in the way proposed by them. I argue that weak compositionality fails to provide some of the expected benefits of compositionality. First, weak compositionality fails (...)
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  21. Evaluating the multiple proposition strategy.Benjamin Lennertz - 2020 - Ratio 33 (3):163-172.
    Contextualism about many expressions faces a common objection: in some discourses it appears that there is no single interpretation which can explain how a speaker is justified in making her assertion and how a hearer with different information or standards is justified in negatively evaluating what the speaker said. According to the Multiple Proposition Strategy , contextualists may attempt to explain these competing features pragmatically in terms of different propositions in play. In this paper I argue against the Multiple Proposition (...)
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  22. Indicative Conditionals in Objective Contexts.Vít Punčochář & Christopher Gauker - 2020 - Theoria 86 (5):651-687.
    A conversation can be conceived as aiming to circumscribe a set of possibilities that are relevant to the goals of the conversation. This set of possibilities may be conceived as determined by the goals and objective circumstances of the interlocutors and not by their propositional attitudes. An indicative conditional can be conceived as circumscribing a set of possibilities that have a certain property: If the set of relevant possibilities is subsequently restricted to one in which the antecedent holds, then it (...)
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  23. Ways of Using Words: On Semantic Intentions.Emanuel Viebahn - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (1):93-117.
    Intentionalism is the view that demonstratives, gradable adjectives, quantifiers, modals and other context‐sensitive expressions are intention‐sensitive: their semantic value on a given use is fixed by speaker intentions. The first aim of this paper is to defend Intentionalism against three recent objections, according to which speakers at least sometimes do not have suitable intentions when using supposedly intention‐sensitive expressions. Its second aim is to thereby shed light on the so far little‐explored question of which kinds of intentions can be semantically (...)
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  24. Resisting Relativistic Contextualism: On Finlay's Confusion of Tongues.Alex Worsnip - 2020 - Analysis 80 (1):122-131.
    Stephen Finlay’s book Confusion of Tongues is extraordinarily sophisticated, ambitious and thought-provoking. I highly commend it to those who haven’t read it yet. I will begin this commentary with a summary of which big-picture issues Finlay and I agree on and which we disagree on.
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  25. Communication and indifference.Martín Abreu Zavaleta - 2019 - Mind and Language 36 (1):81-107.
    The propositional view of communication states that every literal assertoric utterance of an indicative sentence expresses a proposition, and the audience understands those utterances only if she entertains the proposition(s) the speaker expressed. According to an important objection due to Ray Buchanan, the propositional view is ill‐equipped to handle meaning underdeterminacy. Using resources from situation semantics and MacFarlane's nonindexical contextualism, this article develops a view of literal communication close to the propositional view which overcomes Buchanan's underdeterminacy considerations while accounting for (...)
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  26. Two Ways to Want?Ethan Jerzak - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy 116 (2):65-98.
    I present unexplored and unaccounted for uses of 'wants'. I call them advisory uses, on which information inaccessible to the desirer herself helps determine what she wants. I show that extant theories by Stalnaker, Heim, and Levinson fail to predict these uses. They also fail to predict true indicative conditionals with 'wants' in the consequent. These problems are related: intuitively valid reasoning with modus ponens on the basis of the conditionals in question results in unembedded advisory uses. I consider two (...)
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  27. Acquaintance and first-person attitude reports.Henry Ian Schiller - 2019 - Analysis 79 (2):251-259.
    It is often assumed that singular thought requires that an agent be epistemically acquainted with the object the thought is about. However, it can sometimes truthfully be said of someone that they have a belief about an object, despite not being interestingly epistemically acquainted with that object. In defense of an epistemic acquaintance constraint on singular thought, it is thus often claimed that belief ascriptions are context sensitive and do not always track the contents of an agent’s mental states. This (...)
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  28. ‘Ought’-contextualism beyond the parochial.Alex Worsnip - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (11):3099-3119.
    Despite increasing prominence, ‘ought’-contextualism is regarded with suspicion by most metaethicists. As I’ll argue, however, contextualism is a very weak claim, that every metaethicist can sign up to. The real controversy concerns how contextualism is developed. I then draw an oft-overlooked distinction between “parochial” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are those that the speaker, or others in her environment, subscribe to—and “aspirational” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are the objective standards for the relevant domain. However, I argue that neither view (...)
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  29. Faultless Disagreement.Julia Zakkou - 2019 - Frankfurt am Main, Deutschland: Klostermann.
    People disagree frequently, about both objective and subjective matters. But while at least one party must be wrong in a disagreement about objective matters, it seems that both parties can be right when it comes to subjective ones: it seems that there can be faultless disagreements. But how is this possible? How can people disagree with one another if they are both right? And why should they? In recent years, a number of philosophers and linguists have argued that we must (...)
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  30. Context and Communication by Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever. [REVIEW]Alex Davies - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68:197-199.
  31. This is not an instance of (E).Teresa Marques - 2018 - Synthese 195 (3):1035–1063.
    Semantic paradoxes like the liar are notorious challenges to truth theories. A paradox can be phrased with minimal resources and minimal assumptions. It is not surprising, then, that the liar is also a challenge to minimalism about truth. Horwich (1990) deals swiftly with the paradox, after discriminating between other strategies for avoiding it without compromising minimalism. He dismisses the denial of classical logic, the denial that the concept of truth can coherently be applied to propositions, and the denial that the (...)
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  32. Absolutely tasty: an examination of predicates of personal taste and faultless disagreement.Jeremy Wyatt - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (3):252-280.
    Debates about the semantics and pragmatics of predicates of personal taste have largely centered on contextualist and relativist proposals. In this paper, I argue in favor of an alternative, absolutist analysis of PPT. Theorists such as Max Kölbel and Peter Lasersohn have argued that we should dismiss absolutism due to its inability to accommodate the possibility of faultless disagreement involving PPT. My aim in the paper is to show how the absolutist can in fact accommodate this possibility by drawing on (...)
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  33. A Note on Belief Reports and Context Dependence.Tadeusz Ciecierski - 2017 - Acta Analytica 32 (4):447-464.
    The aim of this paper is to pose a problem for theories that claim that belief reports are context dependent. Firstly, I argue that the claim is committed to verbalism, a theory that derives the context sensitivity of belief reports from the context sensitivity of the psychological verbs used in such reports. Secondly, I argue that verbalism is not an attractive theoretical option because it is in conflict with the non-proto-rigidity of verbs like ‘believe’. Finally, I describe various consequences that (...)
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  34. Oraciones normativas y sensibilidad a la evaluación.Justina Diaz Legaspe - 2017 - Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofia 43 (1):29-47.
    Nuestro lenguaje no solo describe el mundo que nos rodea: muchas expresiones que usamos habitualmente (desde predicados de gusto a expresiones como “interesante” o “divertido”) tienen por función valorar los objetos que constituyen nuestro entorno. Las oraciones que las contienen son sensibles a la evaluación: su valor de verdad depende del estándar evaluativo saliente en contexto y su emisión puede dar lugar a desacuerdos duros. El presente trabajo examina la ex- tensión de esta categoría a oraciones con predicados y verbos (...)
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  35. Deflationary Pluralism about Motivating Reasons.Daniel Fogal - 2017 - In Veli Mitova (ed.), The Factive Turn in Epistemology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
    This paper takes a closer look at ordinary thought and talk about motivating reasons, in an effort to better understand how it works. This is an important first step in understanding whether—and if so, how—such thought and talk should inform or constrain our substantive theorizing. One of the upshots is that ordinary judgments about motivating reasons are at best a partial and defeasible guide to what really matters, and that so-called factualists, propositionalists, and statists are all partly right, as well (...)
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  36. Color Adjectives, Standards, and Thresholds: An Experimental Investigation.Nat Hansen & Emmanuel Chemla - 2017 - Linguistics and Philosophy 40 (3):1--40.
    Are color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.) relative adjectives or absolute adjectives? Existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives attempt to answer that question using informal ("armchair") judgments. The informal judgments of theorists conflict: it has been proposed that color adjectives are absolute with standards anchored at the minimum degree on the scale, that they are absolute but have near-midpoint standards, and that they are relative. In this paper we report two experiments, one based on entailment patterns and one based (...)
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  37. A plea for radical contextualism.Minyao Huang - 2017 - Synthese 194 (3):963-988.
    Extant contextualist theories have relied on the mechanism of pragmatically driven modulation to explain the way non-indexical expressions take on different interpretations in different contexts. In this paper I argue that a modulation-based contextualist semantics is untenable with respect to non-ambiguous expressions whose invariant meaning fails to determine a unique literal interpretation, such as ‘lawyer’ ‘musician’ ‘book’ and ‘game’. The invariant meaning of such an expression corresponds to a range of closely related and equally basic interpretations, none of which can (...)
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  38. On the Very Idea of a Minimal Proposition.Hsiu-Lin Ku - 2017 - NTU Philosophical Review 53:35-74.
    Can the idea of a minimal proposition be successfully held? I will first formulate what the minimal proposition is in the minimalist’s mind, taking Emma Borg as the representative. What a minimalist seeks for a minimal proposition is the abstract and skeletal core meaning of a sentence, and this faith is founded on the notion of minimal word meaning—an atomic, code-like, conceptual thing. I show that the problem of this notion of minimal proposition lies in the three features, intuitive read-off, (...)
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  39. Counterfactuals and Knowledge.Karen S. Lewis - 2017 - In Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism. New York: Routledge. pp. 411-424.
  40. The Logicality of Language: A new take on Triviality, “Ungrammaticality”, and Logical Form.Guillermo Del Pinal - 2017 - Noûs 53 (4):785-818.
    Recent work in formal semantics suggests that the language system includes not only a structure building device, as standardly assumed, but also a natural deductive system which can determine when expressions have trivial truth-conditions (e.g., are logically true/false) and mark them as unacceptable. This hypothesis, called the `logicality of language', accounts for many acceptability patterns, including systematic restrictions on the distribution of quantifiers. To deal with apparent counter-examples consisting of acceptable tautologies and contradictions, the logicality of language is often paired (...)
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  41. Metanormative Contextualism and Normative Uncertainty.John Pittard & Alex Worsnip - 2017 - Mind 126 (501):155-193.
    We offer a new argument in favour of metanormative contextualism, the thesis that the semantic value of a normative ‘ought’ claim of the form ‘ S ought to Φ’ depends on the value of one or more parameters whose values vary in a way that is determined by the context of utterance. The debate over this contextualist thesis has centred on cases that involve ‘ought’ claims made in the face of uncertainty regarding certain descriptive facts. Contextualists, relativists, and invariantists all (...)
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  42. How to Dispel the Asymmetry Concerning Retraction.Diogo Santos - 2017 - Phenomenology and Mind 12:74-82.
    MacFarlane (2014) advocates a radical form of semantic relativism. He argues that his proposal complies with the norms governing our assertion practices in various areas of discourse. These practices also include norms regarding the conditions in which it is inappropriate not to retract an assertion. Ferrari & Zeman (2014) identify an asymmetry concerning retractions in two relevant areas of discourse and argue that assessment-sensitivity needs to be supplemented with further theoretical tools to explain it. I dispel the asymmetry and conclude (...)
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  43. (2 other versions)Review of Making the Social World by John Searle (2010).Michael Starks - 2017 - Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization Michael Starks 3rd Ed. (2017).
    Before commenting in detail on Making the Social World (MSW) I will first offer some comments on philosophy (descriptive psychology) and its relationship to contemporary psychological research as exemplified in the works of Searle (S) and Wittgenstein (W), since I feel that this is the best way to place Searle or any commentator on behavior, in proper perspective. It will help greatly to see my reviews of PNC, TLP, PI, OC,TARW and other books by these two geniuses of descriptive psychology. (...)
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  44. One's Modus Ponens: Modality, Coherence and Logic.Una Stojnić - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (1):167-214.
    Recently, there has been a shift away from traditional truth-conditional accounts of meaning towards non-truth-conditional ones, e.g., expressivism, relativism and certain forms of dynamic semantics. Fueling this trend is some puzzling behavior of modal discourse. One particularly surprising manifestation of such behavior is the alleged failure of some of the most entrenched classical rules of inference; viz., modus ponens and modus tollens. These revisionary, non-truth-conditional accounts tout these failures, and the alleged tension between the behavior of modal vocabulary and classical (...)
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  45. Contextualist Answers to the Challenge from Disagreement.Dan Zeman - 2017 - Phenomenology and Mind 12:62-73.
    In this short paper I survey recent contextualist answers to the challenge from disagreement raised by contemporary relativists. After making the challenge vivid by means of a working example, I specify the notion of disagreement lying at the heart of the challenge. The answers are grouped in three categories, the first characterized by rejecting the intuition of disagreement in certain cases, the second by conceiving disagreement as a clash of non-cognitive attitudes and the third by relegating disagreement at the pragmatic (...)
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  46. Experimenting on Contextualism: Between-Subjects vs. Within-Subjects.Adrian Ziółkowski - 2017 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 36 (3):139-162.
    According to contextualism, vast majority of natural-language expressions are context-sensitive. When testing whether this claim is reflected in Folk intuitions, some interesting methodological questions were raised such as: which experimental design is more appropriate for testing contextualism – the within- or the between-subject design? The main thesis of this paper is that the between-subject design should be preferred. The first experiment aims at assessing the difference between the results obtained for within-subjects measurements (where all participants assess all contexts) and between-subject (...)
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  47. Objective truth in matters of taste.Mihnea D. I. Capraru - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (7):1755-1777.
    In matters of personal taste, faultless disagreement occurs between people who disagree over what is tasty, fun, etc., in those cases when each of these people seems equally far from the objective truth. Faultless disagreement is often taken as evidence that truth is relative. This article aims to help us avoid the truth-relativist conclusion. The article, however, does not argue directly against relativism; instead, the article defends non-relative truth constructively, aiming to explain faultless disagreement with the resources of semantic contextualism. (...)
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  48. Conceptual and terminological confusion around Personalised Medicine: a coping strategy.Giovanni De Grandis & Vidar Halgunset - 2016 - BMC Medical Ethics 17 (1):1-12.
    The idea of personalised medicine (PM) has gathered momentum recently, attracting funding and generating hopes as well as scepticism. As PM gives rise to differing interpretations, there have been several attempts to clarify the concept. In an influential paper published in this journal, Schleidgen and colleagues have proposed a precise and narrow definition of PM on the basis of a systematic literature review. Given that their conclusion is at odds with those of other recent attempts to understand PM, we consider (...)
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  49. Evaluative Disagreements.Justina Diaz Legaspe - 2016 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy (1):67-87.
    A recent quarrel over faultless disagreements assumes that disputes over evaluative sentences should be understood as regular, factual disagreements. Instead, I propose that evaluative disagreements should be understood in Lewisian terms. Language use works like a rule-governed game. In it, the assertion of an evaluative sentence is an attempt to establish one value as default in the conversation; its rejection, in turn, is in most cases the refusal to accept this move.
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  50. Assurance: An Austinian View of Knowledge and Knowledge Claims, by Krista Lawlor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 231 pp. ISBN 10/13: 978–0199657896 hb £36.00. [REVIEW]Nat Hansen - 2016 - European Journal of Philosophy 24 (1):298-302.
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