This paper extends Parikh's earlier work in semantics with games of partial information and attempts to derive and represent the full content of an utterance from first principles. It also discusses various ways in which this content may be indeterminate.

To what extent was ordinary language philosophy a precursor to experimental philosophy? Since the conditions on pursuit of either project are at best unclear, and at worst protean, the general question is hard to address. I focus instead on particular cases, seeking to uncover some central aspects of J. L. Austin’s and John Cook Wilson’s ordinary language based approach to philosophical method. I make a start at addressing three questions. First, what distinguishes their approach from other more traditional approaches? Second, (...) is their approach a form of experimental philosophy? Third, given their aims, should it have been? I offer the following preliminary answers. First, their approach distinctively emphasizes attention to what we should say when. Second, their approach is closer to contemporary experimental mathematics than it is to some prominent forms of contemporary experimental philosophy. Third, some purported grounds for pursuing their aims by way of surveying what individual speakers would say when are not compelling. (shrink)

The idea that there are representations with a double direction of fit has acquired a pride of place in contemporary debates on the ontology of institutions. This paper will argue against the very idea of anything at all having both directions of fit. There is a simple problem which has thus far gone unnoticed. The suggestion that there are representations with both directions of fit amounts to a suggestion that, in cases of discrepancy between a representation and the world, both (...) should change—the representation and the world. But that would merely amount to another discrepancy, and so both should change again, ad infinitum. The paper will first elucidate the notion of a “direction of fit” and clarify how the criticism to be presented here differs from earlier criticisms (Section 1).The next section sheds some light on why and how acts and attitudes with both directions of fit have seemed to play a part in explaining the existence of institutional reality (Section 2). The next sections present the argument against any representations with both directions of fit, relying on a normative understanding of the distinction. The argument will have three steps (Sections 3, 4, and 5). The section that follows shows that the criticism also applies to the dispositional understanding of the notion of a direction of fit (Section 6), and then the paper asks whether a third kind of reading would be available (Section 7) and whether the infallibility of the relevant representations would be of help (Section 8). Finally, the paper assesses briefly the consequences of dropping the notion of two directions of fit (Section 9). (shrink)

Leading contemporary argumentation theories such as those of Ralph Johnson, van Eemeren and Houtlosser, and Tindale, in their attempt to address rhetoric, tend to define rhetorical argumentation with reference to (a) the rhetorical arguer’s goal (to persuade effectively), and (b) the means he employs to do so. However, a central strand in the rhetorical tradition itself, led by Aristotle, and arguably the dominant view, sees rhetorical argumentation as defined with reference to the domain of issues discussed. On that view, the (...) domain of rhetorical argumentation is centered on choice of action in the civic sphere, and the distinctive nature of issues in this domain is considered crucial. Hence, argumentation theories such as those discussed, insofar as they do not see rhetoric as defined by its distinctive domain, apply an understanding of rhetoric that is historically inadequate. It is further suggested that theories adopting this understanding of rhetoric risk ignoring important distinctive features of argumentation about action. (shrink)

Direction of fit theories usually claim that beliefs are such that they “aim at truth” or “ought to fit” the world and desires are such that they “aim at realization” or the world “ought to fit” them. This essay argues that no theory of direction of fit is correct. The two directions of fit are supposed to be determinations of one and the same determinable two-place relation, differing only in the ordering of favored terms. But there is no such determinable (...) because of ineliminable asymmetries between the way that beliefs “aim at truth” and the way that desires “aim at realization.” This essay traces the ills of direction of fit theory to a misunderstanding of Anscombe and proposes a cure that distinguishes theoretical and practical thought by appeal to a distinction between thought in the form of a state and thought in the form of an event. (shrink)

Debates about the concept of disease have traditionally been framed as a competition between two conflicting approaches: naturalism, on the one hand, and normativism or social constructivism, on the other. In this article, we lay the groundwork for a naturalistic form of social constructivism by dissociating the presumed link between value-free conceptions of disease and a broadly naturalistic approach; offering a naturalistic argument for a form of social constructivism; and suggesting avenues that strike us as especially promising for filling in (...) the details of an alternative approach and addressing the most obvious objections. (shrink)

Truth conditional semantics is the project of ‘determining a way of assigning truth conditions to sentences based on A) the extension of their constituents and B) their syntactic mode of combination’. This research program has been subject to objections that take the form of underdetermination arguments, an influential instance of which is presented by Travis: … consider the words ‘The leaf is green,’ speaking of a given leaf, and its condition at a given time, used so as to mean what (...) they do mean in English. How many distinct things might be said in words with all that true of them? Many.… Suppose a Japanese maple leaf, turned brown, was painted green for a decoration. In sorting leaves by colour, one might truly call this one green. In describing leaves to help identify their species, it might, for all the paint, be false to call it that. (shrink)

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, (...) which portrays a Ludovician model of temporality that firmly denies the possibility of temporal editing, this paper defends the strength of the contextualist position. (shrink)

G. F. Stout is famous as an early twentieth century proselyte for abstract particulars, or tropes as they are now often called. He advanced his version of trope theory to avoid the excesses of nominalism on the one hand and realism on the other. But his arguments for tropes have been widely misconceived as metaphysical, e.g. by Armstrong. In this paper, I argue that Stout’s fundamental arguments for tropes were ideological and epistemological rather than metaphysical. He moulded his scheme to (...) fit what is actually given to us in perception, arguing that our epistemic practices would break down in an environment where only universals were given to us. (shrink)

Many recent accounts of the ontology of groups, institutions, and practices have touched upon the normative or deontic dimensions of social reality (e.g., social obligations, claims, permissions, prohibitions, authority, and immunity), as distinct from any specifically moral values or obligations. For the most part, however, the ontology of such socio-deontic phenomena has not received the attention it deserves. In what sense might a social obligation or a claim exist? What is the ontological status of such an obligation (e.g., is it (...) an entity in its own right)? And how do people come to have social obligations or permissions in the first place? In this dissertation, I argue that such social-deontic phenomena can be accounted for ontologically in terms of the existence of shared prescriptive representational content that is backed by collectively held dispositions to monitor for compliance, and to punish (sanction, blame, chide, look unfavorably upon) those who fail to comply. (shrink)

Assertives have a word-to-world ‘direction-of-fit’: their illocutionary point is that the word should fit the world. Directives and commissives have a world-to-word direction-of-fit: their illocutionary point is to make the world fit the word. Arguments in politics and practical argumentation generally are often about directives or commissives, and many of these cannot meaningfully be reconstructed as assertives. Nevertheless, many theorists of argumentation proceed, tacitly or explicitly, as if all arguments must be about assertives, thereby obfuscating matters.

The classic thought experiments for Content Externalism have been motivated by consideration of intentional states with a mind-to-world direction of fit. In this paper, I argue that when these experiments are run on intentional states with a world-to-mind direction of fit, the thought experiments actually support Content Internalism. Because of this, I argue that the classic thought experiments alone cannot properly motivate Content Externalism. I do not show that Content Externalism is false in this paper, just that it cannot be (...) motivated by the classic thought experiments alone. I discuss various externalist responses to the argument I raise and show that they all fail. (shrink)

'Post this letter!' does not entail 'Post this letter or drink up my wine!' (the Ross Paradox) because one can be in a state with the content of the former without being in a state with the content of the latter; in turn, because the latter can rationalize drinking up my wine but the former cannot; in turn, because practical rationalization flows toward one's present situation, in contrast with the flow of theoretical rationalization from one's present situation. Formally, this is (...) implemented with a semantics for imperatives involving a partition to set up an issue of significance and a proposition to establish how to settle it. I characterize a series of languages and language-games to implement all this, and appeal to an 'endorsement-theoretic' conception of modals as quantifiers over mental states to explain why 'You must post this letter' does not entail 'You must either post this letter or drink up my wine'. (shrink)

This paper offers a new interpretation of John Austin’s views both on assertion and on adverbs, as result of which an expressivist thesis concerning the semantics for action sentences is advanced. First, Austin’s analysis of assertion based on various, specific assertive forces and his remarks on adverbs are systematically connected in order to obtain assertive schemata for action sentences. Finally, those schemata are put to work as the expression of inferential commitments implicit in argumentative practices of different sorts (exculpatory, justificatory (...) and illustrative) in the deployment of which, both logical contrariety and contradiction are exploited. (shrink)