This paper considers ways that experimental design can affect judgments about informally presented context shifting experiments. Reasons are given to think that judgments about informal context shifting experiments are affected by an exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments and by experimenter bias. Exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments may produce experimental artifacts by obscuring important differences of degree between the phenomena being investigated. Experimenter bias is an effect generated when, for example, experimenters disclose (even unconsciously) their own beliefs (...) about the outcome of an experiment. Eliminating experimenter bias from context shifting experiments makes it far less obvious what the “intuitive” responses to those experiments are. After it is shown how those different kinds of bias can affect judgments about informal context shifting experiments, those experiments are revised to control for those forms of bias. The upshot of these investigations is that participants in the contextualist debate who employ informal experiments should pay just as much attention to the design of their experiments as those who employ more formal experimental techniques if they want to avoid obscuring the phenomena they aim to uncover. (shrink)

Using a combination of semantic theory and findings from conversation analysis, this paper describes a way in which questions, which incorporate presuppositions that are false, when used in a courtroom cross-examination wherein there are certain turn-taking rules, rights and restrictions, stop a rape victim from expressing the content that she wants to express in that context. This kind of silencing contrasts with other kinds of silencing that consist in the disabling of a speech act's force, rather than precluding the expression (...) of certain contents. -/- Content Note: there are explicit descriptions of sexual violence in this paper. (shrink)

This paper presents experimental evidence in support of the existence of metalinguistic moral encroachment: the influence of the moral consequences of using a word with a given content upon the content of that word. The evidence collected implies that the effect of moral factors upon content is weak. For instance, by changing the moral consequences of the sentence's truth, it was possible to shift judgements about the truth of the sentence "that's a lot of cake", when used to describe two (...) sponge cakes. Similarly, by changing the moral consequences of the sentence's truth, it was possible to shift judgements about the truth of the sentence "the children's hospital is old", when used to describe a 40 year old hospital. The implications of this for Esa Díaz-León’s recent attempt to show how Jennifer Saul can legitimately reject an empirical semantic hypothesis on political grounds are described. Directions for future research are also described. (shrink)