Illocutionary force and semantic content are widely held to occupy utterly different categories in at least two ways: Any expression serving as an indicator of illocutionary force must be without semantic content, and no such expression can embed. A refined account of the force/content distinction is offered here that does the explanatory work that the standard distinction does, while, in accounting for the behavior of a range of parenthetical expressions, shows neither nor to be compulsory. The refined account also motivates (...) a development of the "scorekeeping model" of conversation, helps to isolate a distinction between illocutionary force and illocutionary commitment, and reveals one precise respect in which meaning is only explicable in terms of use. (shrink)

This paper develops an analysis of a scalar implicature that is induced by the use of reportative evidentials such as the Cuzco Quechua enclitic = si and the German modal sollen. Reportatives, in addition to specifying the speaker’s source of information for a statement as a report by someone else, also usually convey that the speaker does not have direct evidence for the proposition expressed. While this type of implicature can be calculated using the same kind of Gricean reasoning that (...) underlies other scalar implicatures, it requires two departures from standard assumptions. First, evidential scalar implicatures differ from the more familiar scalar implicatures in that they do not turn on the notion of informativeness but on the notion of evidential strength. Second, the implicature arises on the illocutionary level of meaning. It is argued that a version of Grice’s maxim of quantity in terms of illocutionary strength can account for this evidential scalar implicature as well as for the more typical scalar implicatures. The account developed also proposes some revisions to the taxonomy of speech acts and suggests that the sincerity conditions of assertive speech acts contain an evidential sincerity condition in addition to the belief condition standardly assumed. (shrink)

In this book an introduction to the grammatical view of the scalar implicature phenomenon is presented. A detailed overview is offered concerning the embeddability of the exhaustivity operator, and the contextual dependance of the alternatives generation process. The theoretical implications of the grammatical view with respect to the abductive character of the scalar implicature are also discussed. A pragmatic account of the assertive content is proposed in correlation with a blindness-based account of the semantic content carried by scalar sentences, in (...) order to ensure that the information globally conveyed by the latter is sometimes different from the semantic content automatically generated. -/- . (shrink)

Traditional accounts of justification can be characterized as trying to analyze justification in such a way that having a justified belief brings with it assurance of truth. The internalist offers a demanding requirement on justification: one's having a justified belief requires that one see what the belief has going for it. Externalists worry that the internalist's narrow conception of justification will lead to unacceptably radical and implausible skepticism. According to the externalist, one need not know what a belief has going (...) for it in order for that belief to be justified. Externalism, though, comes with its own problems. Ernest Sosa has attempted to bridge the divide between internalism and externalism by pairing the strengths of internalism with the strengths of externalism. Sosa distinguishes two kinds of knowledge: animal knowledge that is essentially externalist in character and reflective knowledge that is intended to capture our best intellectual procedure in regards to knowledge. On Sosa's view, one gains reflective knowledge by building upon animal knowledge. As a result, Sosa's view seems to illustrate a bottom-up approach to the analysis of knowledge : reflective knowledge is the result of animal knowledge and some other epistemic factor. My project, in contrast to Sosa's, is to argue that one should start with an account of ideal justification and then proceed by loosening the standards on ideal justification in an effort to develop the possibility of non- ideal kinds of justification. The view that I will develop will adopt Sosa's strategy of distinguishing kinds of knowledge, but will result in a top-down approach to the analysis of justification. Instead of starting with an undemanding standard and layer levels on top, I will start with an ideal standard and strip layers away. I will also argue that my view has some important advantages over Sosa's. Not only does Sosa's view seem to run into many of the problems that threaten externalism, but his view is incapable of offering the kind of assurance that the internalist is after. The view I develop will maintain the internalist's interest in assurance while also providing a response to some of the skeptical problems that have plagued internalists. If my project is successful, then, even if the justification that results in many of the cases I will be exploring is not ideal, we can use these conceptions of justification to help explicate how one might have justified beliefs about a great number of things. The essentially internalist account that I have offered will not only illustrate a serious approach to dealing with skepticism, but it will also capture how many of our commonsensically justified beliefs are in fact justified. (shrink)