The metaphysics of representation poses questions such as: in virtue of what does a sentence, picture, or mental state represent that the world is a certain way? In the first instance, I have focused on the semantic properties of language: for example, what is it for a name such as ‘London’ to refer to something? Interpretationism concerning what it is for linguistic expressions to have meaning, says that constitutively, semantic facts are fixed by best semantic theory. As here developed, it (...) promises to give a reductive, universal and non-revisionary account of the nature of linguistic representation. -/- Interpretationism in general, however, is threatened by severe internal tension, due to arguments for radical inscrutability. These contend that, given the interpretationist setting, there can be no fact of the matter what object an individual word refers to: for example, that there is no fact of the matter as to whether “London” refers to London or to Sydney. -/- A series of challenges emerge, forming the basis for this thesis. 1. What sort of properties is the interpretationist trying to reduce, and what kind of reductive story is she offering? 2. How are inscrutability theses best formulated? Are arguments for inscrutability effective in their own terms? What kinds of inscrutability arise? 3. Is endorsing radical inscrutability a stable position? 4. Are there theoretical virtues—such as simplicity—that can be appealed to in discrediting the rival (empirically equivalent) theories that underpin inscrutability arguments? -/- In addressing these questions, I concentrate on diagnosing the source of inscrutability, mapping the space of ways of resisting the arguments for radical inscrutability, and examining the challenges faced in developing a principled account of linguistic content that avoids radical inscrutability. -/- The effect is not to close down the original puzzles, but rather to sharpen them into a set of new and deeper challenges. (shrink)

What is it exactly that we are attributing to a thing when we judge it to be good? According to the orthodox answer, at least in some cases when we judge that something is good we are attributing to it a monadic property. That is, good things are “just plain good.” I reject the orthodox view. In arguing against it, I begin with the idea that a plausible account of goodness must take seriously the intuitive claim that there is something (...) in common between moral and non-moral goodness—something in virtue of which it makes sense to call ‘good’ both the things that are morally good and the things that are non-morally good. However, it is implausible that all judgments about the goodness of things attribute a monadic property to those things, as this does not capture what we mean when we judge something to be non-morally good. Instead, I propose and defend my own relational theory of goodness according to which goodness is a relation that holds between things and ends (or goals). That is, goodness is a relational property such that to be good is to be related in the relevant way to some goal or another. This is true in both the mundane everyday cases and in loftier cases concerned with moral goodness. (shrink)

A common view among nontheists combines the de jure objection that theism is epistemically unacceptable with agnosticism about the de facto objection that theism is false. Following Plantinga, we can call this a “proper” de jure objection—a de jure objection that does not depend on any de facto objection. In his Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga has produced a general argument against all proper de jure objections. Here I first show that this argument is logically fallacious (it makes subtle probabilistic fallacies (...) disguised by scope ambiguities), and proceed to lay the groundwork for the construction of actual proper de jure objections. (shrink)

The discourse surrounding humor and ethics has focused exclusively on jokes – Are certain jokes immoral to tell? Why can some people tell some jokes and not others? How soon is too soon? Two cases which have widely considered important in assessing the answers to these questions – those of Michael Richards and Daniel Tosh – actually fail to address the questions at all in that while the events discussed occurred during the comedians’ sets in a comedy club, neither were (...) jokes. Both, rather, were responses to hecklers. The moral bounds of a comedian’s ability to respond to hecklers is a different question, but one that ought to be taken seriously. We afford comedians a broader moral range than we do to others in polite discourse. This is reasonable. I argue that the moral bounds ought to be expanded even further in dealing with hecklers, that is, comedians ought to be allowed to say things that would be out of bounds in other circumstances. But this expansion does not mean that there are no moral boundaries in responding to hecklers. The determination of these lines requires an understanding of the nature of the heckling and the cultural meaning of the language used to shut the hecklers down. (shrink)

This paper considers a now familiar argument that the ubiquity of context -dependence threatens the project of natural language semantics, at least as that project has usually been conceived: as concerning itself with `what is said' by an utterance of a given sentence. I argue in response that the `anti-semantic' argument equivocates at a crucial point and, therefore, that we need not choose between semantic minimalism, truth-conditional pragmatism, and the like. Rather, we must abandon the idea, familiar from Kaplan and (...) others, that utterances express propositions `relative to contexts' and replace it with the Strawonian idea that speakers express propositions by making utterances in contexts. The argument for this claim consists in a detailed investigation of the particular case of demonstratives, which I argue demand such a Strawsonian treatment. I then respond to several objections, the most important of which allege that the Strawsonian account somehow undermines the project of natural language semantics, or threatens the semantics -pragmatics distinction. Please note that the paper posted here is an extended version of what was published. (shrink)

In the last quarter-century, the emergence of argumentation theory has spurred the development of an extensive literature on the study of argument. It encompasses empirical and theoretical investigations that often have their roots in the different traditions that have studied argument since ancient times – most notably, logic, rhetoric, and dialectics. Against this background, I advocate a “thick” theory of argument that merges traditional theories, weaving together their sometimes discordant approaches to provide an overarching framework for the assessment of arguments (...) in a broad range of contexts. In sketching such a theory, I propose six steps that can “thicken” traditional approaches to argument in the interests of a comprehensive theory. (shrink)

El significado de los términos numéricos es objeto de debate en la lingüística, la pragmática y la filosofía del lenguaje. En este trabajo defiendo una versión contextualista en la cual propongo que, más que consistir en un concepto específico, la semántica de los términos numéricos es una vía convencional para activar cognitivamente una zona conceptual que contiene a los conceptos numéricos que pueden expresarse a través de su uso. Las interpretaciones que un término numérico puede recibir están dadas por la (...) interacción de la forma lógica del enunciado en que aparece, la activación de una zona conceptual específica y la búsqueda de relevancia óptima. Esta propuesta explica evidencia lingüística y empírica de la que otras posturas no pueden dar cuenta. (shrink)

In this introduction I start by presenting and examining the main positions on the current debate concerning the semantic analysis of sentences containing definite descriptions. As is known, the debate in question has started off with Russell's proposal, which has been initially criticized by both Strawson and Donnellan. Nowadays, waters are divided on this issue: some philosophers, representing the so-called univocality approach, defend Russell's original analysis, according to which all definite descriptions are quantificational expressions, whereas there are others who, following (...) Strawson´s and Donnellan´s objections, consider that at least some descriptions are genuine singular terms and hence have referential meanings. Among the defendants of the last approach, known as the ambiguity theory, we can find Michael Devitt. In the second part of the paper, I then survey Devitt's stance on some traditional arguments for the ambiguity theory -mainly, the arguments from misdescription, incompleteness, opacity, and anaphora-, and finally I consider the new ones that he has put forward in favor of the existence of referential descriptions: the argument from regularity, the one based on the comparison with demonstratives, and the argument based on weak rigidity. En esta introducción comienzo por presentar y analizar las distintas posiciones que caracterizan el debate actual en torno al análisis semántico de las oraciones que contienen descripciones definidas. Como es sabido, tal debate se origina a partir de la propuesta de Russell, la cual fue inicialmente objetada por Strawson y por Donnellan. En la actualidad las aguas están divididas: algunos filósofos, representantes del aquí llamado enfoque de la univocidad, defienden el análisis russelliano, según el cual todas las descripciones son susceptibles de ser analizadas como expresiones cuantificacionales ; otros, por el contrario, haciéndose eco de las objeciones anteriores, consideran que algunas descripciones son términos singulares genuinos y, en tanto tales, expresiones referenciales. Entre los defensores más conspicuos de este enfoque, conocido como teoría de la ambigüedad, se encuentra Michael Devitt. En la segunda parte de esta introducción, resumo la posición de Devitt respecto de los argumentos tradicionales a favor del enfoque de la ambigüedad -fundamentalmente, los argumentos basados en las descripciones fallidas, las descripciones incompletas, los casos de opacidad y los de anáfora-, y luego presento y analizo los nuevos argumentos por él ofrecidos, a saber, el argumento basado en el uso regular, aquél basado en la comparación con los demostrativos y el que se vale de la noción de rigidez débil. (shrink)

Questa conferenza offre una presentazione semplificata del concetto di contesto nella filosofia analitica,in particolare nella filosofia del linguaggio. E' semplificata perché tralascia una serie di discussioni rilevanti per fermarsi alle grandi linee che segnano l'emergenza del concetto di contesto in filosofia del linguaggio. Inoltre mi concentro su un aspetto particolare del dibattito: la linea di confine tra pragmatia e semantica e il ruolo che il concetto di contesto ha in questo dibattito, cercando di evidenziare i punti di disaccordo tra le (...) parti in causa. Nel primo paragrafo riprendo brevemente alcune idee di Frege, mostrando come aiutano a individuare una tripartizione abbastanza standard del concetto di contesto. Nel secondo paragrafo riespongo una tripartizione fatta da John Perry, cercando di "generalizzare" quello che Perry chiama "contesto postsemantico". Nella serie di esempi che seguono, mostro dove si situa il punto di discrimine tra la teorie più vicine alla semantica tradizionale e le teorie contestualiste radicali, che danno maggior rilevanza agli aspetti cognitivi rispetto a quelli semantici. Riprendo quindi in generale le due strategie alternative che si contrappongono sul modo di considerare i rapporti tra semantica e pragmatica. Nell'ultimo paragrafo provo a indicare quali sono i principali problemi dell'assunzione di una prospettiva radicalmente contestualista. (shrink)

Paulina Sliwa (2015) argues that knowing why p is necessary and sufficient for understanding why p. She tries to rebut recent attacks against the necessity and sufficiency claims, and explains the gradability of understanding why in terms of knowledge. I argue that her attempts do not succeed, but I indicate more promising ways to defend reductionism about understanding why throughout the discussion.

The article is a summary of recent experimental data on anchoring heuristic and models that seek to explain it. Anchoring heuristic represents one of the mechanisms of decision making in situations of limited information or time, by using a comparison standard called – an anchor. Given the supposed wide usage of this heuristic, authors explore the unconscious character of the heuristic and ways of making its biasing effects less prominent. Apart from the standard experimental design in which anchor is directly (...) connected to the judgment in question, evidence shows that people can be anchored indirectly, even when the anchor is perceived unconsciously. Newest data show that anchoring effect should be explained by two distinct processes. In the concluding remarks, authors consider broader implications of anchoring for the field of social cognition.U članku se opisuju noviji eksperimentalni nalazi vezani uz heuristiku sidrenja kao i modeli koji ih objašnjavaju. Heuristika sidrenja označava jedan od načina na koji ljudi donose odluke u nedostatku informacija i/ili vremena, a podrazumijeva korištenje standarda usporedbe kako bi se došlo do željene procjene. S obzirom na pretpostavljenu široku upotrebu ove heuristike, u članku se istražuju teoretska objašnjenja, razjašnjavaju razlozi zbog kojih je utjecaj te heuristike nedostupan svijesti te kako umanjiti njome izazvanu pristranost u razmišljanju. Osim standardnog nacrta kojim se ispituje ovaj fenomen opisani su i dokazi prema kojima sidro može vršiti svoj utjecaj i kad se ne dovodi u direktnu vezu s procjenom, čak i kada je percipirano nesvjesnim putem. Najnoviji skup istraživanja pak pokazuje da se heuristika sidrenja, prvotno zamišljena kao jedinstveni mehanizam, zapravo može podijeliti na dva bitno različita procesa. Zaključno se razmatraju kakve bi implikacije ovaj razvoj u istraživanjima mogao imati za područje socijalne kognicije općenito. (shrink)

Traditionally irony has been researched as a verbal mode of communicating non-literal meaning. Yet, the extant literal/non-literal meaning oriented research provided conflicting evidence and failed to explain how irony vs. non-irony is processed. The dominant literal/non-literal meaning approach hasn’t accounted for the role of attitudinal non-propositional contents so crucially involved in irony communication and comprehension. Employed to communicate indirectly, on top of non-literal meaning, irony serves to convey implicit attitudes: emotional load non-propositionally attached to the propositional contents. The role of (...) emotional contents implicitly communicated by irony has not been acknowledged in irony research so far. This paper reviews irony and attitude research, focusing on the non-propositional, emotional contents, aiming to bridge the propositional-non-propositional meaning gap in irony research. Neuroimaging and behavioral evidence showing that emotional load profoundly influences communicative contents processing, priming its computation and determining its processing patterns, is presented, and its role for irony processing is highlighted. (shrink)

A central and influential idea among researchers of language is that the sentence, by virtue of its direct relationship with syntactic parsing, represents the heart of language itself. Even in the field of pragmatics, models rooted in classical theories tend to put sentence prominence forward again. Here, we present results from recordings of event-related brain potentials that brings into question even the distinction between sentence and discourse. During natural communicative exchanges, the human brain continuously and immediately relates incoming words to (...) the previous discourse, whether it is constituted of a word, a sentence or complex speech. Moreover, focusing on discourse instead of sentence represents a viable strategy to better understand the relationship between language and other cognitive systems. (shrink)

In previous work I have argued that talk about negative events should not be taken at face value: typically, what we are inclined to think of as a negative event (John’s failure to go jogging) is just an ordinary, positive event (his going to the movie instead); it is a positive event under a negative description. Here I consider more closely the difficulties that arise in those cases where no positive event seems available to do the job, as with putative (...) cases of causation by omission. In particular, I elaborate on Helen Beebee’s idea that not all causal explanations are reports of causation. When we mention John’s failure to turn off the gas as an explanans of why there was an explosion, we do not say what caused the explosion. We do not mention any of the relevant causes. We just remark that one sort of event that was supposed to occur, and whose occurrence would have prevented the explosion, did not in fact occur. (shrink)

In this contribution we focus on one phenomenon that has a special role in pragmatic theorizing, namely metaphor, and select two issues deriving from theoretical models and prone to be tested experimentally. The first issue concerns the comprehension procedure, that is whether access to metaphorical meaning goes through a mandatory literal stage and thus is indirect, as predicted by a Gricean inspired account, or rather is retrieved directly. The question will be discussed by referring to behavioral and neurophysiological studies, which (...) advanced our understanding of the time course of metaphorical interpretation but proved not fully suitable to answer the question. The second issue revolves around the cognitive architecture of the pragmatic system as it operates in the case of metaphor comprehension. We will illustrate the contribution that functional neuroimaging, coupled with clinical investigations can provide to fine-tune the architecture of the system responsible for metaphor processing. Some outstanding questions are highlighted in the final part, aiming at sketching our interpretation of the experimental pragmatic enterprise. (shrink)

“Reasonable hostility” is a norm of communicative conduct initially developed by studying public exchanges in education governance meetings in local U.S. communities. In this paper I consider the norm’s usefulness for and applicability to a U.S. state-level public hearing about a bill to legalize civil unions. Following an explication of reasonable hostility and grounded practical theory, the approach to inquiry that guides my work, I describe Hawaii’s 2009, 18-hour public hearing and analyze selected seg-ments of it. I show that this (...) particular public hearing raised demands for testifiers on the anti-civil union side of the argument that reasonable hostility does not do a good job of addressing. Development of a norm of communication conduct for this practice, as well as others, must engage with the culture and time-specific beliefs that a society holds, beliefs that will shape not only how to argue but what may be argued and what must be assumed about particular categories of persons. (shrink)

Este artigo apresenta os principais resultados de uma pesquisa que objetivou verificar a validade e viabilidade de aplicar modelos lógico-pragmáticos da Lingüística Cognitiva ao entendimento dos processos inferenciais nos diálogos de díades pacientepsicoterapeuta em Terapia Cognitivo-Comportamental ..

Many students of pragmatics and child language have come to believe that in order to learn a language a child must first have a 'theory of mind,' a grasp that speakers mentally represent the content they would convey when they speak. This view is reinforced by the Gricean theory of communication, according to which speakers intend their words to cause hearers to believe or to do certain things and hearers must recognize these intentions if they are to comply. The view (...) rests on an underlying assumption that learning language involves associating words with things (objects, kinds, events, properties and so forth) or with concepts of these, these associations being acquired, one by one, by observing the usage of others. Accomplishing this task is facilitated, it is thought, by engaging in joint attention with speakers who are attending to the things they are talking about as they talk, and joint attention requires an understanding that others have minds that represent things. (shrink)

I am often asked to explain the difference between my notion of impliciture (Bach 1994) and the relevance theorists’ notion of explicature (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Carston 2002). Despite the differences between the theoretical frameworks within which they operate, the two notions seem very similar. Relevance theorists describe explicatures as “developments of logical forms,” whereas I think of implicitures as “expansions” or “completions” of semantic contents (depending on whether or not the sentence’s semantic content amounts to a proposition). That is (...) not much of a difference. We agree that implicitures/explicatures go beyond what is said (in a strict sense) and yet fall short of being implicatures. So, what is the difference, or is it just terminological? As we will see, the real differences emerge when the two notions are situated in their respective theoretical frameworks with their contrasting conceptions of what is involved in linguistic communication. (shrink)

Algorithms for NLG NLG is typically broken down into stages of discourse planning (to select information and organize it into coherent paragraphs), sentence planning (to choose words and structures to fit information into sentence-sized units), and realization (to determine surface form of output, including word order, morphology and final formatting or intonation). The SPUD system combines the generation steps of sentence planning and surface realization by using a lexicalized grammar to construct the syntax and semantics of a sentence simultaneously.

When interpreting a sentence such as Every time the company fires an employee who comes in late, a union complaint is lodged, an addressee is likely to infer that the union will only complain when an employee is fired because he came in late. One is thus led to ask why a purely pragmatic enrichment of this sort -- one drawn despite no risk of interpretative failure nor other linguistic mandate -- would intrude upon truth conditions. We argue that this (...) effect results from the interaction among three pragmatic phenomena: presupposition, the associative mechanisms that underlie the establishment of coherence in discourse, and the calculation of domain restriction for quantificational operators. Because the analysis does not consider the operative enrichments to be species of implicature, we claim that such cases do not represent an intrusion of implicature into truth-conditional content. Instead, they merely involve the context-dependent determination of quantificational domains. (shrink)

This dissertation consists of three parts. Part I is a defense of an artificial language methodology in philosophy and a historical and systematic defense of the logical empiricists' application of an artificial language methodology to scientific theories. These defenses provide a justification for the presumptions of a host of criteria of empirical significance, which I analyze, compare, and develop in part II. On the basis of this analysis, in part III I use a variety of criteria to evaluate the scientific (...) status of intelligent design, and further discuss confirmation, reduction, and concept formation. (shrink)

Proceeding from serendipitous observations, three studies and two pilot experiments examined how the way mental representations are conceived varies as the subjective status of the representations is manifest or otherwise. Participants were found to produce simple line drawings differently when the drawings were assumed to represent mental contents (beliefs, imaginations, percepts). The results challenged particular lay epistemological concepts. They were partly accounted for by Gricean conversational rules, but a "subjective status bias" was postulated to have them fully explained. The discussion (...) and recommendations for research--completed with two pilot studies--center on the nature of this bias relating it either to a tendency to conceive subjective representations as vague "shadows of reality", or to a tendency to have an increased impact of the law of pregnance. The empirical outcomes of the pilot studies argue for the latter tendency. (shrink)

I make a distinction between a traditional conception of Rhetoric as a corpus of practical knowledge to improve persuasive abilities, and a more contemporary conception of Rhetoric as a hermeneutic discipline for dealing with communicative activities as a means of influence. I argue that the key difference between both conceptions is whether or not they deal with the rhetorical properties of discourses as a matter of speakers’ intentions.

This paper presents findings from a linguistic and psycho-social analysis of nine design dialogues which sets out to investigate the interweaving of transactional and interpersonal threads in collaborative work. We sketch a model of the participants' positioning towards their own or their partner's design proposals, from association to dissociation towards the proposals, together with the conversational cues which indicate this positioning. Our aim is to integrate the role of interpersonal relationships into the study of co-operation, to stress the importance of (...) this dimension for the quality of collective work and to reflect on its potential for integration into the design of dialogue systems. (shrink)

An essential ingredient of language use is our ability to reason about utterances as intentional actions. Linguistic representations are the natural substrate for such reasoning, and models from computational semantics can often be seen as providing an infrastructure to carry out such inferences from rich and accurate grammatical descriptions. Exploring such inferences offers a productive pragmatic perspective on problems of interpretation, and promises to leverage semantic representations in more flexible and more general tools that compute with meaning.

As a graduate student in Linguistics at UMass/Amherst in the 1980s, I was fortunate to be exposed to a number of new developments bearing on the relationship between formal semantics and pragmatics. In the 1970s under the influence of Cresswell, Lewis, Montague, and Partee, enormous progress in semantics was made possible by narrowing the focus of the field mainly to the consideration of the conventional, truth conditional content of an indicative utterance, calculated compositionally as a function of the semantic contributions (...) of its parts and its syntactic structure. Context was typically relegated to the background, in the form of indices of evaluation, though occasionally popping out for more serious consideration, as in the work of Kaplan, Karttunen, and Stalnaker. But eventually the nature of the rigorous formal enterprise itself, confronted with phenomena like Geach’s donkey sentences, presupposition projection, and the context-dependence of tense and aspect, forced the field into a more careful, thorough reconsideration of the relationship between context and content. Hence were born the dynamic theories of interpretation, beginning with Hans Kamp (1981) and Irene Heim (1982), who were both at UMass during my stay there, Heim completing her dissertation and Kamp on the faculty in Philosophy. Such frameworks posit a dynamic interchange between content and context, each dependent on the other, even in the course of interpreting a single utterance. Mats Rooth was also a graduate student at UMass at that time, and wrote his influential dissertation (1985) proposing an alternative semantics for the interpretation of prosodic focus, inter alia shedding light on how focus contributes to the contextual domain restriction of various operators. (shrink)

Up until now, the study of the argumentative role of visuals has been restricted to the formal concept of argument as product, consisting of premises and conclusion. In this paper, I adopt the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation as a social and discursive activity in order to explore argumentative functions of visuals that go beyond claiming and justifying. To do this I pay attention to the visual form and to the interaction between the verbal and the visual mode in argumentative discourse.

The main hypothesis of the article is that there has been an attitude change in the field of pragmatics: the philosophical notion of intentionality has penetrated in a cognitive approach. The first aim is to argue for this attitude change via analyzing classical pragmatical writings (works of J. R. Searle and H. P. Grice) and the relevance- theoretical approach of D. Sperber and D. Wilson. The second aim is to argue for the legitimacy of the attitude change by presenting a (...) new direction of research within the field of cognitive pragmatics. The author summarizes Dan Sperber's metarepresentations-first hypo-thesis about the evolution of ostensive-inferential communication, identifies its implicit presuppositions and analyzes its implications for evolutionary psychology and other related disciplines. The conclusions are the following: (1) the philosophical notion of intentionality play an important role in cognitive pragmatics as well (i.e. it uses the Gricean concept of non-natural meaning, and the Searleian distinction of first- and second-order intentionality), (2) the attitude change has enriched the notion of intentionality, (3) this enrichment makes new research directions possible in the field of pragmatics. (shrink)

Traditional approaches tend to regard figuration (and by extension, deference in general) as an essentially marked or playful use of language, which is associated with a pronounced stylistic effect. For linguistic purposes, however, there is no reason for assigning a special place to deferred uses that are stylistically notable — the sorts of usages that people sometimes qualify with a phrase like "figuratively speaking." There is no important linguistic difference between using redcoat to refer to a British soldier and using (...) suit to refer to a corporate executive (as in "A couple of suits stopped by to talk about the new products"). What creates the stylistic effect of the latter is not the mechanism that generates it, but the marked background assumptions that license it — here, the playful presupposition that.. (shrink)

I consider a problem from pragmatics for the radical interpretation project, relying on the principle of charity. If a speaker X in a context c manifests the attitude of holding a sentence s true, this might be because of believing, not the content of s in c, but what results from a pragmatic enrichment of that content. In this case, the connection between the holding-true attitude and the meaning of s might be too loose for charity to confirm the correct (...) interpretation hypothesis. To solve this problem, I apply the coherence raising account of pragmatic enrichment developed in Pagin 2014. The result is that in upward entailing linguistic contexts, the enriched content entails the prior content, and so charity prevails: the speaker also believes the prior content. In downward entailing contexts this would not hold, but I argue that enrichments tend not to occur in downward entailing contexts. (shrink)

The three research questions of this study have been: what exactly is active ambiguity?; how should we assess active ambiguities in an argumentative discussion?; what does an adequate dialectical account of active ambiguity look like? These three questions have been answered by giving a definition of active ambiguity, and by elaborating on the properties of active ambiguity. Based on the survey of possible consequences of active ambiguities, and based on the basic division of labour in a persuasion dialogue, we arrived (...) at a set of requirements that a normative, procedural account of active ambiguity should satisfy. The model for ambiguity dialectic both provides a detailed account of evaluating active ambiguities, as well as a dialectical account of dealing with alleged active ambiguity. The distinction between constitutive and regulative rules for discussion has made it possible to provide a discussion model in which discussants can raise the issue of active ambiguity, and in which they can argue about the correctness of such points of order. This immanent dialectical approach has lead to a fourfold classification of fallacies: by using an actively ambiguous expression a party either violates a regulative, or a constitutive rule for persuasion dialogue, and if this party violates a rule, he or she either commits a fallacy of ambiguity, and possibly also the more complex fallacy of equivocation. This model for ambiguity dialectic has been shown to be useful for the analysis and evaluation of complex debates and discussions. The present study can be extended in various ways:  A model for critical discussion can be enriched so that it accommodates other regulative rules, such as the rule that requires arguments to be valid. By doing so, other points of order and other fallacy criticisms can be studied from the perspective of a critical metadiscussion.  The results concerning active ambiguity can be applied to other modes of reasoning, such as visual argumentation.  The results can be applied to ambiguity at the level of larger stretches of argumentative discourse. That could lead to a fruitful contribution to the theory of argument structures.  There still is a need for dialectical models that concern the use of usage declaratives different from providing a disambiguation, such as the use of definitions, clarifications of unfamiliar expressions, amplifications, etc., and the question would have to be answered how the rules with respect to active ambiguity would relate to those models.  The model can be enriched by inserting a specific ‘linguistic utterance meaning testing machine’. That would be a major step towards implementing the model in a computer program.  The use of descriptive profiles of dialogue could be improved further. In order to analyse the way parties respond to dialectically complex contributions, we are in need of a dialectical theory that provides the parties with specific rights and obligations for putting forward complex contributions and for responding to complex contributions. (shrink)

The folk Psychology frames propositional attitudes as fundamental theoretical entities for the construction of a model designed to predict the behavior of a subject. A trivial, such as grasping a pen and writing reveals - something complex - about the behavior. When I take a pen and start writing I do, trivially, because I believe that a certain object in front of me is a pen and who performs a specific function that is, in fact, that of writing. When I (...) believe that the object that stands before me is a pen, I am in relation to "believe" with the propositional content: that in front of me is a pen. Philosophers of the proposition, from Frege onwards, have dedicated their studies to the analysis of what kinds of entities are the propositional attitudes. Jerry Fodor says that now, the proper prediction of the psychology of common sense, can not be questioned and that the propositional attitudes represent the most effective way to describe our behavior. What Fodor says, however, is that propositional attitudes function, but not how they work. Most philosophers interested in the issue, we are dedicated to the search for a theory that can account consistently both a semantics for propositional attitudes, both of these entities that seem to cause the behavior of a rational subject. There are two main paradigms in the theory of the proposition that contributed to the discussion of the propositional attitudes. One is the one that begins with Gottlob Frege, the other with Bertrand Russell. Defenders of Frege argue that the paradigm scrub objects and properties can not be constituents of the propositional content which have a purely conceptual. In other words, the philosophers belonging to the paradigm of Frege, but not all, mean that you can test in a rigorous way the truth conditions of propositional attitudes. Who defends the russellian’s paradigm argues that the propositional content are made by the objects and properties on which propositional attitudes relate. The purpose of this article is not to rebuild - in detail - both paradigms, nor to reconstruct one but, in a sense, my work will be a completely partial objective is to demonstrate how the paradigm is more profitable russell not only to make a coherent semantic theory for propositional attitudes2 but also to predict the behavior of a rational subject thing, completely innovative, given the repeated objections in contemporary literature3. At the end of this paper will be drafted a proposal to build a consistent model to predict the behavior,of a rational agent, based on a referential theory of propositional attitudes. (shrink)

The topic of the dissertation is this: How well does contextualism, in general, fare as an epistemic theory? And the answer comes in three parts. The root of the skeptical problem. I argue that the source of the skeptical problem is neither the underdetermination principle nor the closure principle. Instead, I claim that it is a change in context that generates the problem in the first place. Though I make no explicit argument in favor of contextualism as a solution to (...) skeptical problems, the chapter amounts to a de facto defense of the contextualist solution to skeptical problems. The problem with Gettier. I consider criticisms of contextualism's capacity to resolve Gettier cases. As it stands, Lewis' contextualism can't resolve a wide range of Gettier cases. However, I offer a new rule, the Rule of Special Similarity, as a replacement rule for Lewis' Rule of Resemblance. I then show how the new rule, though not problem-free, can do a much better job of resolving the Gettier problem. Contextualism, then, needn't fail because it can't solve Gettier problems; it can. The ways of context. One goal is to get a clear map of the territory, one that underscores the fact that precisely how context is incorporated into the theory matters epistemically. Another is to make the point that contextualism—the claim that context plays an essential semantic role in knowledge ascriptions—is not just one particular view, but a family of similar views. Also, I offer a new kind of contextualism that avoids many of the substantial criticisms aimed at the others in the family. Though the primary aim of the dissertation is a defense in three parts of the contextualist approach I general, a view emerges from the dissertation. I call the view condexicalism, and the dissertation is, secondarily, a development and defense of that view. (shrink)