Imperatives cannot be true or false, so they are shunned by logicians. And yet imperatives can be combined by logical connectives: "kiss me and hug me" is the conjunction of "kiss me" with "hug me". This example may suggest that declarative and imperative logic are isomorphic: just as the conjunction of two declaratives is true exactly if both conjuncts are true, the conjunction of two imperatives is satisfied exactly if both conjuncts are satisfied—what more is there to say? Much more, (...) I argue. "If you love me, kiss me", a conditional imperative, mixes a declarative antecedent ("you love me") with an imperative consequent ("kiss me"); it is satisfied if you love and kiss me, violated if you love but don't kiss me, and avoided if you don't love me. So we need a logic of three -valued imperatives which mixes declaratives with imperatives. I develop such a logic. (shrink)

Noh (1998a, b) analyzes echo questions in terms of metarepresentation and pragmatic enrichment within the framework of Relevance Theory. This paper argues that while the basic idea of metarepresentational analysis seems correct, it is better implemented differently. The alternative analysis proposed in this paper consists of three claims: first, echo questions are metarepresentational with rising intonation, with the rise alone conferring the question status; second, echo questions question the pragmatically enriched attribution; third, the focus of metarepresentation is to be distinguished (...) from the rest of the metarepresentation. This version of metarepresentational analysis reveals why echo questions behave the way they do, both syntactically and semantically/pragmatically. At the same time, this analysis captures not only similarities but also differences between echo questions and interrogatives on a principled basis. (shrink)

Peter Hanks and Scott Soames both defend pragmatic solutions to the problem of the unity of the proposition. According to them, what ties together Tim and baldness in the singular proposition expressed by ‘Tim is bald’ is an act of the speaker : the act of predicating baldness of Tim. But Soames construes that act as force neutral and noncommittal while, for Hanks, it is inherently assertive and committal. Hanks answers the Frege–Geach challenge by arguing that, in complex sentences, the (...) force inherent in the content of an embedded sentence is cancelled. Indrek Reiland has recently objected to Hanks’s proposal that it faces a dilemma: either force cancellation dissolves the unity of the proposition secured by the cancelled act of assertion, or Hanks’s proposal reduces to Soames’s. In this paper, I respond to Reiland by offering an analysis of force cancellation which gets rid of the alleged dilemma. The proposal is based on a set of distinctions from speech act theory : between two senses of ’force’, two types of act, and two types of context. The role of simulation in force cancellation is emphasized, and connections drawn to broader issues such as the evolution of complex language. (shrink)

In this survey paper, I start from two classical theses of speech act theory: that speech act content is uniformly propositional and that sentence mood encodes illocutionary force. These theses have been questioned in recent work, both in philosophy and linguistics. The force/content distinction itself – a cornerstone of 20‐century philosophy of language – has come to be rejected by some theorists, unmoved by the famous ‘Frege–Geach’ argument. The paper reviews some of these debates.

Moral Expressivists typically concede that, in some minimal sense, moral sentences are truth-apt but claim that in some more robust sense they are not. The Immodest Disciplined Syntacticist, a species of minimalist about truth, raises a doubt as to whether this contrast can be made out. I here address this challenge by motivating and describing a distinction between reducibly and irreducibly truth-apt sentences. In the light of this distinction the Disciplined Syntacticist must either adopt a more modest version of his (...) theory, friendlier to Expressivism, or substantially modify it, abandoning one of its central conditions on truth-aptness. One natural and promising such modification, the Pure Discipline View, is described and its implications for an understanding of Expressivism briefly discussed. (shrink)

Summary Ordinary language philosophers frequently draw on the fact that an appropriately selected sentential combination of the form p but not q can, or cannot, be uttered without absurdity; however, they do so without sufficient reflection on the methodology of such combination tests, which results in considerable shortcomings even in practical application. To improve things, I shall discuss two criteria for distinguishing ‘pragmatic’ from ‘non-pragmatic’ implications and for separating the latter into ‘linguistic’ (‘semantic’ and ‘syntactical’) and ‘non-linguistic’ ones (2–3); consider (...) the bearing of the principle of ‘sense-constancy‘ on the applicability of combination tests (4); and call attention to the important, though merely heuristic, function of investigating pragmatic, as opposed to semantic, implications (5.1–5.2). Finally, I shall hint at a striking analogy between the linguistic (yet non-empirical) method of combination tests, the phenomenological method of ‘fictional variation’, and the empirical method of ‘conjectures and refutations’ (5.3). (shrink)

In this paper I defend against a certain objection the view that it is possible to account for validity and kindred notions for moral language within a non-cognitivist framework by appeal to the descriptive meaning of moral terms. The objection is that such an account leads to an asymmetry in the accounts it offers for synonymy in different contexts; in certain contexts it holds that sameness of meaning for a moral term depends on its evaluative meaning, in other contexts that (...) it depends on the term's descriptive meaning. In the third part of the paper I try to show why non-cognitivists should be prepared to live with that asymmetry. In the process I also deal with two other objections. (shrink)

This volume consists of the invited papers presented at the 23rd International Wittgenstein Conference held in Kirchberg, Austria in August 2000. Among the topics treated are: truth, psychologism, science, the nature of rational discourse, practical reason, contextualism, vagueness, types of rationality, the rationality of religious belief, and Wittgenstein. Questions addressed include: Is rationality tied to special sorts of contexts? ls rationality tied to language? Is scientific rationality the only kind of rationality? Is there something like a Western rationality? and: Could (...) we genetically engineer human beings to be less wicked? (shrink)

The so-called ‘central problem’ of internalism has been formulated like this: one cannot concurrently maintain the following three philosophical positions without inconsistency: internalism about practical reason, moral rationalism, and moral absolutism. Since internalism about practical reason is the most controversial of these, the suggestion is that it is the one that is best abandoned. In this paper, I point towards a response to this problem by sketching a deontic logic of internal reasons that deflates moral normativity to the normativity of (...) instrumental rationality, and provides support for the assertion that one can hold fast simultaneously to internalism and at least many of the intuitive commitments of liberal moral thinking. Crucial to the proposal is an account of the enkratic principle – I ought to attempt to realise what I ultimately desire – as the source of obligations we owe to ourselves. I attempt to show how from this, in conjunction with some plausible assumptions, obligations to others might be derived. (shrink)