The Operator Argument against eternalism holds that having non-vacuous tense operators in the language is incompatible with the claim that every proposition has its truth-value eternally. Assuming that (1) there are non-vacuous tense operators, (2) tense operators operate on propositions and (3) tense operators which operate on eternal entities are vacuous, it may be argued that eternalism is false. In this paper, I examine the Operator Argument. The goal is threefold. First, I want to present some aspects of the debate (...) in a more elaborate way, especially those concerning formal matters. Secondly, I will argue that eternalism can escape the Operator Argument. There are two main strategies for handling the Operator Argument. The first one is based on replacing temporal operators with object-language quantifiers. The second rejects the identification of compositional semantic value with assertoric content. My third goal is to show that none of them is as good as the strategy that adopts Timestamp Semantics (Fritz in Philosl Stud 176:2933–2959, 2019). I am going to argue that the quantificational treatment of tenses is compatible with temporalism and that the arguments for rejecting the identification of compositional semantic value with assertoric content provide, in fact, a motivation for the temporalist position. At the end, I will develop Timestamp Semantics by providing a novel formalization of it, and defend it against three potential counter-arguments. (shrink)

Causal claims are context sensitive. According to the old orthodoxy (Mackie 1974, Lewis 1986, inter alia), the context sensitivity of causal claims is all due to conversational pragmatics. According to the new contextualists (Hitchcock 1996, Woodward 2003, Maslen 2004, Menzies 2004, Schaffer 2005, and Hall ms), at least some of the context sensitivity of causal claims is semantic in nature. I want to discuss the prospects for causal contextualism, by asking why causal claims are context sensitive, what they are sensitive (...) to, and where they are sensitive to it. (shrink)

Attempts to characterize unarticulated constituents (henceforth: UCs) by means of quantification over the parts of a sentence and the constituents of the proposition it expresses come to grief in more complicated cases than are commonly considered. In particular, UC definitions are inadequate when we consider cases in which the same constituent appears more than once in a proposition that only has one word with the constituent as its semantic value. This article explores some consequences of trying to repair the formal (...) definitions. (shrink)

I defend the claim that it is possible for thoughts to be context-sensitive. Assuming that a thought is a sentence of Mentalese and content is a function from indices to truth-values, then a thought, T, is context-sensitive IFF at least one of the following three conditions are met: T exhibits character-underdeterminacy, where T is character underdetermined iff a component of T makes an explicit reference to the context to establish content. T exhibits type-underdeterminacy, where T is type underdetermined iff there (...) are tokens of T that have distinct truth-values. T is token-underdetermined, where T is token underdetermined iff for some possible states of affairs its truth-value is indeterminate. Additionally, there must be a mechanism by which the content of T can be determined by appeal to the context. Otherwise T is not sensitive to the context. The most significant objection to the possibility of context-sensitive thoughts comes from a regress argument. The concern is that any process of removing context-sensitivity from a thought will token an additional thought. If that further thought is context-sensitive, then another thought will have to be tokened. This process will only terminate when a non-context-sensitive thought is arrived at. Yet this seems to show that context-sensitivity in thought, if possible, can only be a contingent, detachable feature of thoughts. To counter this argument, I will present three versions of context-sensitive thought, mirroring each of -. These views make use of a range of relationships between thoughts and their contents or extensions that are affected by the context, but I will argue they do not require the generation of an additional thought. This provides a range of views on which thoughts can be treated as essentially context-sensitive. (shrink)

The essays in this volume concern the points of intersection between analytic philosophy and the philosophy of the exact sciences. More precisely, it concern connections between knowledge in mathematics and the exact sciences, on the one hand, and the conceptual foundations of knowledge in general. Its guiding idea is that, in contemporary philosophy of science, there are profound problems of theoretical interpretation-- problems that transcend both the methodological concerns of general philosophy of science, and the technical concerns of philosophers of (...) particular sciences. A fruitful approach to these problems combines the study of scientific detail with the kind of conceptual analysis that is characteristic of the modern analytic tradition. Such an approach is shared by these contributors: some primarily known as analytic philosophers, some as philosophers of science, but all deeply aware that the problems of analysis and interpretation link these fields together. (shrink)

Relative to an ordinary context, an utterance of the sentence ‘Everything is in the car’ communicates a proposition about a restricted domain. But how does this work? One possibility is that quantifier expressions like 'everything' are context sensitive and range over different domains in different contexts. Another possibility is that quantifier expressions are not context sensitive, but have a fixed, absolutely general meaning, and ordinary utterances communicate a restricted content via Gricean mechanisms. I argue that, contrary to received opinion, the (...) latter view has both a number of methodological and also intuitive advantages over the former. I then reply to three objections to the latter view: the binding argument (due to Stanley and Szabo), the availability-based attack (due to Recanati), and an argument based on Recanati’s scope principle. (shrink)

John MacFarlane explores how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative. He provides new, satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis, including what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do.

Does G. E. Moore know that he has hands? Yes, says the dogmatist: Moore’s hands are right before his eyes. No, says the skeptic: for all Moore knows he could be a brain-in-a-vat. Yes and no, says the contrastivist: yes, Moore knows that he has hands rather than stumps; but no, Moore does not know that he has hands rather than vat-images of hands. The dogmatist and the skeptic suppose that knowledge is a binary, categorical relation: s knows that p. (...) The contrastivist says that knowledge is a ternary, contrastive relation: s knows that p rather than q. (shrink)

The problem analysed in this paper is whether we can gain knowledge by using valid inferences, and how we can explain this process from a model-theoretic perspective. According to the paradox of inference (Cohen & Nagel 1936/1998, 173), it is logically impossible for an inference to be both valid and its conclusion to possess novelty with respect to the premises. I argue in this paper that valid inference has an epistemic significance, i.e., it can be used by an agent to (...) enlarge his knowledge, and this significance can be accounted in model-theoretic terms. I will argue first that the paradox is based on an equivocation, namely, it arises because logical containment, i.e., logical implication, is identified with epistemological containment, i.e., the knowledge of the premises entails the knowledge of the conclusion. Second, I will argue that a truth-conditional theory of meaning has the necessary resources to explain the epistemic significance of valid inferences. I will explain this epistemic significance starting from Carnap’s semantic theory of meaning and Tarski’s notion of satisfaction. In this way I will counter (Prawitz 2012b)’s claim that a truth-conditional theory of meaning is not able to account the legitimacy of valid inferences, i.e., their epistemic significance. (shrink)

Introduction to Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics, 2007, Oxford University Press, (eds. Preyer and Peter).

One may distinguish between three broad conceptions of linguistic meaning. One conception, which I will call “logical”, views meaning as given in reference (for words) and truth (for sentences). Another conception, the “monological” one, seeks meaning in the cognitive capacities of the single mind. A third, “dialogical”, conception attributes meaning to interaction between individuals and personal perspectives. In this chapter I directly contrast how well these three approaches deal with the evidence brought forth by fictive interaction. I examine instances of (...) fictive interaction and argue that intersubjectivity in these instances cannot be reduced to either referential-logical or individual-cognitive semantic notions. It follows that intersubjectivity must belong to the essence of linguistic meaning. (shrink)

In a very recent paper (2010), Dominic McIver Lopes has claimed that pictures perceptually ground demonstrative reference to depicted objects. If as I think Lopes is right, this has important consequences for the debate on the semantics/pragmatics divide. For one can exploit Lopes' claim in order to provide one more argument in favour of the well-known contextualist thesis that wide context has not only both a pre- and a post-semantic role, but also a semantic role – to put it in (...) Perry's (1997) terms. (shrink)

Attempts to clarify some issues about the use of hidden arguments to predicates of personal taste, and motivate an analysis which does not make use of such arguments.

Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as (...) a correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfil two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and to semantics. This thesis has a negative and a positive side. The negative side is that a deeply rooted presumption about logical form turns out to be overly optimistic: there is no unique notion of logical form that can play both roles. The positive side is that the distinction between two notions of logical form, once properly spelled out, sheds light on some fundamental issues concerning the relation between logic and language. (shrink)

There are good reasons to think natural languages are compositional. But compound nominals (CNs) are largely productive constructions that have proven highly recalcitrant to compositional semantic analysis. I evaluate existing proposals to treat CNs compositionally and argue that they are unsuccessful. I then articulate an alternative proposal according to which CNs contain covert indexicals. Features of the context allow a variety of relations to be expressed using CNs, but this variety is not expressed in the lexicon or the semantic rules (...) of the language. This proposal accounts for the diversity of contents CNs can be used to express while preserving compositionality. Finally, I defend this proposal against some recent anti-contextualist arguments. (shrink)

We identify two senses of ‘pragmatics’ and related terms that give rise to two different methods of propositional individuation. The first one is the contextualist approach that essentially acknowledges contextual information to take part in the determination of what is said by the utterance of a sentence. In this sense, Pragmatics relies on the Principle of Compositionality and interprets propositions as structured entities. It epitomises the Building-block Model of Propositional Individuation. The general approach that makes what the agents do the (...) grounding level of philosophical and linguistic analysis characterizes the second sense, Pragmatism. It finds its clearest expression in Peirce’s Pragmatist Maxim, and it relies on the Fregean Principle of Context, and supports a view of propositions as unstructured entities. This is the Organic Model of Propositional Individuation. There is a test, the Analytic Equivalence Test, that tells apart the two models. According to it, the answer to the question whether a theory makes room for different but analytically equivalent propositions determines the model the theory belongs in. A positive answer classifies the theory as belonging to the building-block model; a negative answer allocates the theory within the organic model. (shrink)

One recurrent objection against minimalism is that minimal contents have no theoretical role. It has recently been argued that minimal contents serve to draw the distinction between lying and misleading. In Sect. 1 and Sect. 2 I summarise the main argument in support of that claim and contend that it is inconclusive. In Sect. 3 I discuss some cases of lying and some of misleading that raise difficulties for minimalism. In Sect. 4 I make a diagnosis of the failure of (...) minimalism with those cases. In Sect. 5 I strengthen the case against minimal contents by addressing two received says-based definitions of lying. My analysis of the failure of minimalism suggests that the distinction between lying and misleading, at least in some important cases, calls for a kind of utterance content that is grounded on conventions of language. (shrink)

Siguiendo la aproximación de C. Peacocke, desarrollaré una explicación del autoconocimiento psicológico en términos de los estados y contenidos involucrados en la transición desde un estado mental consciente a un juicio de orden superior. Ahora bien, parece que la mera conciencia de un estado mental no representa explícitamente o hace manifiesto de algún modo al sujeto de ese estado, en cuyo caso esto plantea una objeción à la Lichtenberg a la explicación de Peacocke. Tras adoptar una teoría auto-representacional del carácter (...) subjetivo de la experiencia, argumentaré que la representación mediante la cual una experiencia consciente se representa a sí misma como sí misma tiene un contenido de se implícito. Es así una explicación que excluye una objeción à la Lichtenberg porque el uso de la primera persona en un juicio de orden superior resulta ser dependiente de contenido. (shrink)

In this paper, I give an account of degree achievements in Southern Aymara, an understudied Andean language. I focus on degree achievements that are derived from gradable bases by means of the verbal suffix -cha, e.g., llusk’a -cha-ña ‘to straighten’ or q’añu -cha-ña ‘to dirty’. I provide arguments suggesting that Aymara should be analyzed as a degree language :1–48, 2015b). I further propose an analysis of Aymara degree achievements in terms of a differential measure function Adjectives and adverbs: syntax, semantics (...) and discourse. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 156–182, 2008) The main point argued for in this paper is that this language has two degree morphemes in competition Semantik: ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp 487–535, 1991) combining with degree achievements, namely, a covert verbal positive morpheme v.pos and the overt morpheme -su. The latter restricts the standard of comparison to change where maximal values are reached, so it is preferred over v.pos when such values are targeted. v.pos is thus felicitous when the maximum is not reached. I propose an initial typology that distinguishes how telicity is achieved cross-linguistically when degree achievements are considered. (shrink)

I identify a notion of compositionality at the intersection of the different notions philosophers, linguists, and psychologists are concerned with. The notion is compositionality of expression content: the idea that the content of a complex expression in a context of its utterance is determined by its syntactic structure and the contents of its constituents in the contexts of their respective utterances. Traditional arguments from productivity and systematicity cannot establish that the contents of linguistic expressions are compositionally determined in this sense. (...) I present a novel argument for this thesis. (shrink)

This paper defends a novel view of ‘what it is like’-sentences, according to which they attribute certain sorts of relations—I call them ‘affective relations’—that hold between events and individuals. The paper argues in detail for the superiority of this proposal over other views that are prevalent in the literature. The paper further argues that the proposal makes better sense than the alternatives of the widespread use of Nagel’s definition of conscious states and that it also shows the mistakes in two (...) prominent suggestions about the definition when properly understood: first, that it is empty and uninformative, and second, that it leads directly to a substantial claim in the theory of consciousness, namely that an individual is in a conscious state only if the individual is aware of their being in that state. (shrink)

In this paper, I take issue with an idea that has emerged from recent relativist proposals, and, in particular, from Lasersohn, according to which the correct semantics for taste predicates must use contents that are functions of a judge parameter rather than implicit arguments lexically associated with such predicates. I argue that the relativist account and the contextualist implicit argument-account are, from the viewpoint of semantics, not much more than notational variants of one another. In other words, given any sentence (...) containing a taste predicate, and given any assignment of values to the relevant parameters, the two accounts predict the same truth value and are, in that sense, equivalent. I also look at possible reasons for preferring one account over the other. The phenomenon of "faultless disagreement" is often believed to be one such reason. I argue, against Kölbel and Lasersohn, that disagreement is never faultless: either the two parties genuinely disagree, hence if the one is right then the other is wrong, or the two parties are both right, but their apparent disagreement boils down to a misunderstanding. What is more, even if there were faultless disagreement, I argue that relativism would fail to account for it. The upshot of my paper, then, is to show that there is not much disagreement between a contextualist account that models the judge parameter as an implicit argument to the taste predicate, and a relativist account that models it as a parameter of the circumstances of evaluation. The choice between the two accounts, at least when talking about taste, is thus, to a large extent, a matter of taste. (shrink)

Our paper discusses Recanati’s application of the mental files apparatus to reports of beliefs and other attitudes. While mental files appear early on in Recanati’s work on belief-reports, his latest book introduces the concept of indexed files (a.k.a. vicarious files) and puts it to work to explain how we can report other people’s attitudes and to account for opacity phenomena. Our goal is twofold: we show that the approach in Recanati’s Mental Files (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) departs significantly from (...) his earlier proposals as well as from the very spirit of truth-conditional pragmatics; and we argue that the indexed files approach, qua an attempt to provide a semantics for belief-reports, is untenable. -/- . (shrink)

This article discusses recent work on lying and its relation to deceiving and misleading. Two new developments in this area are considered: first, the acknowledgment of the phenomenon of lying without the intent to deceive , and second, recent work on the distinction between lying and merely misleading. Both are discussed in relation to topics in philosophy of language, the epistemology of testimony, and ethics. Critical surveys of recent theories are offered and challenges and open questions for further research are (...) indicated. (shrink)

The paper argues that the correct definition of lying is that to lie is to assert something one believes to be false, where assertion is understood in terms of the notion of the common ground of a conversation. It is shown that this definition makes the right predictions for a number of cases involving irony, joking, and false implicature. In addition, the proposed account does not assume that intending to deceive is a necessary condition on lying, and hence counts so-called (...) bald-faced lies as lies. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there are good motivations for a relativist account of the domain-sensitivity of quantifier phrases. I will frame the problem as a puzzle involving what looks like a logically valid inference, yet one whose premises are true while the conclusion is false. After discussing some existing accounts, literalist and contextualist, I will present and argue for an account that may be said to be relativist in the following sense: (i) a domain of quantification is required (...) for determining truth value, but is idle in determining semantic content, and (ii) the same sentence, as used on one and the same occasion, may receive different truth values relative to different domains. (shrink)

This paper examines the place of metaphorical interpretation in the current Contextualist-Literalist controversy over the role of context in the determination of truth-conditions in general. Although there has been considerable discussion of 'non-literal' language by both sides of this dispute, the language analyzed involves either so-called implicit indexicality, loose or loosened use, enriched interpretations, or semantic transfer, not metaphor itself. In the first half of the paper, I critically evaluate Recanati's (2004) recent Contextualist account and show that it cannot account (...) for the metaphorical-literal dependence characteristic of metaphor. I then turn to Carston's (2002), and Bezuidenhout's (2001) Contextualist accounts and show that they place no constraints on metaphorical interpretations. In the second half of the paper I sketch a Literalist theory of metaphor elaborated in Stern (2000) and respond to two kinds of Contextualist criticisms of that account by Camp (2005) and Stanley (2005). (shrink)

This paper examines the place of metaphorical interpretation in the current Contextualist‐Literalist controversy over the role of context in the determination of truth‐conditions in general. Although there has been considerable discussion of ‘non‐literal’ language by both sides of this dispute, the language analyzed involves either so‐called implicit indexicality, loose or loosened use, enriched interpretations, or semantic transfer, not metaphor itself. In the first half of the paper, I critically evaluate Recanati’s (2004) recent Contextualist account and show that it cannot account (...) for the metaphorical‐literal dependence characteristic of metaphor. I then turn to Carston’s (2002), and Bezuidenhout’s (2001) Contextualist accounts and show that they place no constraints on metaphorical interpretations. In the second half of the paper I sketch a Literalist theory of metaphor elaborated in Stern (2000) and respond to two kinds of Contextualist criticisms of that account by Camp (2005) and Stanley (2005). (shrink)

This paper argues first that, contrary to what one would expect, metaphorical interpretations of utterances pass two of Cappelan and Lepore's Minimalist tests for semantic context-sensitivity. I then propose how, in light of that result, one might analyze metaphors on the model of indexicals and demonstratives, expressions that (even) Minimalists agree are semantically context-dependent. This analysis builds on David Kaplan's semantics for demonstratives and refines an earlier proposal in (Stern, Metaphor in context, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000). In the course of (...) this argument, I also discuss some new examples of linguistic phenomena that motivate a semantic structure underlying metaphorical interpretation, phenomena I argue that neither Minimalists nor Contextualists can explain. (shrink)

This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind.

The central issue of this essay is whether contextualism in epistemology is genuinely in conflict with recent claims that ‘know’ is not in fact a contextsensitive word. To address this question, I will first rehearse three key aims of contextualists and the broad strategy they adopt for achieving them. I then introduce two linguistic arguments to the effect that the lexical item ‘know’ is not context sensitive, one from Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore, one from Jason Stanley. I find these (...) and related arguments quite compelling. In particular, I think Cappelen and Lepore (2003, 2005a) show pretty definitively that ‘know’ is not like ‘I’/‘here’/‘now’, and Stanley (2004) shows that ‘know’ is not like ‘tall’/‘rich’.1 One could try to find another model for ‘know’. Instead, I consider whether one can rescue ‘‘the spirit of contextualism in epistemology’’—that is, achieve its aims by deploying a strategy of appealing to speaker context—even while granting that ‘know’ isn’t a context-sensitive word at all. My conclusion, in a nutshell, is this: If there are pragmatic determinants of what is asserted/stated, and contextualism can overcome independent problems not having to do specifically with the context-sensitivity of the word ‘know’, then the spirit of contextualism can be salvaged. Even though, for reasons sketched by the aforementioned authors, ‘know’ doesn’t actually belong in the class of context-sensitive words. (shrink)

Scott Soames’s book The World Philosophy Made is a history of ideas spanning from the ancient Greeks until today.1 1 At nearly 400 pages of tightly printed text, the book is enormous in its scope, surveying ideas not only in philosophy but also in physics, mathematical logic, cognitive science, economics, linguistics, social science, legal theory and more. Among the topics discussed in detail are: the debate about immanent vs. transcendent forms; the Thomistic synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology; the (...) heliocentric model of the solar system and retrograde planetary motion; set-theoretic reductions of number and the question of whether set theory counts as logic; Gödel’s completeness and incompleteness proofs; the Chomskian revolution in linguistics; public choice theory; the representational theory of mind; special and general relativity; the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics; the libertarian challenge to Rawlsian liberalism; the relation between Marx’s philosophy and 20th century socialist political movements; the rise of the administrative state; the role of evolution and child development in the acquisition of moral sentiments; and death and the meaning of life. This is by no means a complete list. (shrink)

A thorny question surrounding the meaning of ought concerns a felt distinction between deontic uses of ought that seem to evaluate a state of affairs versus those that seem to describe a requirement or obligation to perform an action, as in and, respectively. There ought not be childhood death and disease. You ought to keep that promise. Various accounts have been offered to explain the contrast between “agentive” and “non-agentive” ought sentences. One such account is the Agency-in-the-Prejacent theory, which traces (...) the difference to a particular kind of ambiguity in the prejacent. This theory has been criticized as linguistically unviable. Indeed, I level a few novel complaints against AIP myself in the present paper. But AIP has a kernel of genuine insight which allows us to explain the contrast—that the distinction between agentive and non-agentive ought sentences owes in part to the way natural language encodes information about agency. I develop this idea into a novel account that, like AIP, traces the contrast to an ambiguity in the complement of the modal. However, according to the view I propose, the Coercion View, a linguistically-motivated coercion operation produces the necessary grammatical conditions for agentive ought, which in turn allow a kind of variadic function operator in the style of to produce the semantic effect we see on display in agentive readings of ought. Having explained the mechanism by which we get this structure, I show that it corroborates some of the central intuitions underwriting agentive ought. I submit that the Coercion View offers an explanation of agentive ought to take at least as seriously as any of its competitors. (shrink)

A standard objection to Cappelen and Lepore’s Semantic Minimalism is that minimal propositions are explanatorily idle. But Schoubye and Stokke recently proposed that minimal proposition and the question under discussion of a conversation jointly determine what is said in a systematic and explanatory way. This note argues that their account both overgenerates and undergenerates.

I argue for an account of semantic paradox that requires minimal logical revision. I first consider a phenomenon that is common to the paradoxes of definability, Russell’s paradox and the Liar. The phenomenon—which I call Repetition—is this: given a paradoxical expression, we can go on to produce a semantically unproblematic expression composed of the very same words. I argue that Kripke’s and Field’s theories of truth make heavy weather of Repetition, and suggest a simpler contextual account. I go on to (...) outline a ‘singularity’ theory of semantical predicates in the spirit of remarks of Gödel. According to this theory, ‘denotes’, ‘extension’ and ‘true’ are context-sensitive expression that apply almost everywhere on a given occasion of use, except for certain singular points. I then turn to revenge paradoxes, and argue that even the dialetheist is subject to revenge. I then examine how the singularity theory responds to revenge. (shrink)

A number of recent accounts for vague terms postulate a kind of context-sensitivity, one that kicks in after the usual ‘external’ contextual factors like comparison class are established and held fixed. In a recent paper, ‘Vagueness without Context Change’: 275–92), Rosanna Keefe criticizes all such accounts. The arguments are variations on considerations that have been brought against context-sensitive accounts of knowledge, predicates of personal taste, epistemic modals, and the like. The issues are well known and there are variety of options (...) available in reply. More important, the arguments rely on an overly narrow conception of context-sensitivity, suggesting that one size fits all. If Keefe’s arguments were cogent, they would tell against the context-sensitivity of just about any expression, beyond the typical indexicals, including the variation of vague terms with comparison class. However, the criticisms raised by Keefe do highlight certain questions that must be answered by an advo... (shrink)

In an insightful and provocative paper, Jessica Rett (2006) claims that attempts to locate the (non-indexical, non-demonstrative) semantic contributions of context in syntax run into problems respecting compositionality. This is an especially biting problem for hidden indexical theorists such as Stanley (2000, 2002) who deploy hidden variables to provide a compositional theory of semantic interpretation. Fortunately for the hidden indexical theorists, her attack fails, albeit in interesting and subtle ways. The following paper is divided into four sections. Section I presents (...) a skeletal version of Rett’s argument. Those already familiar with Rett (2006) can skip ahead without shame. Section II offers a .. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that certain sentences of natural language fail to express truth conditional contents. Standard examples include e.g. Tipper is ready and Steel is strong enough. In this paper, we provide a novel analysis of truth conditional meaning using the notion of a question under discussion. This account explains why these types of sentences are not, in fact, semantically underdetermined, provides a principled analysis of the process by which natural language sentences can come to have enriched meanings in (...) context, and shows why various alternative views, e.g. so-called Radical Contextualism, Moderate Contextualism, and Semantic Minimalism, are partially right in their respective analyses of the problem, but also all ultimately wrong. Our analysis achieves this result using a standard truth conditional and compositional semantics and without making any assumptions about enriched logical forms, i.e. logical forms containing phonologically null expressions. (shrink)

Contextualism treats ‘knows’ as an indexical that denotes different epistemic properties in different contexts. Contrastivism treats ‘knows’ as denoting a ternary relation with a slot for a contrast proposition. I will argue that contrastivism resolves the main philosophical problems of contextualism, by employing a better linguistic model. Contextualist insights are best understood by contrastivist theory.

Causation is widely assumed to be a binary relation: c causes e. I will argue that causation is a quaternary, contrastive relation: c rather than C* causes e rather than E*, where C* and E* are nonempty sets of contrast events. Or at least, I will argue that treating causation as contrastive helps resolve some paradoxes.

We discuss the challenge to truth-conditional semantics presented by apparent shifts in extension of predicates such as ‘red’. We propose an explicit indexical semantics for ‘red’ and argue that our account is preferable to the alternatives on conceptual and empirical grounds.

In a recent paper (Linguistics and Philosophy 23, 4, June 2000), Jason Stanley argues that there are no `unarticulated constituents', contrary to what advocates of Truth-conditional pragmatics (TCP) have claimed. All truth-conditional effects of context can be traced to logical form, he says. In this paper I maintain that there are unarticulated constituents, and I defend TCP. Stanley's argument exploits the fact that the alleged unarticulated constituents can be `bound', that is, they can be made to vary with the values (...) introduced by operators in the sentence. I show that Stanley's argument rests on a fallacy, and I provide alternative analyses of the data. (shrink)

The received view about meteorological predicates like ‘rain’ is that they carry an argument slot for a location which can be filled explicitly or implicitly. The view assumes that ‘rain’, in the absence of an explicit location, demands that the context provide a specific location. In an earlier article in this journal, I provided a counter-example, viz. a context in which ‘it is raining’ receives a location-indefinite interpretation. On the basis of that example, I argued that when there is tacit (...) references to a location, it takes place for pragmatic reasons and casts no light on the semantics of meteorological predicates. Since then, several authors have reanalysed the counter-example, so as to make it compatible with the standard view. I discuss those attempts and argue that my account is superior. (shrink)

Conversational implicatures do not normally fall within the scope of operators because they arise at the speech act level, not at the level of sub-locutionary constituents. Yet in some cases they do, or so it seems. My aim in this paper is to compare different approaches to the problem raised by what I call 'embedded implicatures': seeming implicatures that arise locally, at a sub-locutionary level, without resulting from an inference in the narrow sense.

Abstract -/- Quantifier domain restriction (QDR) and two versions of nominal restriction (NR) are implemented as restrictions that depend on a previously introduced interpreter and interpretation time in a two-dimensional semantic framework on the basis of simple type theory and categorial grammar. Against Stanley (2002) it is argued that a suitable version of QDR can deal with superlatives like tallest. However, it is shown that NR is needed to account for utterances when the speaker intends to convey different restrictions for (...) multiple uses of the same quantifying determiner. We argue that NR generally fares better with such examples but also observe that examples like Every sailor waves at every sailor might be pragmatically anomalous. An account of contextual domain restriction is proposed that (i) excludes these anomalous readings (but it is shown how they could be included), (ii) makes it possible to express different contextual domain restrictions as long-range dependencies on an interpreter and an interpretation time, and (iii) additionally models restrictions based on locative constructions as general mereological constraints introduced by shifting the index. (shrink)

Since Kaplan : 81–98, 1979) first provided a logic for context-sensitive expressions, it has been thought that the only way to construct a logic for indexicals is to restrict it to arguments which take place in a single context— that is, instantaneous arguments, uttered by a single speaker, in a single place, etc. In this paper, I propose a logic which does away with these restrictions, and thus places arguments where they belong, in real world conversations. The central innovation is (...) that validity depends not just on the sentences in the argument, but also on certain abstract relations between contexts. This enrichment of the notion of logical form leads to some seemingly counter-intuitive results: a sequence of sentences may make up a valid argument in one sequence of contexts, and an invalid one in another such sequence. I argue that this is an unavoidable result of context sensitivity in general, and of the nature of indexicals in particular, and that reflection on such examples will lead us to a better understanding of the idea of applying logic to context sensitive expressions, and thus to natural language in general. (shrink)

Kaplan (1989a) insists that natural languages do not contain displacing devices that operate on character—such displacing devices are called monsters. This thesis has recently faced various empirical challenges (e.g., Schlenker 2003; Anand and Nevins 2004). In this note, the thesis is challenged on grounds of a more theoretical nature. It is argued that the standard compositional semantics of variable binding employs monstrous operations. As a dramatic first example, Kaplan’s formal language, the Logic of Demonstratives, is shown to contain monsters. For (...) similar reasons, the orthodox lambda-calculus-based semantics for variable binding is argued to be monstrous. This technical point promises to provide some far-reaching implications for our understanding of semantic theory and content. The theoretical upshot of the discussion is at least threefold: (i) the Kaplanian thesis that “directly referential” terms are not shiftable/bindable is unmotivated, (ii) since monsters operate on something distinct from the assertoric content of their operands, we must distinguish ingredient sense from assertoric content (cf. Dummett 1973; Evans 1979; Stanley 1997), and (iii) since the case of variable binding provides a paradigm of semantic shift that differs from the other types, it is plausible to think that indexicals—which are standardly treated by means of the assignment function—might undergo the same kind of shift. (shrink)

This essay investigates whether or not we should think that the things we say are identical to the things our sentences mean. It is argued that these theoretical notions should be distinguished, since assertoric content does not respect the compositionality principle. As a paradigmatic example, Kaplan's formal language LD is shown to exemplify a failure of compositionality. It is demonstrated that by respecting the theoretical distinction between the objects of assertion and compositional values certain conflicts between compositionality and contextualism are (...) avoided. This includes the conflict between eternalism and the semantics of tense, the embedding problems for contextualism about epistemic modals and taste claims, and the conflict between direct reference and the semantics of bound pronouns (and monstrous operators). After presenting the theoretical picture which distinguishes assertoric content from compositional semantic value, some objections to the picture are addressed. In so doing, the objection from King (2003) stemming from apparent complications with the interaction of temporal expressions and attitude reports is assessed and shown to be non-threatening. (shrink)

This essay argues that cases of apparently sub-sentential speech, such as Charles’ utterance of ‘a world famous topologist’ in the presence of a suitably salient woman, are unproblematic from the viewpoint of the Traditional View of meaning and truth-conditions. My argument is grounded on the distinction between different senses of ‘truth-conditions’ in double-index semantics, and on an understanding of semantic inputs as constraints on logical forms. Given these conceptual resources, I argue that an utterly traditional understanding of the relationships between (...) meaning and truth yields the intuitively desired results. (shrink)