25 found
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  1. Descriptions and Tests for Polysemy.Andrei Moldovan - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (3):229-249.
    Viebahn (2018) has recently argued that several tests for ambiguity, such as the conjunction-reduction test, are not reliable as tests for polysemy, but only as tests for homonymy. I look at the more fine-grained distinction between regular and irregular polysemy and I argue for a more nuanced conclusion: the tests under discussion provide systematic evidence for homonymy and irregular polysemy but need to be used with more care to test for regular polysemy. I put this conclusion at work in the (...)
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  2.  60
    Pragmatic Considerations in the Interpretation of Denying the Antecedent.Andrei Moldovan - 2009 - Informal Logic 29 (3):309-326.
    In this paper I am concerned with the analysis of fragments of a discourse or text that express arguments suspected of being denials of the antecedent. I first argue that one needs to distinguish between two senses of ‘the argument expressed’. Second, I show that, with respect to one of these senses, given a Gricean account of the pragmatics of conditionals, some such fragments systematically express arguments that are valid.
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  3.  28
    Arguments as abstract objects.Paul Simard Smith, Andrei Moldovan & G. C. Goddu - unknown
    In recent discussions concerning the definition of argument, it has been maintained that the word ‘argument’ exhibits the process-product ambiguity, or an act/object ambi-guity. Drawing on literature on lexical ambiguity we argue that ‘argument’ is not ambiguous. The term ‘argument’ refers to an object, not to a speech act. We also examine some of the important implications of our argument by considering the question: what sort of abstract objects are arguments?
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  4. Arguments as Abstract Objects.Paul L. Simard Smith & Andrei Moldovan - 2011 - Informal Logic 31 (3):230-261.
    In recent discussions concerning the definition of argument, it has been maintained that the word ‘argument’ exhibits the process-product ambiguity, or an act/object ambigu-ity. Drawing on literature on lexical ambiguity we argue that ‘argument’ is not ambiguous. The term ‘argu-ment’ refers to an object, not to a speech act. We also examine some of the important implications of our argument by considering the question: what sort of abstract objects are arguments?
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  5. Resources for Research on Analogy: A Multi-disciplinary Guide.Marcello Guarini, Amy Butchart, Paul Simard Smith & Andrei Moldovan - 2009 - Informal Logic 29 (2):84-197.
    Work on analogy has been done from a number of disciplinary perspectives throughout the history of Western thought. This work is a multidisciplinary guide to theorizing about analogy. It contains 1,406 references, primarily to journal articles and monographs, and primarily to English language material. classical through to contemporary sources are included. The work is classified into eight different sections (with a number of subsections). A brief introduction to each section is provided. Keywords and key expressions of importance to research on (...)
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  6.  47
    Questions, Presuppositions and Fallacies.Andrei Moldovan - 2022 - Argumentation 36 (2):287-303.
    In this paper I focus on the fallacy known as Complex Question or Many Questions. After a brief introduction, in Sect. 2 I highlight its pragmatic dimension, and in Sect. 3 its dialectical dimension. In Sect. 4 I present two accounts of this fallacy developed in argumentation theory, Douglas Walton’s and the Pragma-Dialectics’, which have resources to capture both its pragmatic and its dialectical nature. However, these accounts are unsatisfactory for various reasons. In Sect. 5 I focus on the pragmatic (...)
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  7. The Real Problem with Uniqueness.Andrei Moldovan - 2017 - SATS 18 (2):125-139.
    Arguments against the Russellian theory of definite descriptions based on cases that involve failures of uniqueness are a recurrent theme in the relevant literature. In this paper, I discuss a number of such arguments, from Strawson (1950), Ramachandran (1993) and Szabo (2005). I argue that the Russellian has resources to account for these data by deploying a variety of mechanisms of quantifier domain restrictions. Finally, I present a case that is more problematic for the Russellian. While the previous cases all (...)
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  8. Arguments, Implicatures and Argumentative Implicatures.Andrei Moldovan - 2012 - In Henrique Jales Ribeiro (ed.), Inside Arguments: Logic And The Study of Argumentation. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishers.
    In the first part of this paper I make some general remarks about the relevance of semantics and pragmatics to argumentation theory, insisting on the importance of the reconstruction of speaker meaning for argument analysis, especially in the case of implicatures. In the second part of the paper I look more closely at the relation between argument and implicature. In the last part I discuss the concept of argumentative implicature, that is, implicatures that are generated by speech acts of arguing. (...)
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  9.  47
    Deference and Stereotypes.Andrei Moldovan - 2016 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 12 (2):55-72.
    In this paper I discuss Hilary Putnam’s view of the conditions that need to be fulfilled for a speaker to successfully defer to a linguistic community for the meaning of a word she uses. In the first part of the paper I defend Putnam’s claim that knowledge of what he calls “stereotypes” is a requirement on linguistic competence. In the second part of the paper I look at two consequences that this thesis has. One of them concerns the choice between (...)
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  10.  32
    Presumptions in Communication.Andrei Moldovan - 2016 - Studia Humana 5 (3):104-117.
    In the first part of this paper I consider the Gricean account of communication, as structured by the Cooperative Principle and the four maxims. Several authors, including Jean Goodwin [10], Fred Kauffeld [17], Michael Gilbert [7], Ernie Lepore and Mathew Stone [22], among others, argue that the Gricean view of communication fails in as much as it pretends to offer an account of all such human interactions. As Goodwin and Kauffeld suggest, a more promising starting point is to consider the (...)
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  11.  52
    Quantifier Domain Restriction, Hidden Variables and Variadic Functions.Andrei Moldovan - 2016 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 3 (23):384-404.
    In this paper I discuss two objections raised against von Fintel’s (1994) and Stanley and Szabó’s (2000a) hidden variable approach to quantifier domain restriction (QDR). One of them concerns utterances of sentences involving quantifiers for which no contextual domain restriction is needed, and the other concerns multiple quantified contexts. I look at various ways in which the approaches could be amended to avoid these problems, and I argue that they fail. I conclude that we need a more flexible account of (...)
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  12. Can Uses of Language in Thought Provide Linguistic Evidence?Andrei Moldovan - 2010 - In Erich Rast & Luiz Carlos Baptista (eds.), Meaning and Context. Peter Lang. pp. 269-291.
    In this article I focus on the argument that Jeff Speaks develops in Speaks (2008). There, Speaks distinguishes between uses of language in conversation and uses of language in thought. Speaks’s argument is that a phenomenon that appears both when using language in communication and when using language in thought cannot be explained in Gricean conversational terms. A Gricean account of implicature involves having very complicated beliefs about the audience, which turn out to be extremely bizarre if the speaker is (...)
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  13.  12
    Aventuras en el Mundo de la Lógica: Ensayos en Honor a María Manzano.Enrique Alonso, Antonia Huertas & Andrei Moldovan (eds.) - 2019 - College Publications.
    Este libro es un compendio de diversos artículos del ámbito de la Lógica que cubren un amplio abanico de temas ofreciendo una panorámica sobre esta disciplina. Encontraremos artículos sobre aspectos históricos y sobe el desarrollo de la lógica en la filosofía, la informática y las matemáticas actuales; otros sobre cuestiones de metalógica, y otros sobre diferentes tipos de lógicas: intuicionista, híbridas e intensionales, y sus lenguajes, semánticas y aplicaciones. El resultado en su conjunto es, además, una reflexión sobre el papel (...)
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  14.  22
    Introduction to the Special Issue on Speech Acts and Argumentation.Lilian Bermejo-Luque & Andrei Moldovan - 2021 - Informal Logic 43 (2):281-287.
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  15.  42
    (1 other version)Can Entailments Be Implicatures?Andrei Moldovan - 2019 - In Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Philosophical Insights Into Pragmatics. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 43-62.
    I argue that an affirmative answer to the question whether entailments could figure as contents of CI is warranted. In particular, the two features of CI that could rule out entailments from the class of contents that could be conversationally implicated are cancellability and non-conventionality. Entailments are non-cancellable, but this is a reason to conclude that they cannot be CIs only if cancellability is a universal property of CIs; alternatively, one might accept CIs that are entailed by what is said (...)
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  16.  25
    Commentary on James B. Freeman: “The Method of Relevant Variables, Objectivity, and Bias”.Andrei Moldovan - unknown
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  17.  25
    Denying the antecedent and conditional perfection again.Andrei Moldovan - 2013 - Proceedings of the 10th OSSA Conference, 2013. Virtues of Argumentation.
    It has been argued that a fragment of discourse that constitutes a fallacy of denying the antecedent at the level of what is literally said may not be a fallacy at the level of speaker meaning. The pragmatic phenomenon involved here is known as conditional perfection. I argue that the account of conditional perfection in van der Auwera and Horn has several problems, and I discuss several possible alternatives.
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  18. Incomplete Descriptions and the Underdetermination Problem.Andrei Moldovan - 2015 - Research in Language 13 (4):352–367.
    The purpose of this paper is to discuss two phenomena related to the semantics of definite descriptions: that of incomplete uses of descriptions, and that of the underdetermination of referential uses of descriptions. The Russellian theorist has a way of accounting for incomplete uses of descriptions by appealing to an account of quantifier domain restriction, such as the one proposed in Stanley and Szabó (2000a). But, I argue, the Russellian is not the only one in a position to appeal to (...)
     
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  19.  56
    On Appeals to Nature and their Use in the Public Controversy over Genetically Modified Organisms.Andrei Moldovan - 2018 - Informal Logic 38 (3):409-437.
    In this paper I discuss appeals to nature, a particular kind of argument that has received little attention in argumentation theory. After a quick review of the existing literature, I focus on the use of such arguments in the public controversy over the acceptabil-ity of genetically-modified organisms in the food industry. Those who reject this biotechnology invoke its unnatural character. Such arguments have re-ceived attention in bioethics, where they have been analyzed by distinguishing different meanings that “nature” and “natural” might (...)
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  20.  32
    The Availability Principle and Truth-Value Judgements.Andrei Moldovan - 2015 - Filozofia Nauki 23 (2):29-44.
  21.  64
    The Pragmatics of Non-denoting Descriptions.Andrei Moldovan - 2020 - Topoi (2):413-423.
    One challenge that the proponent of the Fregean theory of definite descriptions has to meet is to account for those truth-value intuitions that do not match the predictions of her theory. What needs an explanation is why sentences such as ‘The king of France is sitting in that chair’ [pointing at an empty chair] are intuitively false, while semantically truth-valueless. The existence of such cases was pointed out by Strawson :216–231, 1954) and Russell :385–389, 1957), and much discussed in the (...)
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  22.  55
    Carnap's External Questions and Semantic Externalism.Andrei Moldovan - 2014 - Prolegomena 13 (2):253-268.
    What is it for an utterance of an expression to lack meaning? In this paper I address the issue along the lines of Carnap’s seminal article “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology”. Carnap provides there an answer to the above question, which he then uses to argue that certain claims of metaphysics are meaningless. In the first section of the paper I present Carnap’s argument for the meaninglessness of certain metaphysical claims. In the second section I argue that, although the argument is (...)
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  23.  82
    An assessment of the argument from convention.Andrei Moldovan - 2016 - Discusiones Filosóficas 17 (28):15 - 34.
    This paper focuses on what is known in the literature on the semantics and pragmatics of definite descriptions as “the argument from convention”. This argument purports to show that referential uses of definite descriptions are a semantic phenomenon. A key premise of the argument is that none of the pragmatic alternatives (any one of a variety of Gricean accounts of referential uses) is successful. I argue that no good reason is offered to support this claim. I conclude that the argument (...)
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  24.  50
    (1 other version)Singular Thought without Significance.Andrei Moldovan - 2015 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 22 (1):53-70.
    The main purpose of this essay is critical. I focus on Robin Jeshion’s (2002; 2004; 2010) theory of singular thought, and I offer three objections to her Significance Condition for the creation of mental files. First of all, this condition makes incorrect predictions concerning singular thoughts about insignificant objects. Second, it conflicts with a theoretical aim mental file theories usually have, that of accounting for our ability to track discourse referents. And third, it appeals to a vague notion where a (...)
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  25.  23
    Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone, Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language. Reviewed by. [REVIEW]Andrei Moldovan - 2019 - Philosophy in Review 39 (1):29-31.
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