ABSTRACT: When we describe an event as sad or happy, we attribute to it a certainemotional value. Attributions of emotional value depend essentially on an agent ; and yet, people readily disagree over such values. My aim in this paper is to explain what happens in the case of “emotional disagreement”, and, more generally, to provide some insight into the semantics of value-attributions.

U svetu arhajskog čoveka -- Kožev--"posthumni" mislilac -- Žan Delimo ili apologija pesimizma -- Pitanje tragedije.

Among semanticists and philosophers of language, there has been a recent outburst of interest in predicates such as delicious, called predicates of personal taste (PPTs, e.g. Lasersohn 2005). Somewhat surprisingly, the question of whether or how we can distinguish aesthetic predicates from PPTs has hardly been addressed at all in this recent work. It is precisely this question that we address. We investigate linguistic criteria that we argue can be used to delineate the class of specifically aesthetic adjectives. We show (...) that there are, in fact, good motivations for keeping PPTs and aesthetic predicates apart: the semantic structure of the former, but not the latter, entails an experiencer. There are many adjectives whose semantic structure arguably also entails an experiencer, yet which are readily used in expressing aesthetic judgments. Adjectives such as provocative or moving are a case in point, since as adjectives they arguably maintain the experiencer argument from the verb they are derived from. Nevertheless, when we describe, say, a sculpture as provocative, or a theater performance as moving, we clearly make aesthetic judgments. The difficult question, then, is to articulate the relationship between an aesthetic predicate (of which beautiful and ugly are paradigms) and other predicates that just happen to be used in making an aesthetic judgment. Tightly related to this point is the more general question of the relationship between an evaluative predicate and a predicate that occurs in an evaluative judgment. One of our aims is to make some progress in addressing these questions. (shrink)

The recent proliferation of types and accounts of experimentation in sustainability science still lacks philosophical reflection. The present paper introduces this burgeoning topic to the philosophy of science by identifying key notions and dynamics in sustainability experimentation, by discussing taxonomies of sustainability experimentation and by focusing on barriers to the transfer of evidence. It integrates three topics: the philosophy of experimentation; the sustainability science literature on experimentation; and discussions on values in science coming from the general philosophy of science, the (...) social sciences, and sustainability science. The aim is to improve understanding of how sustainability experimentation has evolved, from a broader picture of the history and philosophy of science, with a specific focus on understanding evidence production and how evidence traveling in and from sustainability experiments can be improved, particularly in the context of complex and pervasive normative commitments of the research. By engaging in these topics, this research is one of the first philosophical accounts of sustainability experimentation, contributing both to the knowledge on specific philosophies of science and to the further development of an evidence-based sustainability science through a better understanding of the barriers to more relevant and usable knowledge. (shrink)

It has long been known (cf. Frege 1918, Castañeda 1968, Anscombe 1975 , Perry 1977, 1979, Lewis 1981) that de se attitudes, that is beliefs, desires, hopes etc. that one has about oneself as oneself,1 are interestingly different fromthe attitudes that one holds in a third-personal mode about some individual, who might or might not turn out to be them. Frege suggested that Dr. Lauben’s belief that he has been wounded is a belief that only Dr. Lauben himself can entertain. (...) Another person’s belief that Dr. Lauben has been wounded would be a different belief, one that would motivate action in a completely different way. This led Frege to the following puzzle.When Dr. Lauben says “I have been wounded”, he cannot be plausibly taken to express his own first-personal belief that he has been wounded, since nobody else can come to have that same belief. So what is, then, the content that he does express, in order to communicate to others that he has been wounded? Different solutions to the puzzle have been proposed, and my chapter may be seen as yet another attempt at addressing this question. I shall show that not only de se attitudes but also de se speech is interestingly different from third-personal attitudes/speech. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: 1. Social Pathologies as the Focus of the New Critical Theory 2. Respect as a Form of Intersubjective Recognition in Honneth 3. Respect as Recognition of Persons as Independent Centres of Consciousness: R. S. Peters 4. Respect, Discursive Initiation and Cognitive Development 5. Disrespect as Social Pathology in Education Conclusion Notes References.

In this paper, the authors present a presuppositional account for a class of evaluative terms that encode both a descriptive and an evaluative component: slurs and thick terms. The authors discuss several issues related to the hybrid nature of these terms, such as their projective behavior, the ways in which one may reject their evaluative content, and the ways in which evaluative content is entailed or implicated (as the case may be) by the use of such terms.

This paper argues that there is a class of terms, or uses of terms, that are best accounted for by an expressivist account. We put forward two sets of criteria to distinguish between expressive and factual terms. The first set relies on the action-guiding nature of expressive language. The second set relies on the difference between one's evidence for making an expressive vs. factual statement. We then put those criteria to work to show, first, that the basic evaluative adjectives such (...) as ‘good’ have expressive as well as factual uses and, second, that many adjectives whose primary meanings are factual, such as ‘powerful’, also have expressive uses. (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)

We present two experimental studies on the Italian expressive ‘stronzo’. The first study tests whether, and to which extent, the acceptability of using an expressive is sensitive to the information available in the context. The study looks both at referential uses of expressives and predicative uses of expressives. The results show that expressives are sensitive to contextual information to a much higher degree than the non-expressive control items in their referential use, but also, albeit to a lesser degree, in their (...) predicative use. The second study tests whether the lower acceptability of expressives in their predicative use may be simply due to saying something negative about someone. A comparison between expressives, such as ‘jerk’, and non-expressive negative terms, such as ‘nasty’ or ‘unbearable’, suggests that it is the expressive nature of these terms, rather than the mere negative valence, that affects acceptability. Our studies present a major challenge to the existing accounts of expressives, and raise several theoretical issues that still call for an answer. (shrink)

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. In this introduction, we first give a brief overview of the debate over multiculturalism in political theory. We then situate Alan Patten’s Equal Recognition in that context by highlighting his major normative thesis, according to which there are reasons of principle, in a liberal democracy, to grant special forms of public recognition and accommodation to cultural minorities. Finally, we present a succinct summary of the nine articles that follow this (...) introduction and that critically engage with Patten’s arguments. (shrink)

Aesthetic judgments are often expressed by means of predicates that, unlike ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’, are not primarily aesthetic, or even evaluative, such as ‘intense’ and ‘harrowing’. This paper aims to explain how such adjectives can convey a value-judgment, and one, moreover, whose positive or negative valence depends on the context.

Aims and Scope -/- This volume brings together original papers by linguists and philosophers on the role of context and perspective in language and thought. Several contributions are concerned with the contextualism/relativism debate, which has loomed large in recent philosophical discussions. In a substantial introduction, the editors survey the field and map out the relevant issues and positions.

The aim of this paper is to argue against a growing tendency to assimilate moral disagreements to disagreements about matters of personal taste. The argumentative strategy adopted in the paper appeals to a battery of linguistic criteria that reveal interesting and important differences between predicates of personal taste and moral predicates. The paper further argues that these semantically tractable differences have an impact on the nature of the corresponding disagreements.

According to Diogenes Laertius, the concept of ‘appearance’ played a central role in Stoic philosophy. As staunch corporealists, the Stoics believed that appearances are physical structures in our corporeal soul which provide the foundation for all our thoughts. One of the crucial features of appearance is that it is a representational mental state that has the ability to provide us with accurate awareness of the world through causal interaction between our senses and external objects, and thus supply the means for (...) acquiring knowledge about the reality. However, the Stoics recognized that we can also be aware and think of objects that are real but are not presently affecting our senses, as well as objects that are altogether fictional and thus incapable of ever interacting with our senses. Because of this, it was important for them to distinguish between representational mental states which are and those which are not caused by external objects at the moment in which they are formed. Chrysippus was one of the Stoics who paid special attention to this distinction; in a key text, Aet. 4.12, he is reported as reserving the name ‘appearance’ only for the former states, while for the latter he used a different term, ‘imagination’. (shrink)

In this paper, I take issue with the proposal put forward by Mark Richard in When Truth Gives Out (2008) concerning disputes over issues such as who is rich, what is cool, and other issues of similar ilk. Richard holds that the parties in the dispute can truly disagree on whether a given person is rich, but can be both right, if we assume that they have different standards of wealth. Disputes over what is cool are, according to Richard, trickier, (...) since they can give rise to cases of faultless disagreement in which the two parties disagree, and neither party is wrong, but neither party is right either! My fi rst goal in this paper will be to showthat the distinction between the two types of disagreement, as drawn by Richard, is not well motivated. I will also argue that if he were right about the stronger case (disagreement in which both parties are right), his own account would fail to capture it. He can capture either the idea that they truly disagree, or the idea that they are both right; but he cannot both have his cake and eat it, too.My second goal will be to bring to the foreground some constructive aspects of Richard’s proposal, and in particular the idea that such disagreements involve concepts whose application is not fully determined and whose usage is open to accommodation and negotiation (to use Lewis’s terms, as used by Richard). If we accept that on some occasions, whether a concept applies to a given instance or doesn’t is not yet settled, then arguably there are cases in which neither party is wrong—at least at the time of the dispute. I argue that their disagreement can be genuine only to the extent that it will eventually be settled whether the concept isto apply to a given instance or not, hence the way in which the concept gets shaped up and extended through its future uses makes it possible to determine, retrospectively, which of the two parties got it right. If this is correct, then the putative cases of faultless disagreement really turn upon the openness of the future: what makes them “faultless” is, simply, that there isn’t any matter of fact yet whether the one or the other party is right. (shrink)

The Stoics thought that knowledge depends on a special kind of appearances which they called ‘apprehensive’, which are by definition true. Interestingly, Sextus Empiricus reports in M 7.247 that they held that there are appearances that are true but that are not apprehensive because they are true merely by chance and thus cannot constitute knowledge. I believe that this suggests that the Stoics were aware of what is in modern literature known as the problem of epistemic luck. Unfortunately, Sextus’ report (...) leaves out a lot of important details, which makes it difficult to understand exactly which appearances the Stoics thought are true by chance, and why. I argue that the true non-apprehensive appearances in question here are imaginations, representational states which are not immediately caused by external objects through perception, but produced solely by the mind. I propose an explanation why the Stoics, who defined chance in terms of hidden causes, would have thought that imaginations can only be true by chance. The explanation stems from their view that the essential characteristic of imagination is that it leaves the actual cause of its representational content hidden from the subject. (shrink)

It has been long known (Perry in Philos Rev 86: 474–497, 1977 ; Noûs 13: 3–21, 1979 , Lewis in Philos Rev 88: 513–543 1981 ) that de se attitudes, such as beliefs and desires that one has about oneself , call for a special treatment in theories of attitudinal content. The aim of this paper is to raise similar concerns for theories of asserted content. The received view, inherited from Kaplan ( 1989 ), has it that if Alma says (...) “I am hungry,” the asserted content, or what is said , is the proposition that Alma is hungry (at a given time). I argue that the received view has difficulties handling de se assertion, i.e., contents that one expresses using the first person pronoun, to assert something about oneself. I start from the observation that when two speakers say “I am hungry,” one may truly report them as having said the same thing. It has often been held that the possibility of such reports comes from the fact that the two speakers are, after all, uttering the same words, and are in this sense “saying the same thing”. I argue that this approach fails, and that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to use the same words, or words endowed with the same meaning, in order to be truly reported as same-saying. I also argue that reports of same-saying in the case of de se assertion differ significantly from such reports in the case of two speakers merely implicating the same thing. (shrink)

Education, Self-consciousness and Social Action reconstructs the Hegelian concept of education, Bildung, and shows that this concept could serve as a powerful alternative to current psychologist notions of learning. Taking a Hegelian perspective, Stojanov claims that Bildung should be interpreted as growth of mindedness and that such a growth has two central and interrelated components, including the development of self-consciousness toward conceptual self-articulation and the formation of one's capacity for intelligent social action. The interrelation between the two central components of (...) education implies that learning is transformed into education only when it involves the self-consciousness and the identity of the learner. Since both are grounded in the ethical beliefs and values of the individual, transforming learning into education therefore requires that education also address students' everyday ethical assumptions, as well as their articulation and conceptualization. This claim has a number of implications for educational policy and pedagogy; one being that learning and teaching in schools are educative only if they have ethical significance for both students and teachers. Another implication is that the point of departure for educative teaching becomes the actual, everyday ethical beliefs and experiences of the students, rather than fixed curricular contents. Students' encountering with sciences and arts should aim at the conceptual articulation of those beliefs and experiences - an articulation which makes individual's rational autonomy and self-determination possible. Education, Self-consciousness and Social Action will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students interested in the philosophy of education. It should also be essential reading for anyone engaged in the study of Hegel's work. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of new trends have seen light at the intersection of semantics and philosophy of language. They are meant to address puzzles raised by the context-sensitivity of a variety of natural language constructions, such as knowledge ascriptions, belief reports, epistemic modals, indicative conditionals, quantifier phrases, gradable adjectives, temporal constructions, vague predicates, moral predicates, predicates of personal taste. A diversity of labels have consequently emerged, such as 'contextualism', 'indexicalism', 'invariantism', 'literalism', 'minimalism', and 'relativism', variously qualified. The goal (...) of this essay is to pinpoint the issues that lie at the heart of the recent debates, clarify what is at stake, and provide a snapshot of the current theoretical landscape. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper I address the distributive, inclusive, and relational dimensions of educational justice individually in relation to transnational migration. First, I thematize distributive issues with regard to immigrant students, the central question being whether these students are entitled to more or less educational resources as non-immigrant students. Second, I discuss to which extent and in which sense enabling immigrant students to participate fully in the social and political life of their receiving country is a demand of educational justice. Third, (...) I elaborate on which kinds of educational interactions – in the first place, which types of teaching – could perpetuate unjust treatment of those students in the form of disrespect. I claim that educational justice with regard to immigrated students consists in their enabling to full social and political participation by a mode of teaching that positively addresses students’ biographical experiences with migration, and by constructing school curricula which encourage inter-lingual, inter-cultural, and inter-contextual translations in the classroom. That is to say, that educational justice in context of migration is to be ultimately understood as relational justice, or more specific – as a matter of just pedagogical relations. (shrink)

The nature of moral judgments, and, more specifically, the question of how they relate, on the one hand, to objective reality and, on the other, to subjective experience, are issues that have been central to metaethics from its very beginnings. While these complex and challenging issues have been debated by analytic philosophers for over a century, it is only relatively recently that more interdisciplinary and empirically-oriented approaches to such issues have begun to see light. The present chapter aims to make (...) a contribution of that kind. We will present the results of an empirical – specifically, corpus linguistic – study that offers evidence that moral predicates exhibit hallmarks of subjectivity at the linguistic level, but also, that they differ significantly from paradigmatically subjective predicates. (shrink)

The concept of respect plays a central role in several recent attempts to re-actualise the programme of a critical social theory. In Axel Honneth's most prominent version of that concept, respect is closely tied to the sphere of law, and it is limited to the recognition of a Kantian-type moral autonomy of the individual. So interpreted, the concept of respect can only have a very limited application in the field of education, where concern for the particular desires, intentions and beliefs (...) of mostly immature persons is at stake.However, more than forty years ago R. S. Peters did develop an extended concept of respect as a central component in education. This concept focuses exactly on those desires, intentions and beliefs, instead of on the very demanding capability of practical reasoning orientated towards the Kantian Categorical Imperative. My task in this paper is to explore the potential of Peters' concept of respect for the identification and description of educational pathologies and ultimately for the founding of a critical theory of education. (shrink)

This paper investigates practice, frameworks and philosophy in the field of ecological management, a novel integrative approach to closing the gap between ecological and economic theoretical models and ecological and economic behavior. First, I will present the current status in this emerging field and discuss management in relation to various sub-disciplines, including agroecology, circular economy, industrial ecology, and urban sustainability. This provides a basis to analyze the theoretical frameworks found in profitable, ecologically-based businesses and identify key general features that characterize (...) this approach, notably the relationships between: an enterprise’s diversity and its economic resiliency; zero waste policies and societal and environmental impacts; and affordances of the local environment and business’ long-term economic viability. Finally, the philosophical issues looming behind are discussed, notably problems regarding interdisciplinarity and the relation of ethical frameworks with management. Through use of the model-centered philosophy of science to disentangle some of these conceptual problems, I argue that ecological management has a unique place in sustainable development as an independent exploratory tool for constructing and testing economic and ethical models in the Anthropocene. (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 is driven by the idea that the contextualism-relativism debate regarding the semantics of value-attributions turns upon certain extra-semantic assumptions that are unwarranted. One is the assumption that the many-place predicate of truth, deployed by compositional semantics, cannot be directly appealed to in theorizing about people's assessments of truth value, but must be supplemented (if not replaced) by a different truth-predicate, obtained through certain "postsemantic" principles. Another is the assumption that semantics assigns to sentences not only truth values (as (...) a function of various parameters, such as contexts, worlds and times), but also semantic contents, and that what context-sensitive expressions contribute to content are certain contextually determined elements. My first aim in this paper will be to show how the two assumptions have shaped two ways of understanding the debate between contextualism and relativism, as regards value-attributions. My second aim will be to show that both assumptions belong outside semantics, and are moreover questionable. (shrink)

In this essay Krassimir Stojanov attempts first to reconstruct the “heart” of Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics, namely the so-called “principle of universalization” of ethical norms. This principle grounds Habermas's proceduralist account of social justice via equal access of all concerned to the practices of deliberative validation of norms. Stojanov claims with regard to this account that it could only be implemented if the social actors are involved in a process of education as discursive initiation. After using R. S. Peters's educational (...) theory to distinguish discursive initiation from a traditionalist understanding of educative initiation, he discusses some central social prerequisites for the development of discursive skills in growing individuals; to identify these prerequisites, he draws on Axel Honneth's conception of the intersubjective origins of individuals' development of rational autonomy. In the final part of the essay, Stojanov briefly explores some implications of his elaborated account of discursive initiation and its social preconditions for schooling and pedagogy. (shrink)

One of the most important and, at the same time, most controversial issues in metasemantics is the question of what semantics is, and what distinguishes semantic elements (features, properties, phenomena, mechanisms, processes, or whatever) from the rest. The issue is tightly linked with the debate over the semantics-pragmatics distinction, which has been vibrant for a decade or two, but seems to be reaching an impasse. I suggest that this impasse may be due to the failure to recognize a distinct realm (...) that should not be subsumed either under semantics or pragmatics, but may be labeled "prepragmatics". My ultimate goal is to put forward and defend a novel picture of our language architecture, according to which: semantic content is strictly poorer than the lexically encoded content (and therefore does not involve any contextually determined material - not even the reference of demonstratives); pragmatic mechanisms require being able to reason about one's beliefs and intentions and do not affect truth-conditions or truth-value; and, finally, there is a distinct prepragmatic level, which takes into account various kinds of contextual information and makes it possible to evaluate a sentence (as used on a particular occasion) for a truth value. I shall take as a case study, one of the "stumbling stones" in the semantics-pragmatics literature: the case of demonstrative reference. The upshot will be to show that if there is indeed room for a family of linguistic phenomena that are neither semantic nor yet fully pragmatic, the resolution of demonstrative reference is a candidate par excellence to belong there. (shrink)

The received view about indexicals holds that they are directly referential expressions, and that the semantic contribution of an indexical consists of that thing or individual to which the indexical refers in the context of its utterance. The aim of this paper is to put forward a different picture. I argue that direct reference and indexicality are distinct and separate phenomena, even if they cooccur often. Still, it is the speaker who directly refers to the things that she is talking (...) about, and those things matter for the truth of her utterance. Indexicals, on the other hand, merely help the interpreter identify the speaker's intended reference. Typically, indexicals encode descriptive conditions that the context must meet to make the utterance true. For example, the demonstrative 'this' encodes the condition that the subject matter, ie that about which one is talking, should be salient and proximal to the speaker. The semantic contribution of an indexical, I suggest, consists precisely of such descriptive conditions. I will offer a formal account, dubbed contextual update semantics, and show how it captures the main conceptual motivation and how it handles embedded indexicals, which may seem problematic at a first glance. (shrink)

Philosophers of language distinguish among the lexical or linguistic meaning of the sentence uttered, what is said by an utterance of the sentence, and speaker's meaning, or what is conveyed by the speaker to her audience. In most views, what is said is the semantic or truth-conditional content of the utterance, and is irreducible either to the linguistic meaning or to the speaker's meaning. I will show that those views account badly for people's intuitions on what is said. I will (...) also argue that no distinguished level of what is said is required, and that the notion of linguistic meaning is the best placed to play the role of what is said. This relies on two points. First, our intuitions on what is said cannot be detached from the ways in which we talk about what is said, and from the semantics of speech reports and indirect discourse in general. Second, besides what is said, there is an equally important notion of what what-is-said is said about, or that about which the speaker is talking. These are, then, the three main ingredients needed for the theory of what is said: linguistic meaning, what is talked about, and a semantic account of reported speech. (shrink)

Comprising almost a third of greenhouse gas emissions and having an equally prominent role in pollution of soils, fresh water, coastal ecosystems, and food chains in general, agriculture is, alongside industry and electricity/heat production, one of the three biggest anthropogenic causes of breaching the planetary boundaries. Most of the problems in agriculture, like soil degradation and diminishing biodiversity, are caused by unfit uses of existing technologies and approaches mimicking the agriculturally-relevant functioning natural ecosystems seem necessary for appropriate organization of our (...) toxic and entropic agro-technologies. Our thesis is that eco-curative and sustainable uses of agro-technology require a paradigm shift from the chemical model of agro-systems to the ecological system-design model of agriculture. Particularly, following the new biomimetic paradigm of ecological innovation, we question in what sense can we mimic natural solutions in agriculture. We discern among Integrated agriculture and Permaculture, analyze their biomimetic status from the perspective of the philosophy of biomimicry, and argue that the former nature-mentored approach is a more appropriate solution for sustainable broadscale agriculture necessary for the growing world. However, it is not clear how this agricultural bio-integration will interact with the predicted automatization of work, urban demographic momentum, and the Earth system instability, and can the Permaculture alternative emerge as a social safety-net for the anticipated technologically-redundant or economically or environmentally endangered workers. We argue both for the importance to understand Permaculture as a social safety-net and as experimental testing ground for cutting edge biomimetic technologies. (shrink)