Reichenbachian approaches to indexicality contend that indexicals are "token-reflexives": semantic rules associated with any given indexical-type determine the truth-conditional import of properly produced tokens of that type relative to certain relational properties of those tokens. Such a view may be understood as sharing the main tenets of Kaplan's well-known theory regarding content, or truth-conditions, but differs from it regarding the nature of the linguistic meaning of indexicals and also regarding the bearers of truth-conditional import and truth-conditions. Kaplan has criticized these (...) approaches on different counts, the most damaging of which is that they make impossible a "logic of demonstratives". The reason for this is that the token-reflexive approach entails that not two tokens of the same sentential type including indexicals are guaranteed to have the same truth-conditions. In this paper I rebut this and other criticisms of the Reichenbachian approach. Additionally, I point out that Kaplan's original theory of "true demonstratives" is empirically inadequate, and claim that any modification capable of accurately handling the linguistic data would have similar problems to those attributed to the Reichenbachian approach. This is intended to show that the difficulties, no matter how real, are not caused by idiosincracies of the "token-reflexive" view, but by deep facts about indexicality. (shrink)

Descriptive semantic theories purport to characterize the meanings of the expressions of languages in whatever complexity they might have. Foundational semantics purports to identify the kind of considerations relevant to establish that a given descriptive semantics accurately characterizes the language used by a given individual or community. Foundational Semantics I presents three contrasting approaches to the foundational matters, and the main considerations relevant to appraise their merits. These approaches contend that we should look at the contents of speakers’ intuitions; at (...) the deep psychology of users and its evolutionary history, as revealed by our best empirical theories; or at the personal-level rational psychology of those subjects. Foundational Semantics II examines a fourth view, according to which we should look instead at norms enforced among speakers. The two papers aim to determine in addition the extent to which the approaches are really rival, or rather complementary. (shrink)

Two-dimensional semantics is a framework that helps us better understand some of the most fundamental issues in philosophy: those having to do with the relationship between the meaning of words, the way the world is, and our knowledge of the meaning of words. This selection of new essays by some of the world's leading authorities in this field sheds fresh light both on foundational issues regarding two-dimensional semantics and on its specific applications. Contributors: Richard Breheny, Alex Byrne, David Chalmers, Martin (...) Davies, Gareth Evans, Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, Josep Maci`, Martine Nida-Rumelin, Christopher Peacocke, James Pryor, Francois Recanati, Scott Soames, Cara Spencer, Robert Stalnaker, Kai-Yee Wong, Stephen Yablo. (shrink)

With contributions from some of the key figures in the contemporary debate on relativism this book is about a topic that is the focus of much traditional and ...

The contents of linguistic and mental representations may seem to be individuated by what they are about. But a problem arises with regard to representation of the non-existent - words and thoughts that are about things that don't exist. Fourteen new essays get to grips with this much-debated problem.

The Continuum Companion to Philosophy of Language offers the definitive guide to contemporary philosophy of language. The book covers all the fundamental questions asked by the philosophy of language - areas that have continued to attract interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more recently as active areas of research. Ten specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal where important work continues to be done in the area and, most valuably, the exciting new directions the (...) field is taking. The Companion explores issues pertaining to the nature of language, form semantics, theories of meaning, reference, intensional contexts, context-dependence, pragmatics, the normativity of language, analyticity, a priority and modality. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including an A to Z of key terms and concepts, a detailed list of resources and a fully annotated bibliography, this is the essential reference tool for anyone working in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

The chapter draws a very rough (and rather idiosyncratic) map of the terrain of the contemporary scene in the philosophy of language, as it was set out in the work of Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein – the presupposed common background, taught to beginners in the discipline, for the themes to be further explored from a present-day perspective in the rest of the book. The chapter outlines some core issues as they are presented in the insightful systematic articulation of (...) Frege’s and Russell’s themes in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Then it sums up the main issues, describes some contributions to them in Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and other historical landmarks, and indicates how they are approached today, as presented in the book's chapters. The introduction concludes with a brief discussion of research methods and problems in the field. (shrink)

There seems to be a distinction between primary and secondary properties; some philosophers defend the view that properties like colours and values are secondary, while others criticize it. The distinction is usually introduced in terms of essence; roughly, secondary properties essentially involve mental states, while primary properties do not. In part because this does not seem very illuminating, philosophers have produced different reductive analyses in modal terms, metaphysic or epistemic. Here I will argue, firstly, that some well-known examples fail, and (...) also that there are deep reasons why such approaches should do so. Secondly, I will argue that it is acceptable to remain satisfied with the non-reductive account in terms of essence. To that end, I will indicate how such an explication could be put to use to support the claim that properties like colours and values are secondary. In a series of recent writings, Kit Fine has argued that essence cannot be reductively analysed in modal terms. Fine offers some examples to motivate his claim. I suggest that the primary/secondary distinction constitutes a philosophically interesting illustration. (shrink)

The paper defends a version of Direct Reference for indexicals on which reference-fixing material (token-reflexive conditions) plays the role of an ancillary presupposition.

Inspired by Castañeda (1966, 1968), Perry (1979) and Lewis (1979) showed that a specific variety of singular thoughts, thoughts about oneself “as oneself” – de se thoughts, as Lewis called them – raise special issues, and they advanced rival accounts. Their suggestive examples raise the problem of de se thought – to wit, how to characterize it so as to give an accurate account of the data, tracing its relations to singular thoughts in general. After rehearsing the main tenets of (...) two contrasting accounts – a Lewisian one and a Perrian one – in the first section of this paper, in the second I will present a proposal of my own, which is a specific elaboration of the Perrian account. In the first section I will indicate some weaknesses of Perry’s presentation of his view; the proposal I will articulate in the second overcomes them. I will conclude with a brief discussion of reasons for preferring one or another account, in particular regarding the issue of the communication of de se thoughts. (shrink)

The truth of a statement depends on the world in two ways: what the statement says is true if the world is as the statement says it is; on the other hand, what the expressions in the statement mean depends on what the world is like (for instance, on what conventions are in place). Each of these two kinds of dependence of truth on the world corresponds to one of the dimensions on the two-dimensional semantic framework, developed in the 1970’ (...) in the work of Evans, Kaplan, Kripke and Stalnaker. The introduction provides a systematic overview of the framework, the ideas of its earlier originators, recent developments and criticism. Finally, it gives a brief overview over the contributions to the volume. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a new account of linguistic presuppositions, on which they are ancillary speech acts defined by constitutive norms. After providing an initial intuitive characterization of the phenomenon, I present a normative speech act account of presupposition in parallel with Williamson’s analogous account of assertion. I explain how it deals well with the problem of informative presuppositions, and how it relates to accounts for the Triggering and Projection Problems for presuppositions. I conclude with a brief discussion of (...) the consequences of the proposal for the adequacy of Williamson’s account of assertion. (shrink)

After a critical examination of several attempts to characterize the Analytic tradition in philosophy, in the book here discussed Hanjo Glock goes on to contend that Analytic Philosophy is “a tradition that is held together both by ties of influence and by a family of partially overlapping features”. Here I question the need to appeal to a “family resemblance” component, arguing instead (in part by drawing on related attempts to characterize art, art genres and art schools) for a genealogical characterization. (...) Nonetheless, I point out that the difference between these two views might end being merely terminological, for, properly understood, a genealogical characterization will have to mention a “family of partially overlapping features” in describing the origins of Analytic Philosophy and the lines of influence among analytic philosophers. (shrink)

There are propositions constituting the content of fictions—sometimes of the utmost importance to understand them—which are not explicitly presented, but must somehow be inferred. This essay deals with what these inferences tell us about the nature of fiction. I will criticize three well-known proposals in the literature: those by David Lewis, Gregory Currie, and Kendall Walton. I advocate a proposal of my own, which I will claim improves on theirs. Most important for my purposes, I will argue on this basis, (...) against Walton’s objections, for an illocutionary-act account of fiction, inspired in part by some of Lewis’s and Currie’s suggestions, but (perhaps paradoxically) above all by Walton’s deservedly influential views. (shrink)

De re or singular thoughts are, intuitively, those essentially or constitutively about a particular object or objects; any thought about different objects would be a different thought. How should a philosophical articulation or thematization of their nature look like? In spite of extended discussion of the issue since it was brought to the attention of the philosophical community in the late fifties by Quine (1956), we are far from having a plausible response. Discussing the matter in connection with the status (...) of the Kripkean category of the contingent a priori, Donnellan (1979) argued that what can be properly classified as knowable a priori about utterances like those involving ‘one meter’ or ‘Neptune’ famously proposed by Kripke (1980) cannot be the very same singular content that is contingent he distinguished to that end between knowing a true proposition expressed by an utterance, and knowing that an utterance expresses a true proposition. Evans (1979) replied that, for a very specific sort of cases involving “descriptive names”, a related proto-two-dimensionalist account should be preferred, on which it is not the singular contingent content, but rather a general descriptive one which is knowable a priori. In a series of papers, Robin Jeshion (2000, 2001) has recently attacked Donnellan's proposal, arguing in favour of the most straightforward interpretation of Kripke's claim: in the relevant cases, the very same singular content can be both contingent and knowable a priori. This paper appeals to a generalized version of two-dimensional semantics to advance an account of the Kripkean cases along the lines of Evans's, and argues that Jeshion's compelling arguments against Donnellan's view do not apply to this version. (shrink)

Since the publication of Hartry Field’s influential paper “Tarski’s Theory of Truth” there has been an ongoing discussion about the philosophical import of Tarski’s definition. Most of the arguments have aimed to play down that import, starting with that of Field himself. He interpreted Tarski as trying to provide a physicalistic reduction of semantic concepts like truth, and concluded that Tarski had partially failed. Robert Stalnaker and Scott Soames claimed then that Field should have obtained a stronger conclusion, namely that (...) Tarski’s failure in his allegedly intended physicalistic reduction was total. From another front, Hilary Putnam argued for an even more sweeping thesis: “[a]s a philosophical account of truth, Tarski’s theory fails as badly as it is possible for an account to fail.” Scott Soames followed suit also on this count, endorsing Putnam’s argument in section iii of the aforementioned paper; and John Etchemendy used a very similar argument to contend that “a Tarskian definition of truth [...] cannot possibly illuminate the semantic properties of the object language.” The paper argues that these contentions are based on several misunderstandings about the nature of a definition like Tarski’s. Regarding the Putnam-Soames-Etchemendy argument, we must apply a distinction Frege found natural to draw—and is natural to draw anyway—between what he called “constructive” definitions, definitions properly so called, which are mere stipulations, and what he described as “analytic” definitions, definitions which aim to make explicit the meaning of a term already in use. Regarding the Field-Soames-Stalnaker criticism, the paper contends that the true aims of a Tarskian truth definition are perfectly well fulfilled without Field’s amendments. (shrink)

I defend a Deferred Ostension view of quotation, on which quotation-marks are the linguistic bearers of reference, functioning like a demonstrative; the quoted material merely plays the role of a demonstratum. On this view, the quoted material works like Nunberg’s indexes in his account of deferred ostensión in general. The referent is obtained through some contextually suggested relation; in the default case the relation will be … instantiates the linguistic type __, but there are other possibilities. In this way, the (...) deferred ostension view deals with a problem I pointed out for the identity proposal in my earlier work, that we do not merely refer with quotations to expression-types, but also to other entities related in some way to the relevant token we use: features exhibited by the token distinct from those constituting its linguistic type, features exhibited by other tokens of the same type but not by the one actually used (as when, by using a graphic token, we refer to its phonetic type), or even other related tokens (see the examples on p. 261 of García-Carpintero 1994). (shrink)

Discuto en este trabajo el adecuado tratamiento de un interesante problema semántico, largamente tratado por David Kaplan (1973). El problema fue propuesto originalmente por Richard Cartwright. Después de exponerlo, presento y comento cuatro soluciones. Las soluciones proceden del trabajo de Kaplan; me he tomado no obstante algunas licencias en su presentación. Paso después a proponer una nueva solución al problema de Cartwright, en consonancia con puntos de vista, hasta cierto punto contradictorios con los de Kaplan, que he venido defendiendo en (...) trabajos previos sobre la semántica de indéxicos y nombres propios. El objetivo principal que el trabajo persigue es ofrecer una confirmación indirecta para tales puntos de vista, en tanto que sobre la base teórica que nos proporcionan podemos ofrecer una solución a la paradoja de Cartwright más satisfactoria que las otras hasta ahora propuestas. (shrink)

En este comentario se ofrece una explicación alternativa a la que dio Guillermo Hurtado en su diagnóstico de la filosofía analítica actual en general y de su ejercicio en el mundo latinoamericano, y, por consiguiente, se concluye con una muy diferente apreciación de los méritos de la filosofía analítica. This note provides an alternative explanation to the one offered by Guillermo Hurtado in his diagnostics of present-day Analytic Philosophy and its practice in the Latin-American world, and as a result offers (...) a very different appraisal of its merits. (shrink)

This critical review of John Perry’s recent compilation of his work (Perry (1993) is mainly devoted to surveying the path leading towards a certain rapprochement between philosophers with Fregean inclinations and philosophers attracted by the picture of thought and meaning brought out by Direct Reference theorists like Donnellan, Kaplan, Kripke, Putnam, and, of course, Perry himself, by taking advantage of the suggestions in the postscripts to very well-known and deservedly influential articles.

En su discusión “Obras de ficción, formas de conciencia y literatura”, Josep Corbí formula una serie de críticas certeras a mis ideas sobre la distinción que he hecho entre ficción y no ficción en Relatar lo ocurrido como invención. En esta nota de respuesta expongo primero de forma sucinta el núcleo de esas ideas y después proporciono las que considero las razones más decisivas para adoptarlas, a pesar de las dificultades que señala Corbí.

Kaplan (1999) argued that a different dimension of expressive meaning (“use-conditional”, as opposed to truth-conditional) is required to characterize the meaning of pejoratives, including slurs and racial epithets. Elaborating on this, writers have argued that the expressive meaning of pejoratives and slurs is either a conventional implicature (Potts 2007) or a presupposition (Macià 2002 and 2014, Schlenker 2007, Cepollaro and Stojanovic 2016). We argue that an expressive presuppositional theory accounts well for the data, but that expressive presuppositions are not just (...) propositions to be added to a common ground. We hold that expressives, including pejoratives and slurs, make requirements on a contextual record governed by sui generis norms specific to affective attitudes and their expressions. (shrink)

In his paper “Obras de ficción, formas de conciencia y literatura”, Josep Corbí raises a few sharp objections to my distinction between fiction and non-fiction, as I formulate it in my recently published Relatar lo ocurrido como invención. In this response, I present first in a compact form such ideas, and then I try to answer to Corbí’s criticisms.

Critical notice of Andy Clark's "Associative Engines".

ABSTRACT The book reviewed here advances a fregean theory of reference able to stand up to Kripekean objections to descriptivism. It also claims that fictions are an invitation to imagine situations or pretending assertions and, in spite of it, fictions are objects of knowledge too, since they can refer to reality and we refer to fictional objects. In this review I present a summary of García-Carpintero's ideas and outline some objections to them.

Manuel García Carpintero defends a form of antirealism for the explicit talk and thought both about fictional entities and scientific models: a version of StephenYablo’s figuralist brand of factionalism. He argues that, in contrast with pretense-theoretic fictionalist proposals, on his view, utterances in those discourses are straightforward assertions with straightforward truth-conditions, involving a particular kind of metaphors or figurative manner. But given that the relevant metaphors are all but “dead”, this might suggest that the view is after all (...) realist, committed to referents of some sort for singular terms in the relevant discourses. He revisits these issues from the perspective of the more recent work on them and applies his view to recent debates in semantics on the role and adequacy of supervaluationist models of indeterminacy. (shrink)

Una parte de la explicación del gran florecimiento en los EE. UU. de la filosofía analítica, particularmente la filosofía analítica del lenguaje, después de la segunda guerra mundial está sin duda en la amplitud de la comunidad de filósofos que un país grande en dimensiones permite. Pues conseguir un buen nivel de excelencia en la práctica de este modo de entender la filosofía requiere una amplia comunidad de colegas en que difundir y contrastar nuevas ideas. Conscientes de esto, los filósofos (...) analíticos continentales estamos embarcados en la tarea de ampliar recíprocamente nuestras comunidades, aprovechando el impulso del proyecto de mayor unión política europea. Aunque, a diferencia de lo que ocurría en EE. UU. en el tiempo a que nos hemos referido antes, existen importantes obstáculos culturales, hay buenas razones para ser optimistas. Existe claramente la voluntad, lo que ha permitido en la última década llevar a cabo con éxito proyectos tales como los de la European Society for Philosophy and Psychology y la European Society for Analytic Philosophy, así como establecer importantes lazos de conocimiento mutuo a través de pequeños seminarios bilaterales. Y existe también algo muy importante: el que los temas que más interesan a los filósofos del lenguaje continentales son muy próximos; algo que, aventuramos, lo explica parcialmente una formación que presta más atención a la tradición filosófica que la de nuestros colegas americanos. Estos temas incluyen típicamente la referencia, particularmente la referencia de expresiones indéxicas, así como cuestiones relativas a la objetividad, las condiciones de verdad, el realismo y el antirrealismo. (shrink)

In recent work, Williamson has defended a suggestive account of assertion. Williamson claims that the following norm or rule (the knowledge rule) is constitutive of assertion, and individuates it: (KR) One must ((assert p) only if one knows p) Williamson is not directly concerned with the semantics of assertion-markers, although he assumes that his view has implications for such an undertaking; he says: “in natural languages, the default use of declarative sentences is to make assertions” (op. cit., 258). In this (...) paper I will explore Williamson’s view from this perspective, i.e., in the light of issues regarding the semantics of assertion-markers. I will end up propounding a slightly different account, on which, rather than KR, what is constitutive and individuating of assertion is an audience-involving transmission of knowledge rule: (TKR) One must ((assert p) only if one’s audience comes thereby to be in a position to know p) I will argue that TKR, of which KR is an illocutionary consequence (but not the other way around), has all the virtues that Williamson claims for his account and no new defect. (shrink)

The paper distinguishes between two conceptions of kinds defined by constitutive rules, the one suggested by Searle, and the one invoked by Williamson to define assertion. Against recent arguments to the contrary by Maitra, Johnson and others, it argues for the superiority of the latter in the first place as an account of games. On this basis, the paper argues that the alleged disanalogies between real games and language games suggested in the literature in fact don’t exist. The paper relies (...) on Rawls’s distinction between types of practices and institutions defined by constitutive rules, and those among them that are actually in force, and hence are truly normative; it defends along Rawlsian lines that a plurality of norms apply to actual instances of rule-constituted practices, and uses this Rawlsian line to block the examples that Maitra, Johnson and others provide to sustain their case. (shrink)

This paper argues for a version of metalinguistic descriptivism, the Mill-Frege view, comparing it to a currently popular alternative, predicativism. The Mill-Frege view combines tenets of Fregean views with features of the theory of direct reference. According to it, proper names have metalinguistic senses, known by competent speakers on the basis of their competence, which figure in ancillary presuppositions. In support of the view the paper argues that the name-bearing relation—which predicativists cite to account for the properties that they take (...) names to express—depends on acts of naming with a semantic significance. Acts of naming create particular words specifically designed for referential use, which they perform whether or not the language has other words articulated with the same sound or orthography. Like other forms of metalinguistic descriptivism, the Mill-Frege view affords responses to Kripke’s semantic and epistemic arguments against descriptivism. The view is prima facie more complex than predicativism; but the additional complexity is independently attested in natural languages and well-motivated. Finally, the Mill-Frege proposal deals well with Kripke’s modal argument, and accounts for modal intuitions about names, both issues that pose serious trouble to predicativism. (shrink)

Several philosophers advance substantive theories of propositions, to deal with several issues they raise in connection with a concern with a long pedigree in philosophy, the problem of the unity of propositions. The qualification ‘substantive’ is meant to contrast with ‘minimal’ or ‘deflationary’ – roughly, views that reject that propositions have a hidden nature, worth investigating. Substantive views appear to create spurious problems by characterizing propositions in ways that make them unfit to perform their theoretical jobs. I will present in (...) this light some critical points against Hanks’ (2015, 2019) act-theoretic view, and Recanati’s (2019) recent elaboration of Hanks’ notion of cancellation. Both Hanks and Recanati, I’ll argue, rely on problematic conceptions of fiction and pretense. (shrink)

Schiffer has given an argument against supervaluationist accounts of vagueness, based on reports of vague contents. Suppose that Al tells Bob ‘Ben was there’, pointing to a certain place, and later Bob says, ‘Al said that Ben was there’, pointing in the same direction. According to supervaluationist semantics, Schiffer contends, both Al’s and Bob’s utterances of ‘there’ indeterminately refer to myriad precise regions of space; Al’s utterance is true just in case Ben was in any of those precisely bounded regions (...) of space, and Bob’s is true just in case Al said of each of them that it is where Ben was. However, while the supervaluationist truth-conditions for Al’s utterance might be satisfied, those for Bob’s cannot; for Al didn’t say, of any of those precisely delimited regions of space, that it is where Ben was. In an earlier version of the material presented here (García-Carpintero 2000) I replied to Schiffer’s argument that supervaluationism has an independently well-motivated defense. The response is essentially based on the point that the occurrence of ‘there’ in Bob’s utterance (and of ‘tall’ in Wright’s argument) occurs in indirect discourse, and supervaluationists may allow that it shifts its referent there. Schiffer’s reply to this response shows that it was not made sufficiently clearly. In this paper I will try to improve on that score. In his more recent reply, Schiffer (2000b, 325) dismisses a proposal like the one I will make, mainly because it “undermines … a leading virtue of supervaluationism … its implication that vagueness is … not a feature of the world.” I will argue that my reply does not undermine the fundamental contentions of the supervaluationist account. (shrink)

This paper offers a rejoinder to an argument by Schiffer against semantic accounts of vagueness (typically relying on supervaluationist techniques) based on indirect discourse. The argument, as far as I know original with Schiffer, occurs in “Two Issues of Vagueness” (Schiffer 1998). It is not addressed at supervaluationism as such, but at the philosophical account of vagueness which typically relies on it. Supervaluationism is not by itself a theory, but a logical technique with several applications. In one such application, supervaluationism (...) serves to alleviate a tension between, on the one hand, the rejection of bivalence for some utterances which characterizes what I take to be the correct view on vagueness (vagueness as semantic indecision – ‘VSI’ henceforth –, to put it in the terms of a well-known defender of the view, David Lewis), and, on the other, well-established facts about the semantics of logical expressions. I will address Schiffer’s argument by putting forward some considerations on the concept of de re thoughts which I take to undermine it. These considerations are not ad hoc, but highly germane to VSI; or so I will try to show. (shrink)

I provide a variation on ideas presented by Walton and Currie, elaborating the view that fictive utterances are characterized by a specific form of illocutionary force in the family of directives – a proposal or invitation to imagine. I make some points on the relation between the proposal and the current debates on intentionalist and conventionalist views, and I discuss interesting recent objections made by Stacie Friend to the related, but crucially different, Gricean view of such force advanced by Currie (...) and others. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Robin Jeshion has forcefully criticized both Donnellan's and Evans’ claims on the contingent a priori, and she has developed an “acquaintanceless” account of singular thoughts as an alternative view. Jeshion claims that one can fully grasp a singular thought expressed by a sentence including a proper name, even if its reference has been descriptively fixed and one’s access to the referent is “mediated” by that description. But she still wants to reject “semantic instrumentalism”, the view (...) that “there are no substantive conditions of any sort on having singular thought. We can freely generate singular thoughts at will by manipulating the apparatus of direct reference.” Her account of singular thoughts is a psychological one, rejecting any epistemic requirement. Having singular thoughts is for her a matter of deploying “mental files” or “dossiers” that play a significant role in the cognitive life of the individual. This paper elaborates on an alternative descriptivist-friendly view, which has important points of contact with Jeshion’s. It differs, particularly in that it is an epistemic view; it is only a broadly understood acquaintance view, as it will transpire, but this does not make it a mere terminological variation on Jeshion’s acquaintanceless one. To argue for it, the paper discusses some relevant aspects of the semantics of fictional discourse. (shrink)

Only Imagine is a wonderful book. Clear and tersely written, it provides a compelling defence of a rather unpopular view : namely, extreme intentionalism about the determination of fictional content and the nature of fictionality. It thus unquestionably advances the philosophical debate. It is also a pleasure to read for those of us who like fictions and not just the philosophy thereof: Stock discusses for her arguments many examples from real fictions, systematically making perceptive remarks. Here I will respond to (...) an objection that she makes to the normative account that I have defended in previous work, arguing that it has explanatory advantages grounded on the subordination on that account of author-intentions to fictional contents independently determined by social practices. (shrink)

In recent work, Walton has abandoned his very influential account of the fictionality of p in a fictional work in terms of prescriptions to imagine emanating from it. He offers examples allegedly showing that a prescription to imagine p in a given work of fiction is not sufficient for the fictionality of p in that work. In this paper, both in support and further elaboration of a constitutive-norms speech-act variation on Walton’s account that I have defended previously, I critically discuss (...) his objections. In addition to answering his concerns and developing the account further, I provide additional abductive support for its explanatory virtues vis-à- institutional accounts like Walton’s, and Gricean speech-act proposals. (shrink)

Inspired by Castañeda, Perry and Lewis argued that, among singular thoughts in general, thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’ – first-personal thoughts, which Lewis aptly called de se – call for special treatment: we need to abandon one of two traditional assumptions on the contents needed to provide rationalizing explanations, their shareability or their absoluteness. Their arguments have been very influential; one might take them as establishing a new ‘effect’ – new philosophical evidence in need of being accounted for. This is (...) questioned by the skeptical arguments in recent work by Cappelen & Dever and Magidor, along lines that a few discrepant voices had already announced earlier. Skeptics content that the evidence does not really call for revising traditional theories of content. I will discuss their challenges – first and foremost, concerning action explanations – aiming to make the case that the ‘De Se effect’ is no illusion: de se attitudes require us to revise one of the two tenets of traditional views. (shrink)

Some speech acts are made indirectly. It is thus natural to think that assertions could also be made indirectly. Grice’s conversational implicatures appear to be just a case of this, in which one indirectly makes an assertion or a related constative act by means of a declarative sentence. Several arguments, however, have been given against indirect assertions, by Davis (1999), Fricker (2012), Green (2007, 2015), Lepore & Stone (2010, 2015) and others. This paper confronts and rejects three considerations that have (...) been made: arguments based on the distinction between lying and misleading; arguments based on the ordinary concept of assertion; and arguments based on the testimonial knowledge that assertions provide. (shrink)

One of the hottest philosophical debates in recent years concerns the nature of the semantics/pragmatics divide. Some writers have expressed the reserve that this might be merely terminological, but in my view it ultimately concerns a substantive issue with empirical implications: the scope and limits of a serious scientific undertaking, formal semantics. In this critical note I discuss two arguments by Recanati: his main methodological argument --viz. that the contents posited by what he calls 'literalists' play no relevant role in (...) communication--, and some phenomenological considerations regarding the "Availability Principle" that he appeals to in order to buttress that main argument. /// Uno de los más encarnizados debates filosóficos recientes atañe a la naturaleza de la distinción entre semántica y pragmática. Aunque algunos autores han expresado reservas en el sentido de que èste pudiera ser sólo terminológico, en mi opinión tiene que ver con una cuestión sustantiva con implicaciones empíricas: el alcance y los límites de una empresa científica seria, la semántica formal. En este texto discuto dos argumentos de Recanati: su principal argumento metodológico, que los contenidos postulados por los autores que él denomina "literalistas" no desempeñan ningùn papel relevante en la comunicación, y, en segundo lugar, ciertas consideraciones fenomenológicas en torno a su "Principio de Accesibilidad", a las cuales apela para apoyar el argumento metodológico. (shrink)

Defends a version of the Davidsonian Demonstrative Theory of quotation against proponents of the Fregean Identity Theory.

I discuss an aspect of the relation between accounts of de se thought and the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. I will argue that a deflationary account of the latter—the Simple Account, due to Evans —will not do; a more robust one based on an account of de se thoughts is required. I will then sketch such an alternative account, based on a more general view on singular thoughts, and show how it can deal with the problems I (...) raise for the Simple Account. (shrink)

John MacFarlane has formulated a version of truth-relativism, and argued for its application in some cases – future contingents, knowledge attributions and epistemic modals among them. Mark Richard also defends a version of relativism, which he applies to vagueness-inducing features of the semantics of gradable adjectives. On MacFarlane’s and Richard’s characterization, truth-relativist claims posit a distinctive kind of context-dependence, the dependence of the evaluation of an assertion as true or otherwise on aspects of the context of the evaluation itself – (...) in contrast with the context of the assertion. The paper follows Evans in distinguishing two forms of truth-relativism, a moderate one concerning the evaluation of contents or propositions, an a radical one concerning the evaluation of acts; it argues against Richard’s truth-relativist proposals for gradable adjective, which is understood to be of the second kind, while accepting a form of moderate content-relativism for those cases. (shrink)