The problem of moral disagreement has been presented as an objection to contextualist semantics for ‘ought’, since it is not clear that contextualism can accommodate or give a convincing gloss of such disagreement. I argue that independently of our semantics, disagreements over ‘ought’ in non-cooperative contexts are best understood as indirect metalinguistic disputes, which is easily accommodated by contextualism. If this is correct, then rather than posing a problem for contextualism, the data from moral disagreements provides some reason to (...) adopt a semantics that allows contextual variance in the meanings of ‘ought’. (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives such as more dumb than crazy in which they differ from ordinary comparatives in the scale on which they compare: ordinary comparatives use scales lexically determined by particular adjectives, but metalinguistic ones use a generally-available scale of imprecision or ‘pragmatic slack’. To implement this idea, I propose a novel compositional implementation of the Lasersohnian pragmatic-halos account of imprecision—one that represents clusters of similar meanings as Hamblin alternatives. In the theory that (...) results, existential closure over alternatives mediates between alternative-sets and meanings in which imprecision has been resolved. I then articulate a version of this theory in which the alternatives are not related meanings but rather related utterances, departing significantly from Lasersohn’s original conception. Although such a theory of imprecision is more clearly ‘metalinguistic’, the evidence for it from metalinguistic comparatives in English is surprisingly limited. The overall picture that emerges is one in which the grammatical distinction between ordinary and metalinguistic comparatives tracks the independently motivated distinction between vagueness and imprecision. (shrink)

This paper sets out the felicity conditions for metalinguistic proposals, a type of directive illocutionary act. It discusses the relevance of metalinguistic proposals and other metalinguistic directives for understanding both small- and large-scale linguistic engineering projects, essentially contested concepts, metalinguistic provocations, and the methodology of ordinary language philosophy. Metalinguistic proposals are compared with other types of linguistic interventions, including metalinguistic negotiation, conceptual engineering, lexical warfare, and ameliorative projects.

This paper aims to bridge the relationship between metalinguistic if you like as a non-propositional discourse marker and its conditional counterparts. This paper claims that metalinguistic if you like is polysemous between a hedge that denotes the speaker’s reduced commitment to some aspect of the main clause, and an optional yet potential conditional reading that interlocutors can legitimately draw on in interaction which is brought about due to the ‘if p, q’ sentence form. That is, although the (...) class='Hi'>metalinguistic reading is most likely obtained automatically by default, it also carries an available conditional reading that is akin to other metalinguistic conditional clauses such as if you see what I mean. Next, a semantic representation of metalinguistic if you like is developed that takes on board a characterization of conditionality that departs from lexico-grammatical conventions, such that conditionals of the form ‘if p, q’ no longer bear a one-to-one correspondence with “conditional” truth conditions. Employing a radical contextualist semantic framework in which the unit of truth-conditional analysis is not constrained to the sentence form, utterances employing metalinguistic if you like are given a semantic representation such that the if-clause does not contribute propositional content, yet they also maintain their status as conditionals as the sentence form gives rise to a potential conditional secondary meaning. (shrink)

Philosophers of language and metaethicists are concerned with persistent normative and evaluative disagreements – how can we explain persistent intelligible disagreements in spite of agreement over the described facts? Tim Sundell recently argued that evaluative aesthetic and personal taste disputes could be explained as metalinguistic negotiations – conversations where interlocutors negotiate how best to use a word relative to a context. I argue here that metalinguistic negotiations are neither necessary nor sufficient for genuine evaluative and normative disputes to (...) occur. A comprehensive account of value talk requires stronger metanormative commitments than metalinguistic negotiations afford. (shrink)

In a series of articles, Kit Fine presents some highly compelling objections to monism, the doctrine that spatially coincident objects are identical. His objections rely on Leibniz’s Law and linguistic environments that appear to be immune to the standard charge of non-transparency and substitution failure. In this paper, I respond to Fine’s objections on behalf of the monist. Following Benjamin Schnieder, I observe that arguments from Leibniz’s Law are valid only if they involve descriptive, rather than metalinguistic, negation. Then (...) I show that the monist is justified in treating the negation in Fine’s objections as metalinguistic in nature. Along the way I make a few methodological remarks about the interaction between the study of natural language and metaphysics. I also present evidence that some of the linguistic environments which Fine relies on are, contrary to appearances, non-transparent. (shrink)

In previous work, we have developed the idea that, in some disputes, speakers appear to use (rather than mention) a term in order to put forward views about how that term should be used. We call such disputes “metalinguistic negotiations”. Herman Cappelen objects that our model of metalinguistic negotiation makes implausible predictions about what speakers really care about, and what kinds of issues they would take to settle their disputes. We highlight a distinction (which we have emphasized in (...) prior work) between the question of which disagreements speakers have vs. which disagreements are immediately expressed in a given linguistic exchange. Once this distinction is clear, we can appreciate that speakers who are engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation (where certain issues in conceptual ethics are immediately expressed) can also disagree about other issues, including both other issues in conceptual ethics and “object-level” issues that aren’t about words or concepts. In many metalinguistic negotiations, speakers (we think correctly) care more about these other issues than they do about ones concerning the meaning of a word. Because of this, Cappelen’s objection fails to identify any data that challenge our model. (shrink)

To reconcile the standard possible worlds model of knowledge with the intuition that ordinary agents fall far short of logical omniscience, a Stalnakerian strategy appeals to two components. The first is the idea that mathematical and logical knowledge is at bottom metalinguistic knowledge. The second is the idea that non-ideal minds are often fragmented. In this paper, we investigate this Stalnakerian reconciliation strategy and argue, ultimately, that it fails. We are not the first to complain about the Stalnakerian strategy. (...) But in contrast to existing complaints, we want to cause trouble for the strategy directly on its home turf. That is, we will advance our objection while granting both the plausibility of the fragmentation component—save for an extreme version of it—and that of the metalinguistic component. Once our central objection to the Stalnakerian strategy is in place, we will show how it negatively affects Adam Elga and Augustín Rayo’s recent attempt to apply the Stalnakerian strategy in the context of Bayesian decision theory. (shrink)

In recent work, we have argued that a number of disputes of interest to philosophers – including some disputes amongst philosophers themselves – are metalinguistic negotiations. Prima facie, many of these disputes seem to concern worldly, non-linguistic issues directly. However, on our view, they in fact concern, in the first instance, normative questions about the use of linguistic expressions. This will strike many ordinary speakers as counterintuitive. In many of the disputes that we analyze as metalinguistic negotiations, speakers (...) might quite strongly resist the idea that their debate is in any sense about language. In this paper, we explore and provide responses to what we take to be the best versions of an objection that our view involves an unacceptable attribution of false beliefs to ordinary speakers. (shrink)

We can communicate linguistic information by asserting sentences that are not explicitly about linguistic matters. Stalnaker offers a pragmatic account of this phenomenon. It is not clear that such an account is correct. In this article I offer an alternative account that does not rely on pragmatic mechanisms and which captures many of the insights in Stalnaker's theory of linguistic communication. The view is inspired by Barker's semantics of vague adjectives.

A conviction had by many Christians over many centuries is that natural language is inadequate for describing God. This is the doctrine of divine ineffability. Apophaticism understands divine ineffability as it being justified or proper to negate statements that describe God. This paper develops and defends a version of apophaticism in which the negation involved is metalinguistic. The interest of this metalinguistic apophaticism is two-fold. First, it provides a philosophical model of historical apophaticisms that shows their rational coherence. (...) Second, metalinguistic apophaticism enables a minimal understanding of ineffability that is independently plausible given its minor commitments. (shrink)

In a series of publications Burgess, Plunkett and Sundell have developed a metalinguistic negotiation view that they call ‘Conceptual Ethics.’ I argue that their position adequately captures our intuition that some cases of value disputes are metalinguistic, but that they reverse the direction of justification when they state that speakers ‘negotiate’ the best use of a term or concept on the basis of its prior social role. Borrowing ideas from Putnam, I instead suggest distinguishing two meanings of general (...) terms and value predicates. Core meaning represents the lowest common denominator between speakers and is primarily based on our needs to coordinate behavior. In contrast to this, the noumenal meaning of a general term or value predicate is intended to capture an aspect of reality and represents what a term really means. Like many other disputes about theoretical terms, terms for abstract objects, and predicates, metalinguistic value disputes are about noumenal meaning on the basis of a shared core meaning. This direction towards reality is what sets the account apart from mere metalinguistic negotiation. (shrink)

What I hope to achieve in this paper is some rather deeper understanding of the semantic and pragmatic properties of utterances which are said to involve the phenomenon of metalinguistic negation[FN1]. According to Laurence Horn, who has been primarily responsible for drawing our attention to it, this is a special non-truthfunctional use of the negation operator, which can be glossed as 'I object to U' where U is a linguistic utterance. This is to be distinguished from descriptive truthfunctional negation (...) which operates over a proposition. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the metalinguistic solution to the problem of mathematical omniscience for the possible-worlds account of propositions by combining it with a computational model of knowledge and belief. The metalinguistic solution states that the objects of belief and ignorance in mathematics are relations between mathematical sentences and what they express. The most pressing problem for the metalinguistic strategy is that it still ascribes too much mathematical knowledge under the standard possible-worlds model of knowledge and (...) belief on which these are closed under entailment. I first argue that Stalnaker's fragmentation strategy is insufficient to solve this problem. I then develop an alternative, computational strategy: I propose a model of mathematical knowledge and belief adapted from the algorithmic model of Halpern et al. which, when combined with the metalinguistic strategy, entails that mathematical knowledge and belief require computational abilities to access metalinguistic information, and thus aren't closed under entailment. As I explain, the computational model generalizes beyond mathematics to a version of the functionalist theory of knowledge and belief that motivates the possible-worlds account in the first place. I conclude that the metalinguistic and computational strategies yield an attractive functionalist, possible-worlds account of mathematical content, knowledge, and inquiry. (shrink)

This paper raises a new form of speaker error objection to the analysis of disputes as metalinguistic negotiations in cases in which disputants reject that analysis. It focuses on an obvious but underexplored form of speaker error: speakers’ misattribution of contents both to others and to themselves. It argues that the analyses of disputes that posit this type of speaker error are uncharitable in three different ways: first, by portraying speakers as mistaken interpreters of their interlocutors; second, by portraying (...) speakers as uncharitable interpreters of their interlocutors; third, by portraying speakers who retract their claims as mistaken interpreters of their own prior utterances. Taken together, these unfavorable consequences weigh significantly against the plausibility of this type of analysis for the cases in question. (shrink)

In recent years, David Plunkett and Tim Sundell have published a series of interesting articles that made an original use of resources from linguistics and philosophy of language to reply to arguments for legal antipositivism, the thesis according to which moral or value facts are part of what determines what the law is in a given jurisdiction at a given time. Plunkett and Sundell’s strategy for resisting antipositivism appeals to the notion of a metalinguistic negotiation, which incorporates the notion (...) of a metalinguistic or context disagreement. Sundell 2011 had argued that metalinguistic disagreements are a possible component of disputes about evaluative matters. A further notion deployed is that of conceptual ethics, an essential component of metalinguistic negotiations. This paper approaches a crucial concern about the deployment of both notions against disagreement-based arguments for legal antipositivism. Metalinguistic negotiations displace disagreements from the semantic to the metalinguistic level, but do not eliminate the appeal to moral or other normative reasons from legal disagreements. Conceptual ethics purports to be a normative activity, engaged with prescribing ways one ought to think and talk. On a broad understanding of legal reasoning and practice, metalinguistic negotiations and conceptual ethics are an integral part of it, and hence are consistent with evaluative and normative facts being essential to, and constitutive of, the law. Or so this paper argues. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one right logic. A particular version of the view, what is sometimes called domain-specific logical pluralism, has it that the right logic and connectives depend somehow on the domain of use, or context of use, or the linguistic framework. This type of view has a problem with cross-framework communication, though: it seems that all such communication turns into merely verbal disputes. If two people approach the same domain with different logics (...) as their guide, then they may be using different connectives, and hence talking past each other. In this situation, if we think we are having a conversation about “¬A\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lnot A$$\end{document}”, but are using different “¬\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lnot $$\end{document}”s, then we are not really talking about the same thing. The communication problem prevents legitimate disagreements about logic, which is a bad result. In this paper I articulate a possible solution to this problem, without giving up pluralism, which requires adopting a notion of metalinguistic negotiation, and allows people to communicate and disagree across domains/contexts/frameworks. (shrink)

Metalinguistic descriptivism is the view that proper names are semantically equivalent to descriptions featuring their own quotations (e.g., ?Socrates? means ?the bearer of ?Socrates??). The present paper shows that Millians can actually accept an inferential version of this equivalence thesis without running afoul of the modal argument. Indeed, they should: for it preserves the explanatory virtues of more familiar forms of descriptivism while avoiding objections (old and new) to Kent Bach's nominal description theory. We can make significant progress on (...) Frege's puzzle and Plato's beard without committing ourselves one way or the other on the semantic values of proper names. The view on offer can also be motivated by analogy with Tarski's schema T, inviting the idea that the equivalence between a name and the associated nominal description has more to do with the semantics of representational locutions than it does with names per se. My response to the modal argument exploits the Kripkean distinction between reference at a world and reference in a world, and can be accepted by metalinguistic descriptivists and Millians alike. (shrink)

This chapter identifies and explains several primary functions of the fictional use of metalinguistic devices and considers some difficult cases. In particular, this chapter argues that when real persons are quoted in a storyworld they are ‘storified’ as near-real fictions. In cases of the misquotation of real persons, near-real fictions and near-real quotations must adequately exploit resemblances between the real and the fictional. This concludes with a discussion of the similarities between fictional and nonfictional uses of metalinguistic acts, (...) and how they bear on our understanding of imagination and make-believe. (shrink)

I argue against the view that metalinguistic usage is a form of conversational implicature. That view, suggested by Thomasson (Anal Philos 57(4):1-28, 2016) and Belleri (Philos Stud 174(9):2211–2226, 2017), has been most recently fleshed out by Mankowitz (Synthese 199:5603–5622, 2021). I provide two types of criticism to the implicature view. From an empirical point of view, metalinguistic usage differs in key respects from standard cases of conversational implicature. From a conceptual standpoint, I argue that the calculation algorithm provided (...) by the implicature view makes undesirable predictions. Although my main objective is negative, I end the paper by sketching an alternative neo-Stalnakerian view of metalinguistic usage, that can be gathered from work by Barker (Linguist Philos 25(1):1–36, 2002; Inquiry 56(2–3):240–257, 2013) and others. (shrink)

In ordinary conversation, speakers disagree not only about worldly facts, but also about how to use language to describe the world. For example, disagreement about whether Buffalo is in the American Midwest, whether Pluto is a planet, or whether someone has been canceled, can persist even with agreement about all the relevant facts. The speakers may still engage in “metalinguistic negotiation”—disputing what to mean by “Midwest”, “planet”, or “cancel”. I first motivate an approach to metalinguistic negotiation that generalizes (...) a Stalnakerian theory of communication by including linguistic commitments in the conversational common ground. Then, I turn to cases where the very status of a disagreement as metalinguistic or factual is unclear or contested. For example, after the publication of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, some responses claimed to identify factual errors, while others took those same “errors” to be matters of interpretation. I’ll consider how to extend our theorizing about metalinguistic negotiation to this type of (even more) “meta” disagreement, using the discussion following the 1619 Project as a case study. On my view, in most such cases, there will be a metalinguistic negotiation going on. Still, I explain several ways in which, despite a dispute being metalinguistic, the factualist side can sometimes receive important vindication. I also discuss why it can make sense for speakers to contest the status of a dispute. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that the traditional Kantian division between two different types of judgments, judgments of personal preference and judgments of taste, does not apply to some contexts in which metalinguistic negotiations take place. To begin, I first highlight some significant similarities between predicates of personal taste and aesthetic predicates. I sustain that aesthetic predicates are gradable and multidimensional, and that they often produce metalinguistic negotiations, characteristics that have motivated an individual treatment for predicates of personal (...) taste. Secondly, contrary to Kant’s claim, I maintain that there are cases where judgments of personal preference are intersubjectively valid; in some contexts of metalinguistic negotiation, judgments of personal preference direct universality to a similar extent as judgments of taste. Some examples of real-life conversations will be presented to illustrate this point. (shrink)

David Kaplan's semantic theory for indexicals yields a distinct logic for indexical languages that generates contingent a priori truths. These special truths of the logic of indexicals include examples like "I am here now", an utterance of which expresses a contingent state of affairs and yet which, according to Kaplan, cannot fail to be true when it is uttered. This claim is threatened by the problem of displaced communications: answerphone messages, for example, seem to facilitate true instances of the negation (...) of this supposed logical truth as they allow the agent of the message to no longer be at the location of the message when it is encountered by an audience. Many such displaced communications can be identified in everyday natural language uses of indexicals. Recent discussion has suggested that Kaplan's error is to be overly restrictive in the possible contexts of utterance his semantic theory recognizes, as he fails to acknowledge the possibility of utterances that occur at a context distinct from that in which they are constructed. I reject this diagnosis and defend Kaplan's semantic theory. Displaced communications, I argue, are best understood as resulting from a pragmatically introduced metalinguistic context-shifting operation and hence do not demand revision of Kaplan's semantic theory. I provide an analysis of the pragmatic process underlying this operation and make the case for its merits over those of rival accounts of displaced communications. (shrink)

In componential analysis, word meanings are (partly) decomposed into other meanings, and semantic and syntactic markers. Although a theory of word meaning based on such semantic decompositions remains compatible with the linguistic labor division thesis, it is not compatible with Kripke/Putnam-style indexical externalism. Instead of abandoning indexical externalism, a Separation Thesis is defended according to which lexical meaning need not enter the truth-conditional content of an utterance. Lexical meaning reflects beliefs about word meaning shared in a speaker community, and these (...) may rest on possibly erroneous world-level theories. It is argued that this type of lexical meaning is indispensable for explaining word composition processes and the rationality of metalinguistic disputes. (shrink)

With the position, he labels as “new” or “metalinguistic agnosticism” Robin LePoidevin can avoid some problems with which fictionalists about religious language are confronted. Religious fictionalism is a position according to which all religious claims[1] are considered to be false when taken at face value. But because fictionalists about religious language think that certain religious worldviews have pragmatic benefits, they interpret several claims in such worldviews as true in fiction. This enables them to gain pragmatic benefits because they live (...) as if a certain religious worldview were true. Nonetheless, they don’t believe that the respective worldview represents the non-fictional reality.[2][1] In the following I understand a “religious claim“ either as the claim that God exists or as a claim that presupposes the existence of God. Since also Le Poidevin focuses on theistic religions I want to keep this focus in my response. Nonetheless, it should be kept in mind that religious fictionalism is not restricted to theistic religions. I also think that metalinguistic agnosticism and the argumentation in this paper could in principle be extended to non-theistic religions.[2] A defense of religious fictionalism can be found in for example Andrew S. Eshleman, “Can an Atheist Believe in God?”, Religious Studies 41, no. 2 and Andrew S. Eshleman, “Religious Fictionalism Defended: Reply to Cordry”, Religious Studies 46, no. 1. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recently, the hypothesis that purely evaluative disputes are metalinguistic negotiations has gained traction. I resist a strong version of that hypothesis, and argue that some of those disputes are not metalinguistic negotiations. To defend that claim, I argue that metalinguistic negotiations have three linguistic properties that some purely evaluative disputes lack. First, in a metalinguistic negotiation it is felicitous to embed the dispute-initial statement under the subjective attitude verb consider; second, a speaker can reply to (...) that initial statement by using a metalinguistic comparative; and, third, such negotiations address metalinguistic questions under discussion. Some purely evaluative disputes lack these properties, which suggests that they are not metalinguistic negotiations. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the view, defended by some philosophers, that it is part of the meaning of mental that being mental is incompatible with being physical. I call this outlook metalinguistic dualism, and I distinguish it from metaphysical theories of the mind-body relation such as Cartesian dualism. I argue that MLD is mistaken, but I don't try to defend the contrary view that mentalistic terms can be definitionally reduced to nonmental ones. After criticizing arguments by certain (...) philosophers which purport to establish MLD, I formulate a criterion for a phenomenon's being mental. I then show that this criterion is neutral between monistic and dualistic theories of the mind-body relation. Since if MLD were true it should be impossible to construct such a criterion, I conclude that it is false. The significance of my paper is that if I am right then I remove one important type of objection to aposteriori, noneliminative forms of the identity theory of mind, namely that such theories ought to be rejected merely on the basis of semantical considerations about the word mental. Beyond that, I believe that my criterion of mental phenomena correctly captures our intuitions about the nature of the distinction between mental and nonmental phenomena. (shrink)

In this paper, we identify a paradigm of metalinguistic comparatives in Greek headed by the preposition para. Para clauses are lexically distinct from other comparatives clauses in Greek (headed by apo, apoti). Building on earlier intuitions, we propose a semantics of metalinguistic MORE as a contrast between two propositions in terms of how appropriate of preferred they are by some individual. Syntactically, metalinguistic comparison appears to behave like a co-ordinate structure with ellipsis in the para-clause. Our account (...) is extended to metalinguistic negation, lexicalized by oxi in Greek, which, on a par with metalinguistic comparison, is defined as a binary operator, also contrasting two propositions. (shrink)

There has been recent interest in the idea that speakers who appear to be having a verbal dispute may in fact be engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation: they are communicating information about how they believe an expression should be used. For example, individuals involved in a dispute about whether a racehorse is an athlete might be communicating their diverging views about how ‘athlete’ should be used. While many have argued that metalinguistic negotiation is a pervasive feature of philosophical (...) and everyday discourse, the literature currently lacks an account of this phenomenon that can be situated within a ‘mainstream’ view of communication. I propose an independently motivated account where individuals reconstruct metalinguistic propositions by means of a pragmatic, Gricean reasoning process. (shrink)

We explore ChatGPT’s handling of left-peripheral phenomena in Italian and Italian varieties through prompt engineering to investigate 1) forms of syntactic bias in the model, 2) the model’s metalinguistic awareness in relation to reorderings of canonical clauses (e.g., Topics) and certain grammatical categories (object clitics). A further question concerns the content of the model’s sources of training data: how are minor languages included in the model’s training? The results of our investigation show that 1) the model seems to be (...) biased against reorderings, labelling them as archaic even though it is not the case; 2) the model seems to have difficulties with coindexed elements such as clitics and their anaphoric status, labeling them as ‘not referring to any element in the phrase’, and 3) major languages still seem to be dominant, overshadowing the positive effects of including minor languages in the model’s training. (shrink)

Many neologies receive a large amount of metalinguistic focus during their conventionalization. This includes explicit metalinguistic comments, as well as several ways of emphasizing a new word qua word in running texts, so-calledmetasignals(e.g., quotation marks). This article reports from a large quantitative study of 360 Swedish neologies. It investigates the nature and the amount of metafocus during conventionalization. More than 96% of the neologies received metafocus at least once, but the mean proportion of metafocused citations was low, just (...) under 3.5%. Metafocusing is likely to be more intense in early phases and is likely to decline over time. No long-term effects of metafocusing on the conventionalization process itself were found in corpus data. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of metalinguistic negotiation in lawyers’ and judges’ speech about the law. A speaker engages in metalinguistic negotiation when the speaker uses a term to advocate for what that term should mean or how it should be used relative to context. While I doubt that legal practitioners employ metalinguistic negotiation in the ways that David Plunkett and Tim Sundell have proposed, it is plausible that practitioners do so in another way. Specifically, I contend (...) that lawyers and judges sometimes use key terms in legal interpretation – e.g., ‘plain’, ‘meaning’, or ‘holding’ – to advocate for what those terms should mean or how courts should use them in adjudication. This suggests an intriguing role for metalinguistic negotiation in legal argumentation, one that could shed light on practitioners’ disputes in a range of cases dealing with constitutional, statutory, or common-law interpretation. (shrink)

This paper defends a particular view of explaining reasonable disagreement: the Conceptual View. The Conceptual View is the idea that reasonable disagreements are caused by differences in the way reasonable people use concepts in a cognitive process to make moral and political judgements. But, that type of explanation is caught between either an explanatory weakness or an unparsimonious and potentially self-undermining theory of concepts. When faced with deep disagreements, theories on the Conceptual View either do not have the resources to (...) explain them, or can only explain them by committing to a completely new theory of concepts where all moral and political concepts are a unique type of concept. This paper shows how the Conceptual View can avoid this dilemma by adopting what I dub the ‘Metalinguistic Strategy’ for explaining reasonable disagreement. The Metalinguistic Strategy uses recent innovations in the philosophy of language on metalinguistic negotiation to explain reasonable disagreements whether they be ordinary or deep disagreements as genuine disagreements whilst maintaining our ordinary ideas about concepts. (shrink)

The role of metalinguistic ability in L2 development is seriously underestimated. It may be seen both (1) as a means of initiating or boosting the flow of primary linguistic data and (2) as a generator of substitute knowledge (derived, but epistemologically distinct from domain-specific knowledge) that may compete with or compensate for perceived gaps in the learners current underlying competence. It cannot serve as a simple means of distinguishing the rival theoretical positions.

Proper names interpreted as rigid designators do not allow us to formulate metalinguistic statements of the form ‘NN might not have been named “NN”’. All we can do is to show what we are trying to say. But we cannot properly formulate such a metalinguistic statement about a rigid name. The rigidity of the name establishes a relationship with its bearer that is much stronger than the contingent relationship that is supposed to exist in the natural languages between (...) the name and its bearer. The sentence is intuitively true as expressed in natural languages, but once we translate it, if possible, into Kripkean formal semantics it is false because once the individual is rigidly named, she cannot have been named otherwise; or even worse, as I suspect, the whole sentence is untranslatable, because in Kripkean formal semantics there is no possible world in which she would not have had the name she rigidly has. This problem in Kripkean semantics could well be termed, as Wittgenstein would say, an ineffability. Kripkean semantics makes the actual contingent property anyone has of bearing a proper name ineffable, notwithstanding it is effable in natural languages. Keywords: rigid names, metalinguistic statements, rigid quoted names, ineffability. (shrink)

The metalinguistic approach to conceptual engineering construes disputes between linguistic reformers and linguistic conservatives as metalinguistic disagreements on how best to use particular expressions. As the present paper argues, this approach has various merits. However, it was recently criticised in Cappelen’s seminal Fixing Language. Cappelen raises an important objection against the metalinguistic picture. According to this objection – the Babel objection, as I shall call it – the metalinguistic account cannot accommodate the intuition of disagreement between (...) linguistic conservatives and reformers who are speaking different languages. The objection generalises to metalinguistic approaches to e.g. moral disagreements. This paper discusses the Babel objection and shows how to dispel it. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives (MCs) in Greek and Korean which combines an attitudinal semantics (Giannakidou and Stavrou 2008) with an expressive component. The comparative morpheme supplies the former, and the than-particle supplies the latter. Following Giannakidou and Stavrou, we assume that the MC involves the speaker’s attitude towards the than-proposition— which is deemed less appropriate or preferable— and we discuss novel data from Korean showing a two way distinction between “regular” MCs (signaled by (...) the particle kipota), and negative MCs (signaled by charari “rather” and the particle nuni). We argue that the use of MC than particles, in all variants, brings about an individual’s emotive state, and propose that the morphemes contain expressive indices in the sense of Potts 2007. Indices allow a range from mildly negative to very negative stance, so we capture the fact that expressive particles convey negativity, without positing negation in syntax— a result consistent with the fact that MC-than itself does not license strong NPIs that need negation. We further show that NPI sanctioning in comparatives is very limited, contrary to what is generally thought. Besides NPI-sanctioning, this analysis has two, we believe, important implications. First, it allows the generalization that metalinguistic functions in language are indeed part of the grammar as a combination of attitude semantics and expressivity. Additionally, our use of expressive indices supports Potts’s view of the expressive component as separate, but interacting, with the descriptive content. Finally, we show that the than particle is not vacuous (as is generally believed) but contentful: it is the locus of the interaction between descriptive and expressive meaning in the comparative. (shrink)

According to philosophical orthodoxy, the parties to moral or legal disputes genuinely disagree only if their uses of key normative terms in the dispute express the same meaning. Recently, however, this orthodoxy has been challenged. According to an influential alternative view, genuine moral and legal disagreements should be understood as metalinguistic negotiations over which meaning a given term should have. In this paper, we argue that the shared meaning view is motivated by much deeper considerations than its recent critics (...) recognize, and that much would be lost in opting for the explanation of normative disputes as metalinguistic negotiations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the view that some ontological disputes are “metalinguistic negotiations”, and to make sense of the significance of these controversies in a way that is still compatible with a broadly deflationist approach. I start by considering the view advocated by Eli Hirsch to the effect that some ontological disputes are verbal. I take the Endurantism–Perdurantusm dispute as a case-study and argue that, while it can be conceded that the dispute is verbal at (...) the object-level, this does not rule out the possibility of a non-verbal disagreement at the metalinguistic level. I then explore the metalinguistic dispute hypothesis by seeing how it can be defended from a first objection playing on the idea of inter-translatability, as well as a second objection raising the question of equal theoretical virtues. (shrink)

According to the theory theory of metalinguistic disputes, disagreements in metalinguistic disputes are based on diverging underlying theories, opinions, or world views. An adequate description of metalinguistic disagreement needs to consider the compatibility and topics of such theories. Although topic continuity can be spelled out in terms of measurement operations, it is argued that even metalinguistic disputes about a term used in different, mutually compatible theories can be substantive because the dispute is indirectly about the virtues (...) of the underlying theories. The account is defended against externalist and holist objections. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider how the notion of metalinguistic negotiation interacts with various theories of generics. The notion of metalinguistic negotiation we discuss stems from previous work from two of us (Plunkett and Sundell). Metalinguistic negotiations are disputes in which speakers disagree about normative issues concerning language, such as issues about what a given word should mean in the relevant context, or which of a range of related concepts a word should express. In a metalinguistic (...) negotiation, speakers argue about such issues implicitly, via competing “metalinguistic” usages of terms. Here, we argue that some disputes involving generics are best thought of as metalinguistic negotiations, and that these cases can be illuminating for our more general theorizing about generics. Specifically, we argue that the “contextualist” theory of generics that one of us (Sterken) has developed in other work is best equipped to account for these metalinguistic negotiations, relative to other leading views of generics. We thus argue for a “package deal” view of generics: a view that combines Plunkett and Sundell’s account of metalinguistic negotiation with Sterken’s contextualist view of generics. (shrink)

The dictionary tells us that metalinguistics is simply "the study of the interrelationship between language and other cultural behavioral phenomena."1 However, because most studies are in fact expressed in language, the study itself becomes a candidate for metalinguistic inquiry. In other words, language is not only capable of interrelationships with kinship systems or economic systems or rituals but it is capable of intrarelationships. . . . Language often becomes a subject in science fiction because science fiction writers realize that (...) they must account for the communication between characters from different planets or different epochs. Wells' Time Traveller, when he first encounters the effete and childlike Eloi, notices that they speak "a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue" which he never does come to understand. This failure of understanding is realistic and leads to some lovely pathos as the Time Traveller tries to apprehend a world solely by means of observation and exchanges of facial expression and gesture. Although language conveniently drops from consideration once it is established that there won't be any significant talking, that it is considered at all adds plausibility to this fantastic tale. · 1. American Heritage Dictionary, New College Edition, 1976. Eric S. Rabkin, professor of English and director of the Collegiate Institute for Values and Science at the University of Michigan, is the author of Narrative Suspense, The Fantastic in Literature, Arthur C. Clarke and the editor of Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales, and Stories. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Spatial Form and Plot," appeared in the Winter 1977 issue. See also: "The Shape of the Signifier" by Walter Benn Michaels in Vol. 27, No. 2. (shrink)