1. 501275.015346
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License <www.philosophersimprint.org/000000/> logically null generic operator called ‘Gen’. Recently, a number of theorists have questioned the standard view and revived a competing proposal according to which generics involve the predication of properties to kinds. This paper offers a novel argument against the kind-predication approach on the basis of the invalidity of Generic Excluded Middle, a principle according to which any sentence of the form ⌜Either Fs are G or Fs are not G⌝ is true. I argue that the kind-predication approach erroneously predicts that GEM is valid, and that it can only avoid this conclusion by either collapsing into a form of the quantificational analysis or otherwise garnering unpalatable metaphysical commitments. I also show that, while the quantificational approach does not validate GEM as a matter of logical form, the principle may be validated on certain semantic analyses of the generic operator, and so, such theories should be rejected.
    Found 5 days, 19 hours ago on PhilPapers
  2. 559064.015497
    Within contemporary metaethics, it is widely held that there is a “presumption of realism” in moral thought and discourse. Anti-realist views, like error theory and expressivism, may have certain theoretical considerations speaking in their favor, but our pretheoretical stance with respect to morality clearly favors objectivist metaethical views. This article argues against this widely held view. It does so by drawing from recent discussions about so-called “subjective attitude verbs” in linguistics and philosophy of language. Unlike pretheoretically objective predicates (e.g., “is made of wood”, “is 185 cm tall”), moral predicates embed felicitously under subjective attitude verbs like the English “find”. Moreover, it is argued that the widespread notion that moral discourse bears all the marks of fact-stating discourse is rooted in a blinkered focus on examples from English. Cross-linguistic considerations suggest that subjective attitude verbs are actually the default terms by which we ascribe moral views to people. Impressions to the contrary in English have to do with some unfortunate quirks of the term “think”.
    Found 6 days, 11 hours ago on PhilPapers
  3. 567084.015512
    Rumfitt has given two arguments that in unilateralist verificationist theories of meaning, truth collapses into correct assertibility. The present paper I give similar arguments that show that in unilateral falsificationist theories of meaning, falsehood collapses into correct deniability. According to bilateralism, meanings are determined by assertion and denial conditions, so the question arises whether it succumbs to similar arguments. I show that this is not the case. The final section considers the question whether a principle central to Rumfitt’s first argument, ‘It is assertible that A if and only if it is assertible that it is assertible that A’, is one that bilateralists can reject and concludes that they cannot. It follows that the logic of assertibility and deniability, according to a result by Williamson, is the little known modal logic K4 studied by Soboci ´nski. The paper ends with a plaidoyer for bilateralists to adopt this logic.
    Found 6 days, 13 hours ago on Nils Kürbis's site
  4. 598166.015524
    According to a popular view about counterfactuals, a counterfactual hypothesis 'if A had happened…' shifts the world of evaluation to worlds that are much like the actual world until shortly before the time of A, at which point they start to deviate from the actual world in a minimal way that allows A to happen. …
    Found 6 days, 22 hours ago on wo's weblog
  5. 674432.015535
    This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Department Faculty Publication Series by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact scholarworks@library.umass.edu.
    Found 1 week ago on PhilPapers
  6. 801793.01556
    It is generally acknowledged that existence in natural language can be conveyed by existence predicates, foremost of course the predicate exist. The standard view about existence in philosophy has been that existence is a univocal notion applying just to anything there is. Thus, Meinongians take exist to be a predicate that is true of existent objects and false of nonexistents; other philosophers try to avoid a commitment to nonexistents and take exist to apply to all entities entities and yield false sentences with a non-referring subject (in one way of another).
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on Friederike Moltmann's site
  7. 847647.015572
    How do we use language to refer to whatever we have in mind? The question is deceptively simple. The complications are right there, however, for everyone to see. The question invokes language language use reference, and human minds and we should not pretend to know the whole truth about any of these things. In Talking About, however, I try to answer the question by integrating a great deal of both classic and current work—in philosophy, cognitive science, and elsewhere— and by making some very specific assumptions about the four troublemakers, again; language use reference minds The central notion is pragmatic competence. This is the capacity to perform speech acts with a suite of specific audience-directed intentions. The capacity is grounded and explained by the normal operation of some biological, cognitive mechanism in humans. Aliens and AIs might certainly have something similar or functionally equivalent but still, the target is to understand the human capacity. The capacity to perform speech acts in which one refers to a single object is a very sophisticated aspect of pragmatic competence. I argue that such acts of reference have a proper function, namely, that they provide evidence of a referential intention. I think referential intentions are real phenomena in human brains, basically, they are sometimes part of the initial planning stages of utterance production. Moreover, I argue that such intentions can, in certain very specific circumstances, be irredeemably confused. Strictly speaking, on my view, those who are confused in this way will fail to refer to anything by the relevant utterances, because the intentions fail to determine any single object as the referent.
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on PhilPapers
  8. 856771.015583
    A large majority of American college students — almost three-quarters — go to public schools. For four-year colleges, it’s about two-thirds. Yet strangely, these “public” schools aren’t equally open to the entire public. …
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on Bet On It
  9. 892859.015594
    In Who’s afraid of A. C. Bradley?comes out in favor of “talk[ing] about Shakespeare’s characters as if they were people.” If “character criticism” is abandoned, you’ll miss most of what is good and important in the plays. …
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on Mostly Aesthetics
  10. 1025513.015605
    Philosophers often defend their views by pointing to the unacceptability of what they take to be the only alternative. So, for example, materialists sometimes defend their view of the mind by contrasting it with the inadequacy of dualist views which treat the mind as an immaterial substance. The idea of immaterial substance is scientifically challenging, obscure, mysterious or even incoherent. This can be part of what moves them to accept a materialist view of the mind. Another case is the subject of this paper: the problem of non-existence. Many analytic philosophers construct their position in opposition to the view that we should explain thought and talk about the non-existent by appealing to a category of non-existent beings or entities. Here is an example of the kind of view they reject, which they usually attribute to Alexius Meinong (1853-1920): thoughts and sentences about the mythological winged horse Pegasus are explained in terms of reference to the non-existent entity, Pegasus. Pegasus does not exist, to be sure, but it must be an entity of some kind if we are to talk about it. However, the idea that there are entities which do not exist but have some kind of being is deeply peculiar. Don’t all these ideas — object, entity, existence, being, reality — come as a package? How can we really pull them apart?
    Found 1 week, 4 days ago on Tim Crane's site
  11. 1198964.015616
    Linguistic data are commonly considered a defeasible source of evidence from which it is legitimate to draw philosophical hypotheses and conclusions. Linguistic methods popular amongst philosophers include linguistic tests, standard and comparative semantic analysis, testing language usage and use frequency with the help of language corpora, and the study of syntactical structures and etymologies. Epistemologists have applied linguistic methods to a wide range of philosophical issues, including epistemic contextualism, epistemic norms of assertion and practical reasoning, the nature of know-how, whether beliefs are states or performances, whether belief is a weak or a strong attitude, and what kind of gradability is instantiated by theoretical rationality and epistemic justification. Traditionally epistemologists have relied almost exclusively on linguistic data from western languages, with a primary focus on contemporary English. However, in the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in cross-linguistic studies in epistemology.
    Found 1 week, 6 days ago on Jie Gao's site
  12. 1237167.015627
    Analytic debates about truth are wide-ranging, but certain key themes tend to crop up time and again. The three themes that we will examine in this paper are (i) the nature and behaviour of the ordinary concept of truth, (ii) the meaning of discourse about truth, and (iii) the nature of the property truth. We will start by offering a brief overview of the debates centring on these themes. We will then argue that cross-linguistic experimental philosophy has an indispensable yet underappreciated role to play in all of these debates. Recognising the indispensability of cross-linguistic experimental philosophy should compel philosophers to significantly revise the ways in which they inquire about truth. It should also prompt analytic philosophers more generally to consider whether similar revisions might be necessary elsewhere in the field.
    Found 2 weeks ago on Jeremy Wyatt's site
  13. 1251681.015638
    A correct observation to the effect that a does not exist, where the ‘a’ is a singular term, could be true on any of a variety of grounds. Typically, a true, singular negative existential is true on the unproblematic ground that the subject term ‘a’ designates something that does not presently exist. More interesting philosophically is a singular, negative existential statement in which the subject term ‘a’ designates nothing at all. Both of these contrast sharply with a singular, negative existential in which the subject term is a name from fiction. I argue that such singular, negative existential statements are false. My account of fictional characters differs significantly from Kripke’s. It is shown that an objection to my account rests on a crucial misunderstanding. Finally, a crucial aspect of the account is emphasized.
    Found 2 weeks ago on PhilPapers
  14. 1309454.015648
    This paper will be centered on Carnap’s views on rationality. More specifically, much of the focus will be on a puzzle regarding Carnap’s view on rationality that Florian Steinberger (2016) has recently discussed. Not only is Steinberger’s discussion of significant intrinsic interest: his discussion also raises general questions about Carnap interpretation. As I have discussed in earlier work, there are two very different ways of interpreting Carnap’s talk of “frameworks” – and, relatedly, different ways of interpreting Carnap’s principle of tolerance. Carnap can be interpreted as either a relativist or as what I call a language pluralist. Steinberger’s puzzle arises given the relativist interpretation; I believe the language pluralist interpretation is correct. Most of the discussion will concern the correct interpretation of Carnap, and what this means for Steinberger’s puzzle. While I will not here mount a full defense of the language pluralist interpretation, I will pause to discuss Vera Flocke’s recent criticism of it. Towards the end, I will describe a puzzle regarding rationality different from Steinberger’s. The puzzle that I describe does arise already for the language pluralist.
    Found 2 weeks, 1 day ago on PhilPapers
  15. 1309478.015663
    In this paper, I will focus on AI systems (“AIs”) as very different, or at least potentially very different, kinds of language users from what humans are. Much theorizing about language is, for natural and understandable reasons, focused on human language, primarily the natural languages we use. But when asking philosophical questions about language, we often want to consider what languages in general are, and not only consider human languages. There is some reason to think that AIs are different from us in relevant respects, so asking questions about languages used by AIs may be useful for these general questions about language.
    Found 2 weeks, 1 day ago on PhilPapers
  16. 1317317.015673
    I propose a revision of Cantor’s account of set size that understands comparisons of set size fundamentally in terms of surjections rather than injections. This revised account is equivalent to Cantor’s account if the Axiom of Choice is true, but its consequences differ from those of Cantor’s if the Axiom of Choice is false. I argue that the revised account is an intuitive generalization of Cantor’s account, blocks paradoxes—most notably, that a set can be partitioned into a set that is bigger than it—that can arise from Cantor’s account if the Axiom of Choice is false, illuminates the debate over whether the Axiom of Choice is true, is a mathematically fruitful alternative to Cantor’s account, and sheds philosophical light on one of the oldest unsolved problems in set theory.
    Found 2 weeks, 1 day ago on PhilSci Archive
  17. 1367225.015685
    Longstanding philosophical debate over the semantics of proper names has yet to examine the distinctive behavior of deadnames, names that have been rejected by their former bearers. The use of these names to deadname individuals is derogatory, but deadnaming derogates differently than other kinds of derogatory speech. This paper examines different accounts of this behavior, illustrates what going views of names will have to say to account for it, and articulates a novel version of predicativism that can give a semantic explanation for this derogation.
    Found 2 weeks, 1 day ago on PhilPapers
  18. 1476502.015695
    David Kaplan famously argued that mainstream semantics for modal logic, which identifies propositions with sets of possible worlds, is affected by a cardinality paradox. Takashi Yagisawa showed that a variant of the same paradox arises when standard possible worlds semantics is extended with impossible worlds to deliver a hyperintensional account of propositions. After introducing the problem, we discuss two general approaches to a possible solution: giving up on sets and giving up on worlds, either in the background semantic framework or in the corresponding conception of propositions. As a result, we conclude that abandoning worlds by embracing a truthmaker-based approach offers a promising way to account for hyperintensional propositions without facing the paradoxical outcome.
    Found 2 weeks, 3 days ago on PhilPapers
  19. 2053943.015706
    Shared intention normally leads to joint action. It does this, it is commonly said, only because it is a characteristically stable phenomenon, a phenomenon that tends to persist from the time it is formed until the time it is fulfilled. However, the issue of what the stability of shared intention comes down to remains largely undertheorized. My aim in this paper is to remedy this shortcoming. I argue that shared intention is a source of moral and epistemic reasons, that responsiveness to such reasons on the part of each individual reinforces her own relevant attitudes, and that this enhances the stability of the shared intention as a whole.
    Found 3 weeks, 2 days ago on PhilPapers
  20. 2180554.015716
    “Poetic expression,” says the sugar-coated-pill theory, “is the honey that makes palatable the medicine of content, be it philosophical, moral, or scientific.” It’s an old theory, evident even in Greek and Roman theory and practice. …
    Found 3 weeks, 4 days ago on Mostly Aesthetics
  21. 2227116.015727
    Bilateral proof systems, which provide rules for both affirming and denying sentences, have been prominent in the development of proof-theoretic semantics for classical logic in recent years. However, such systems provide a substantial amount of freedom in the formulation of the rules, and, as a result, a number of different sets of rules have been put forward as definitive of the meanings of the classical connectives. In this paper, I argue that a single general schema for bilateral proof rules has a reasonable claim to inferentially articulating the core meaning of all of the classical connectives. I propose this schema in the context of a bilateral sequent calculus in which each connective is given exactly two rules: a rule for affirmation and a rule for denial. Positive and negative rules for all of the classical connectives are given by a single rule schema, harmony between these positive and negative rules is established at the schematic level by a pair of elimination theorems, and the truth-conditions for all of the classical connectives are read off at once from the schema itself.
    Found 3 weeks, 4 days ago on PhilPapers
  22. 2385703.015737
    In this paper, I look at Susan Stebbing’s articles and reviews that critically engage logical positivism. These appeared before the publication of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic and helped shape the early British reception of logical positivism. I highlight Stebbing’s adoption of G. E. Moore’s tripartite distinction between knowing a proposition, understanding it, and giving an analysis of it and, in light of this distinction, her focus on whether the principle of verifiability can ground a plausible account of communication. Stebbing thinks not, and I reconstruct her reasons, as well as her own account of communication. In doing this, I relate her criticisms to her rejection of methodological solipsism and her dissatisfaction with the logical positivist treatment of statements about other minds and the past. I also argue that Stebbing’s work provides a bridge to later criticisms of logical positivism by ordinary language philosophers. Foregrounding Stebbing’s engagement with logical positivism, especially her focus on communication, paints a fuller picture of how the logical positivists came to be part of analytic philosophy despite having different concerns than many of the British philosophers engaging their work.
    Found 3 weeks, 6 days ago on Ergo
  23. 2458332.015748
    A hyperintensional epistemic logic would take the contents which can be known or believed as more fine-grained than sets of possible worlds. I consider one objection to the idea: Williamson’s Objection from Overfitting. I propose a hyperintensional account of propositions as sets of worlds enriched with topics: what those propositions, and so the attitudes having them as contents, are about. I show that the account captures the conditions under which sentences express the same content; that it can be pervasively applied in formal and mainstream epistemology; and that it is left unscathed by the objection.
    Found 4 weeks ago on PhilPapers
  24. 2458378.015758
    What is the connection between valid inference and true conditionals? Many conditional logics require that when A is a logical consequence of B, "if A then B" is true. Taking counterlogical conditionals seriously leads to systems that permit counterexamples to that general rule. However, this leaves those of us who endorse non-trivial accounts of counterpossible conditionals to explain what the connection between conditionals and consequence is. The explanation of the connection also answers a common line of objection to non-trivial counterpossibles, which is based on a transition from valid arguments to the corresponding conditionals. It also contributes to the wider project of illuminating the connections between contexts of utterance, on the one hand, and the truth-conditions of conditionals uttered in those contexts, on the other.
    Found 4 weeks ago on PhilPapers
  25. 2559160.015769
    Slurs have been standardly assumed to bear a very direct, very distinctive semantic relationship to what philosophers have called “neutral counterpart” terms. I argue that this is mistaken: the general relationship between paradigmatic slurs and their “neutral counterparts” should be assumed to be the same one that obtains between ‘chick flick’ and ‘romantic comedy’, as well a huge number of other more prosaic pairs of derogatory and “less derogatory” expressions. The most plausible general relationship between these latter expressions — and thus, I argue, between paradigmatic slurs and “neutral counterpart” terms — is one of overlap in presumed extension, grounded in overlap in associated stereotypes. The resulting framework has the advantages of being simple, unified, and, unlike its orthodox rivals, neatly accommodating of a much wider range of data than has previously been considered. More importantly, it positions us to better understand, identify, and confront the insidious mechanisms of ordinary bigotry.
    Found 1 month ago on Ergo
  26. 2568161.01578
    Jessica Keiser’s Non-Ideal Foundations of Language is a serious, sustained attempt to engage in systematic philosophy of language while leaving aside some of the persistent, and arguably pernicious, idealizations that the field has long taken for granted. In short, it’s rad. Of course, I have my reservations about certain aspects of the project – on which more below. But, to be clear: for anyone who had a niggling sense that, for all their talk of being interested in understanding real-world communication and hip to developments over in linguistics, philosophers of language have been missing something important about language use, this is the book for you. And if the reader hasn’t had that sense, this book should serve as a helpful corrective.
    Found 1 month ago on Eliot Michaelson's site
  27. 2568185.015794
    When thinking about online speech, it’s tempting to start with questions like: What’s new here? Do online speech environments enable new types of speech acts, new semantic phenomena, new expressive effects? In other words: how has the shift to online speech fundamentally changed how we use language to communicate, coordinate, obfuscate, rouse, empower, disempower, insult, etc.? What hidden truths might online speech reveal about the nature of meaning and communication more broadly?
    Found 1 month ago on Eliot Michaelson's site
  28. 2568209.01581
    During the town hall, the President . . . tried to separate himself from his recent retweet of a conspiracy theory from an account linked to QAnon, which baselessly claimed that former Vice President Joe Biden orchestrated to have Seal Team Six killed to cover up the fake death of al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. . . .
    Found 1 month ago on Eliot Michaelson's site
  29. 2568231.015827
    According to Jakobson (1960, pp. 353-57), there are six functions of language: the referential, poetic, emotive, conative, phatic, and metalingual functions. To expand on just two of these, the emotive function involves using language to express emotions or feelings rather than information. It is exemplified by pure exclamatives like ‘Wow!’ The phatic function, in contrast, involves the use of language to open, close, or maintain a channel of communication. Exemplars include utterances of ‘Hello’, ‘Um’, or ‘Bye’. Analytic philosophers tend not to pay Jakobson much heed these days. And perhaps that is justified; his categories are vague at best, introduced more via ostention than by definition. Still, the general approach to understanding language is one worth taking seriously: a picture of language as serving a multitude of functions. What is the function of language? There isn’t just one on this picture. Rather, language is a tool that we can, without in any way sullying it, put to a variety of uses in different circumstances.
    Found 1 month ago on Eliot Michaelson's site
  30. 3082125.015862
    In this paper, we discuss J. Michael Dunn’s foundational work on the semantics for First Degree Entailment logic (FDE), also known as Belnap–Dunn logic (or Sanjaya–Belnap–Smiley–Dunn Four-valued Logic, as suggested by Dunn himself). More specifically, by building on the framework due to Dunn, we sketch a broad picture towards a systematic understanding of contra-classicality. Our focus will be on a simple propositional language with negation, conjunction, and disjunction, and we will systematically explore variants of FDE, K3, and LP by tweaking the falsity condition for negation.
    Found 1 month ago on Hitoshi Omori's site