The paper explores the distinction between two doctrines, both of which inform theory construction in much of modern cognitive psychology: the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind. According to the former, propositional attitudes are to be construed as relations that organisms bear to mental representations. According to the latter, mental processes have access only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental representations over which they are defined.The following claims are defended: (1) That the traditional dispute between (...) “rational” and “naturalistic” psychology is plausibly viewed as an argument about the status of the computational theory of mind. Rational psychologists accept a formality condition on the specification of mental processes; naturalists do not. (2) That to accept the formality condition is to endorse a version of methodological solipsism. (3) That the acceptance of some such condition is warranted, at least for that part of psychology which concerns itself with theories of the mental causation of behavior. This is because: (4) such theories require nontransparent taxonomies of mental states; and (5) nontransparent taxonomies individuate mental states without reference to their semantic properties. Equivalently, (6) nontransparent taxonomies respect the way that the organism represents the object of its propositional attitudes toitself, and it is this representation which functions in the causation of behavior.The final section of the paper considers the prospect for a naturalistic psychology: one which defines its generalizations over relations between mental representations and their environmental causes, thus seeking to account for the semantic properties of propositional attitudes. Two related arguments are proposed, both leading to the conclusion that no such research strategy is likely to prove fruitful. (shrink)

The paper explores the distinction between two doctrines, both of which inform theory construction in much of modern cognitive psychology: the representational theory of mind and the computational theory of mind. According to the former, propositional attitudes are to be construed as relations that organisms bear to mental representations. According to the latter, mental processes have access only to formal (nonsemantic) properties of the mental representations over which they are defined.The following claims are defended: (1) That the traditional dispute between (...) “rational” and “naturalistic” psychology is plausibly viewed as an argument about the status of the computational theory of mind. Rational psychologists accept a formality condition on the specification of mental processes; naturalists do not. (2) That to accept the formality condition is to endorse a version of methodological solipsism. (3) That the acceptance of some such condition is warranted, at least for that part of psychology which concerns itself with theories of the mental causation of behavior. This is because: (4) such theories require nontransparent taxonomies of mental states; and (5) nontransparent taxonomies individuate mental states without reference to their semantic properties. Equivalently, (6) nontransparent taxonomies respect the way that the organism represents the object of its propositional attitudes toitself, and it is this representation which functions in the causation of behavior.The final section of the paper considers the prospect for a naturalistic psychology: one which defines its generalizations over relations between mental representations and their environmental causes, thus seeking to account for the semantic properties of propositional attitudes. Two related arguments are proposed, both leading to the conclusion that no such research strategy is likely to prove fruitful. (shrink)

In the past decade various linguists and philosophers (e.g. Pagin, Pelletier, Recanati, Westerståhl, Lasersohn) have proposed a weakening of the standard interpretation of compositionality for propositional content. Their move is motivated by the desire to accommodate radical forms of context sensitivity within a systematic account of natural languages. In this paper I argue against weakening compositionality in the way proposed by them. I argue that weak compositionality fails to provide some of the expected benefits of compositionality. First, weak compositionality fails (...) to provide systematic meaning-rules which can handle forms of context-sensitivity that are not amenable to explanation in terms of a fixed and limited set of contextual parameters. Secondly, I argue that weak-compositionality fails to play any role in explaining speakers’ ability to calculate the semantic values of complex expressions. I conclude that weak compositionality is not a viable alternative to standard interpretations of compositionality, and that it doesn’t offer an acceptable way to accommodate radical forms of context-sensitivity within a systematic account of natural languages. Given the central role that weak-compositionality plays in recent approaches to natural language (e.g. in truth-conditional pragmatics) this also casts doubt on the viability of these projects. (shrink)

The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the authors, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, marshal evidence (...) from mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and biology, setting up their book around three central questions: What are the essential marks of human intelligence? What is it that researchers try to do when they attempt to achieve "artificial intelligence" (AI)? And why, after more than 50 years, are our most common interactions with AI, for example with our bank’s computers, still so unsatisfactory? Landgrebe and Smith show how a widespread fear about AI’s potential to bring about radical changes in the nature of human beings and in the human social order is founded on an error. There is still, as they demonstrate in a final chapter, a great deal that AI can achieve which will benefit humanity. But these benefits will be achieved without the aid of systems that are more powerful than humans, which are as impossible as AI systems that are intrinsically "evil" or able to "will" a takeover of human society. (shrink)

Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in communication, semantic (...) change, translation, Frege’s puzzle of informative identities – are developed. Communication, speaker meaning, and reference are defined. Frege’s context and compositional principles are generalized and reconciled in a fixed-point principle, and a detailed critique of Grice, several aspects of Lewis, and some aspects of the Romantic conception of meaning are offered. Connections with other branches of linguistics, especially psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and natural language processing, are explored. -/- The book will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. It should also interest readers in related fields like literary and cultural theory and the social sciences. (shrink)

The state of recent as well as older research on social ontology suggests a paradigmatic approach, according to which it is our consciousness that must provide the framework for conceptualising the social. I, however, argue that Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule-following opens up a new horizon for the ontology of the social. The fact that the rules of our language are social in nature and that we need not be aware of them in order to follow them shifts the problem to (...) what lies behind consciousness. The ontological conceptualisation of the social must focus on our implicit knowledge instead, which is always an enabling condition for our consciousness: for we share some of this implicit knowledge with others, as can be seen from Wittgenstein and the case of language. (shrink)

Semantic Minimalists make a proprietary claim to explaining the possibility of utterances sharing content across contexts. Further, they claim that an inability to explain shared content dooms varieties of Contextualism. In what follows, I argue that there are a series of barriers to explaining shared content for the Minimalist, only some of which the Contextualist also faces, including: (i) how the type-identity of utterances is established, (ii) what counts as repetition of type-identical utterances, (iii) how it can be determined whether (...) semantically minimal content has been repeated, and (iv) what the nature of such content is. (shrink)

Jürger Habermas has been attempting to develop a critical theory of society with a practical intent, on the basis of communication and a theory of the evolution of practical and moral social competence. He thinks that the studies of language rules and language learning from Piaget, Searle, Chomsky and others have and continue to provide models elsewhere - from productive activity to moral activity. Moreover, the models are said to extend to social learning, which will be exhibited in the development (...) of society.Furthermore, speech acts, which are to be described by a theory of pragmatics, anticipate the establishment of ideal speech situations, which are the avenue to ‘truth, freedom, and Justice.'. (shrink)

Lying is standardly distinguished from misleading according to how a disbelieved proposition is conveyed. To lie, a speaker uses a sentence to say a proposition she does not believe. A speaker merely misleads by using a sentence to somehow convey but not say a disbelieved proposition. Front-and-center to the lying/misleading distinction is a conception of what-is-said by a sentence in a context. Stokke (2016, 2018) has recently argued that the standard account of lying/misleading is explanatorily inadequate unless paired with a (...) theory where what-is-said by a sentence is determined by the question under discussion or QUD. I present two objections to his theory, and conclude that no extant theory of what-is-said enables the standard account of the lying/misleading distinction to be explanatorily adequate. (shrink)

It is a common view that radical contextualism about linguistic meaning is incompatible with a compositional explanation of linguistic comprehension. Recently, some philosophers of language have proposed theories of 'pragmatic' compositionality challenging this assumption. This paper takes a close look at a prominent proposal of this kind due to François Recanati. The objective is to give a plausible formulation of the view. The major results are threefold. First, a basic distinction that contextualists make between mandatory and optional pragmatic processes needs (...) to be revised. Second, the pragmatic theory can withstand a Davidsonian objection only by rejecting the importance of a distinction between primitive and non-primitive semantic items. Thirdly, however, the theory is now open to a worry about how it should be understood: either the theory consists in a very broad functionalist generalization about communication, which makes it explanatorily inert, or it boils down to a highly particularist view about linguistic meaning. Finally, I argue that Recanati's notion of 'occasion meaning' is problematic and suggest replacing it with the notion of speaker meaning, which is explanatorily more basic. (shrink)

Gricean intentionalists hold that what a speaker says and means by a linguistic utterance is determined by the speaker's communicative intention. On this view, one cannot really say anything without meaning it as well. Conventionalists argue, however, that malapropisms provide powerful counterexamples to this claim. I present two arguments against the conventionalist and sketch a new Gricean theory of speech errors, called the misarticulation theory. On this view, malapropisms are understood as a special case of mispronunciation. I argue that the (...) Gricean theory is supported by empirical work in phonetics and phonology and, also, that conventionalism inevitably fails to do this work justice. I conclude, from this, that the conventionalist fails to show that malapropisms constitute a counterexample to a Gricean theory. (shrink)

I identify a notion of compositionality at the intersection of the different notions philosophers, linguists, and psychologists are concerned with. The notion is compositionality of expression content: the idea that the content of a complex expression in a context of its utterance is determined by its syntactic structure and the contents of its constituents in the contexts of their respective utterances. Traditional arguments from productivity and systematicity cannot establish that the contents of linguistic expressions are compositionally determined in this sense. (...) I present a novel argument for this thesis. (shrink)

A ‘multiple-proposition phenomenon’ is a putative counterexample to the widespread implicit assumption that a simple indicative sentence semantically expresses at most one proposition. Several philosophers and linguists have recently developed hypotheses concerning this notion. The guiding questions motivating this research are: Is there an interesting and homogenous semantic category of MP phenomena? If so, what is the import? Do MP theories have any relevance to important current questions in the study of language? I motivate an affirmative answer to, and then (...) argue that MP theorizing is quite relevant to debates at the semantics/ pragmatics interface. (shrink)

This paper examines the place of metaphorical interpretation in the current Contextualist-Literalist controversy over the role of context in the determination of truth-conditions in general. Although there has been considerable discussion of 'non-literal' language by both sides of this dispute, the language analyzed involves either so-called implicit indexicality, loose or loosened use, enriched interpretations, or semantic transfer, not metaphor itself. In the first half of the paper, I critically evaluate Recanati's (2004) recent Contextualist account and show that it cannot account (...) for the metaphorical-literal dependence characteristic of metaphor. I then turn to Carston's (2002), and Bezuidenhout's (2001) Contextualist accounts and show that they place no constraints on metaphorical interpretations. In the second half of the paper I sketch a Literalist theory of metaphor elaborated in Stern (2000) and respond to two kinds of Contextualist criticisms of that account by Camp (2005) and Stanley (2005). (shrink)

This paper examines the place of metaphorical interpretation in the current Contextualist‐Literalist controversy over the role of context in the determination of truth‐conditions in general. Although there has been considerable discussion of ‘non‐literal’ language by both sides of this dispute, the language analyzed involves either so‐called implicit indexicality, loose or loosened use, enriched interpretations, or semantic transfer, not metaphor itself. In the first half of the paper, I critically evaluate Recanati’s (2004) recent Contextualist account and show that it cannot account (...) for the metaphorical‐literal dependence characteristic of metaphor. I then turn to Carston’s (2002), and Bezuidenhout’s (2001) Contextualist accounts and show that they place no constraints on metaphorical interpretations. In the second half of the paper I sketch a Literalist theory of metaphor elaborated in Stern (2000) and respond to two kinds of Contextualist criticisms of that account by Camp (2005) and Stanley (2005). (shrink)

This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind.

The central issue of this essay is whether contextualism in epistemology is genuinely in conflict with recent claims that ‘know’ is not in fact a contextsensitive word. To address this question, I will first rehearse three key aims of contextualists and the broad strategy they adopt for achieving them. I then introduce two linguistic arguments to the effect that the lexical item ‘know’ is not context sensitive, one from Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore, one from Jason Stanley. I find these (...) and related arguments quite compelling. In particular, I think Cappelen and Lepore (2003, 2005a) show pretty definitively that ‘know’ is not like ‘I’/‘here’/‘now’, and Stanley (2004) shows that ‘know’ is not like ‘tall’/‘rich’.1 One could try to find another model for ‘know’. Instead, I consider whether one can rescue ‘‘the spirit of contextualism in epistemology’’—that is, achieve its aims by deploying a strategy of appealing to speaker context—even while granting that ‘know’ isn’t a context-sensitive word at all. My conclusion, in a nutshell, is this: If there are pragmatic determinants of what is asserted/stated, and contextualism can overcome independent problems not having to do specifically with the context-sensitivity of the word ‘know’, then the spirit of contextualism can be salvaged. Even though, for reasons sketched by the aforementioned authors, ‘know’ doesn’t actually belong in the class of context-sensitive words. (shrink)

This is a study of the epistemology of indexical reference, Or its foundation in the intentionality of the speaker's awareness of the referent. Where the referent is the object of the speaker's acquaintance on that occasion, The sense expressed is the generic content of that awareness. This, Indexical sense determines indexical reference, But indexical sense works by appeal to the context of the speaker's awareness of the referent. It is discussed how, By virtue of indexical sense, Indexical reference is rigid, (...) I.E. Picks out the same referent in any possible world. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there are indispensable and irreducible metaphors in religious language and that this does not threaten a realist interpretation of religion. I first sketch a realist theory of religious language and argue that we cannot avoid addressing the problems metaphor poses to semantics. I then give a brief account of what it means for a metaphorical sentence to be true and how metaphors can refer to something even if what they mean is not expressible in (...) literal terms. Finally, I discuss how this realist theory of metaphor influences our understanding of negative theology and gives a new perspective on religious pluralism. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that certain sentences of natural language fail to express truth conditional contents. Standard examples include e.g. Tipper is ready and Steel is strong enough. In this paper, we provide a novel analysis of truth conditional meaning using the notion of a question under discussion. This account explains why these types of sentences are not, in fact, semantically underdetermined, provides a principled analysis of the process by which natural language sentences can come to have enriched meanings in (...) context, and shows why various alternative views, e.g. so-called Radical Contextualism, Moderate Contextualism, and Semantic Minimalism, are partially right in their respective analyses of the problem, but also all ultimately wrong. Our analysis achieves this result using a standard truth conditional and compositional semantics and without making any assumptions about enriched logical forms, i.e. logical forms containing phonologically null expressions. (shrink)

This paper explores the question of what logic is not. It argues against the wide spread assumptions that logic is: a model of reason; a model of correct reason; the laws of thought, or indeed is related to reason at all such that the essential nature of the two are crucially or essentially co-illustrative. I note that due to such assumptions, our current understanding of the nature of logic itself is thoroughly entangled with the nature of reason. I show that (...) most arguments for the presence of any sort of essential re- lationship between logic and reason face intractable problems and demands, and fall well short of addressing them. These arguments include those for the notion that logic is normative for reason (or that logic and correct reason are in some way the same thing), that logic is some sort of description of correct reason and that logic is an abstracted or idealised version of correct reason. A strong version of logical realism is put forward as an alternative view, and is briefly explored. (shrink)

In this article, I argue against a widely accepted model of utterance interpretation, namely the LS model (literality‐based serial model), according to which the literal interpretation of an utterance (the proposition literally expressed by that utterance) must be computed before nonliteral interpretations can be entertained. Alleged arguments in favor of this model are shown to be fallacious, counter‐examples are provided, and alternative models are sketched.

A survey of a wide range of social?scientific disciplines reveals a definite convergence of theoretical interest in human cognition and communication as situated, concerned, and embedded in social commitment. Recent contributions within situation semantics and cognitive science explicitly reject some of the constraints inherent in their shared philosophical heritage and prepare novel ground for dialogues between fields as far apart as formal semantics and ?dialogical? text theory. Issues such as purely cognitive versus motivational aspects of human situatedness, and the relationship (...) between models of individual information processing, on the one hand, and hermeneutic?dialectic assumptions about social and collective features of meaning and mind, on the other, are thus made topics of cross?disciplinary discussions. These are some of the many problems in need of further clarification if we want to explore the possibility of bridging and/or transcending the gulf between analytic?rationalist and hermeneutic?dialectic contributions to our insight into human cognition and communication. (shrink)

Review of Insensitive Semantics, by H. Cappelen and E. Lepore.

In this paper I argue against a widely accepted model of utterance interpretation, namely the LS model, according to which the literal interpretation of an utterance (the proposition literally expressed by that utterance) must be computed before non-literal interpretations can be entertained. Alleged arguments in favor of this model are shown to be fallacious, counterexamples are provided, and alternative models are sketched.

The phenomenon of defeasibility has long been a central theme in legal literature. This essay aims to shed new light on that phenomenon by clarifying some fundamental conceptual issues. First, the most widespread definition of legal defeasibility is examined and criticized. The essay shows that such a definition is poorly constructed, inaccurate and generates many problems. Indeed, the definition hides the close relationship between legal defeasibility and legal interpretation. Second, this essay argues that no new definition is needed. I will (...) show that from an interpretative standpoint, there is nothing special about legal defeasibility. Contrary to what some authors maintain, no unique or privileged source of legal defeasibility exists, nor are there privileged arguments to justify it. Specifically, legal defeasibility refers to interpretative outcomes deriving from interpretative arguments that, on the one hand, are very different from one another, and, on the other, are often employed to justify different interpretative outcomes. In the legal field, the problems related to defeasibility have little in common with the problems that this label covers in other areas—such as logic or epistemology—and they are nothing but the well-known problems related to legal interpretation. In conclusion, this paper argues that as far as legal argumentation is concerned, the notion of legal defeasibility lacks explanatory power, and it should be abandoned. (shrink)

According to contextualists, communication has to do with pragmatically adjusted content, not with conventional meaning. This pragmatic content is sometimes identified with speaker meaning or with the thought the speaker intends to express. I will argue that given the sociolinguistic role of utterance content—the fact it provides reasons for action, liabilities and entitlements—locutionary content should not be modelled as a variety of speaker meaning.

ABSTRACT Truth-conditions are systematically determined when they are the output of an algorithmic procedure that takes as input a set of semantic and contextual features. Truth-conditional sceptics have cast doubts on the thesis that truth-conditions are systematic in this sense. Against this form of scepticism, Schoubye and Stokke : 759–793) and Dobler : 451–474.) have provided systematic analyses of utterance truth-conditions. My aim is to argue that these theories are not immune to the kind of objections raised by truth-conditional sceptics. (...) In particular, I argue that the use of Questions Under Discussion and ways of being is problematic. (shrink)

According to some views, natural language suffers from underdeterminacy, but thought doesn’t. According to the underdeterminacy claim, sentence types underdetermine the truth-conditions of sentence tokens. In particular, the semantics of a predicate type seems to underdetermine the satisfaction conditions of its tokens. By contrast, mental representation-types are supposed to determine the truth-conditions of its tokens. In this paper I critically examine these mixed views. First, I argue that the arguments supporting the indispensability of including in one’s theory mental representations that (...) are free of the underdeterminacy exhibited by natural language are not sound. As a result, the possibility that mental representation-types are as underdetermined as natural language sentence-types has not been ruled out. Second, I argue that Carston’s ad hoc concept-types are as underdetermined as word-types. I finish by arguing that mental representations are also underdetermined in a second sense—mental representation-tokens only determine a partial function from possible worlds to truth-values. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is the method (or methods) via which we can assess and improve our concepts. Can conceptual engineering be usefully employed within analytic theology? Given that analytic theology and analytic philosophy effectively share the same philosophical toolkit then if conceptual engineering works well in philosophy then it ought to work well in analytic theology too. This will be our working hypothesis. To make good on this hypothesis, we first address two challenges. The first challenge makes conceptual engineering look to (...) be too inclusive; the second challenge makes it look to be too revolutionary (for analytic theology). To address these challenges, we propose a refined characterisation of conceptual engineering. We then turn to consider a number of case studies where analytic theology and conceptual engineering may fruitfully cooperate. These are: theological disagreements, inter-faith dialogue, meaning change, celibacy, AI, the name of God, and conceptual genealogy. (shrink)

This is the second part of a two-part article on compositionality, i.e. the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the way they are put together. In the first, Pagin and Westerståhl (2010), we provide a general historical background, a formal framework, definitions, and a survey of variants of compositionality. It will be referred to as Part I. Here we discuss arguments for and against the claim that natural languages have (...) a compositional semantics. We also discuss some problem cases, including belief reports, quotation, idioms, and ambiguity. (shrink)

The appearance in 1945 of the idea of the open texture of empirical concepts, which anticipated Friedrich Waismann’s thesis of a many-level-structure of language, led to a re-evaluation of “context”. It widens the sense of context that we are accustomed to mentioning as being Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning in his later philosophy. The new idea Waismann brought into the landscape is how to “clarify the context”, which is in a way a very non-Wittgensteinian question as well as an “explanation of (...) context”, where open texture plays a key role. But despite the amount of literature about open texture, this idea of Waismann is still not properly understood. Open texture must be situated as an obstacle to exhaustiveness of definition for internal reasons not only because of unforeseen conditions that could always arise in the future, but also by virtue of an a priori aspect of the texture of concepts. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to propose an interpretation of open texture as an immanent property of a concept, that is, as something that is underlying its nature. (shrink)

En este breve texto el autor nos introduce a la polémica entre Ricardo Guastini y Rafael Hernández Marín en torno a la interpretación del derecho. En dicha polémica Guastini defiende el escepticismo, mientras que Hernández Marín defiende el cognoscitivismo. Estas maneras diferentes de entender la interpretación jurídica son puestas a prueba en un interesante intercambio de ideas que nos permite apreciar los alcances y límites de cada posición.

I examine the radical contextualists’ two main arguments for the semantic underdeterminacy thesis, according to which all, or almost all, English sentences lack context-independent truth conditions. I show that both arguments are fallacious. The first argument, which I call the fallacy of the many understandings , mistakenly infers that a sentence S is semantically incomplete from the fact that S can be used to mean different things in different contexts. The second argument, which I call the open texture fallacy , (...) wrongly concludes that a sentence S lacks context-independent truth conditions from the fact that there are circumstances in which the truth value of S would be indeterminate. I do however defend the claim that a certain class of sentences not containing any indexicals do lack context-independent truth conditions, and put forward an argument to that effect. But this argument, as I show, does not generalize to all sentences, and thus fails to support the semantic underdeterminacy thesis. (shrink)

Abstract: Despite all the critical scrutiny they have received recently, contextualist views in philosophy are still not well understood. Neither contextualists nor their opponents have been entirely clear about what contextualist theses amount to and what they are based on. In this article I show that there are actually two kinds of contextualist view that rest on two very different semantic phenomena, namely, semantic incompleteness and semantic indeterminacy . I explain how contextualist approaches can be used to dissolve certain debates (...) in philosophy. According to such approaches, the same philosophical thesis can be correctly endorsed in some contexts and correctly denied in others: it is thus pointless to seek a context-independent solution to debates about this thesis. My purpose is not to defend particular contextualist views but to lay out the general framework on which they rest: this allows us to see more clearly the similarities and differences among contextualist views defended in various areas of philosophy. (shrink)