The boundary between semantics and pragmatics has been important since the early twentieth century, but in the last twenty-five years it has become the central issue in the philosophy of language. This anthology collects classic philosophical papers on the topic, along with recent key contributions. It stresses not only the nature of the boundary, but also its importance for philosophy generally.

En este trabajo argumento contra la explicación de la semántica y la pragmática de las adscripciones de actitudes proposicionales que Soames ofrece en Beyond Rigidity. Defiendo una restricción para la identificación del contenido semántico de las frases de un lenguaje basada en las condiciones de competencia semántica, y argumento que la falla de sustitutividad es un componente esencial de nuestras condiciones de competencia en los predicados de actitudes proposicionales. Dado que la explicación de Soames no respeta esta condición, concluyo que (...) no es una explicación adecuada de las adscripciones de actitudes proposicionales. (shrink)

In this paper I present what I take to be the best argument for the introduction of the semantic category of sense. This argument, or a version of it, can be extracted from Frege’s renowned ‘On Sense and Reference’, but has not been properly understood or appreciated. I begin by discussing the Russellian objections to other versions of the argument attributed to Frege, in order to expound the argument which fends off such objections.

Cappelen and Lepore argue that moderate contextualism is not a stable position for the arguments that support it put it on a slippery slope to radical contextualism. My aim is to stabilize moderate contextualism by providing an account of the sorts of arguments it should rely on. These differ from standard contextualist arguments in that they rely on speakers’ intuitions about the truth-value of uttered sentences, and not about what such utterances say. Given certain conditions of systematicity, clarity and how (...) widespread these intuitions are, I claim we have good evidence for determining whether an expression is context sensitive. Although this method does render quantifier expressions and ‘to rain’ context sensitive, it does not do so with ‘red’. We thus obtain prima facie motivation for moderate contextualism that does not lead to radical contextualism. However, the methodology does not distinguish contextualism from relativism. I thus run through different reasons for introducing elements into contexts of use and elements into circumstances of evaluation.Cappelen e Lepore argumentam que o contextualismo moderado não é uma posição estável, uma vez que os argumentos que o sustentam o colocam em uma encosta escorregadia que conduz ao contextualismo radical. Meu objetivo é estabilizar o contextualismo moderado provendo um tratamento dos tipos de argumentos nos quais ele deveria estar sustentado. Estes diferem dos argumentos contextualistas usuais porque eles partem das intuições dos falantes sobre o valor de verdade de sentenças proferidas, e não sobre o que estas sentenças dizem. Dadas certas condições de sistematicidade, claridade e quão difundidas estas intuições são, eu afirmo que temos boas evidências para determinar se uma expressão é sensível ao contexto. Ainda que este método identifique expressões quantificadoras e ‘chove’ como sensíveis ao contexto, ele não faz o mesmo com ‘vermelho’. Temos assim motivações prima facie para o contextualismo moderado que não leva ao contextualismo radical. No entanto, esta metodologia não distingue o contextualismo do relativismo. Assim, eu examino diferentes razões para introduzir elementos nos contextos de uso e nas circunstâncias de avaliação. (shrink)

Indexicals are expressions that vary in reference according to the context in which they are used. They are of two sorts: pure, and impure or demonstrative. Unlike pure indexicals, demonstratives require an extralinguistic element, like a demonstration or an intention of a certain sort, in order to refer.

We argue that there are names with de se contents and that they are theoretically fruitful. De se names serve to challenge intuitive and otherwise plausible orthodoxies such as Stalnaker's view of communication and Bayesian views of belief update. These implications are also significant for those already sympathetic to the irreducibility of de se content.

In this paper I argue against the account Soames offers in Beyond Rigidity of the semantics and pragmatics of propositional attitude reports. I defend a particular constraint for identifying semantic content of phrases based on conditions for semantic competence, and argue that failure of substitutivity is an essential component of our competence conditions with propositional attitude predicates. Given that Soames's account makes no room for this, I conclude that he does not offer an adequate explanation of propositional attitude reports. /// (...) En este trabajo argumento contra la explicación de la semántica y la pragmática de las adscripciones de actitudes proposicionales que Soames ofrece en Beyond Rigidity. Defiendo una restricción para la identificatión del contenido semántico de las frases de un lenguaje basada en las condiciones de competencia semántica, y argumento que la falla de sustitutividad es un componente esencial de nuestras condiciones de competencia en los predicados de actitudes proposicionales. Dado que la explicación de Soames no respeta esta conditión, concluyo que no es una explicación adecuada de las adscripciones de actitudes proposicionales. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, in order to make (T1) and (T2) compatible within a Fregean approach, we must reject the view that all modes of presentation are senses. (T1) There is a diversity of ways in which Venus may be presented to each subject, and which are associated with the name ‘Venus’. (T2) There is only one Fregean thought expressed by the sentence ‘Venus is a planet’. Modes of presentation are essentially psychological and have causal powers on minds. (...) The mind of a subject is sensitive to differences in modes of presentation, so that if an object is presented to a subject under different modes of presentation and she has no reason to believe that they are modes of presentation of one and the same object, then she may take opposing attitudes involving those different modes of presentation. In contrast, senses are essentially semantic. For this reason, I propose that they be understood as certain ways of determining the reference of terms, and either are given by the semantic rules for those terms or are identical to those semantic rules. I agree with McDowell that an interpretive truth-theory for a language L gives us a theory of sense for L, and that something like (V) ‘Venus’ refers to Venus will give us the axiom which assigns the semantic value for ‘Venus’ within such a theory, and which is necessary in order to derive the interpretive truth-conditions of a sentence like ‘Venus is a planet’. An axiom like ‘Venus’ refers to Hesperus will not do within a theory of sense. Nonetheless, it will do within a theory of reference, a truth-theory which delivers not interpretive truth-conditions, but purely referential truth conditions. The purely referential truth-conditions for an indicative atomic sentence are, I claim, those which are specified by specifying those features in the world (objects, properties, etc.) to which the meaningful parts of the sentence refer, representing them as related in a certain way. For the specification of such truth-conditions, the difference in cognitive value between two sentences will not matter, whereas it will matter for the specification of interpretive truth-conditions. Now, senses are introduced to allow for an explanation of the difference in cognitive value between sentences with the same purely referential truth-conditions. An indication of when two sentences differ in cognitive value is when it is possible for a subject who is rational and understands the language in question to take opposing attitudes to those sentences (or their contents —whatever those contents are); and if there is in fact such a subject who takes opposing attitudes to those sentences, then those sentences differ in their cognitive value. Given this connection between cognitive value and a subject’s attitudes, and given the purpose for which senses are introduced, we must suppose that a subject’s mind must be sensitive to differences in senses, and so, that senses must be psychologically relevant. My proposal, which aims to establish some kind of identity between some modes of presentation under certain conditions and those ways of determination which are senses, is as follows: A psychological mode of presentation M is a way of determination which is a sense relative to a particular expression e in a public language L which aids in expressing propositional attitude P if and only if i the subject who has M and who is sufficiently competent in L knows (or realizes) that M goes with e in L; ii no other proposition e′ in L is more adequate for reporting the subject’s propositional attitude P; iii M is crucial in the subject’s rational failure to make certain identifications; and iv M is an appropriate function to an appropriate reference. Only the mode of presentation associated with ‘Venus’ that satisfies conditions i-iv relative to ‘Venus’ which aids in expressing a propositional attitude like the belief that Venus is a planet, will be the sense of ‘Venus’. I argue that only the mode of presentation of Venus as Venus will do, and that such mode of presentation is implicit in the way of determination shown by (V). Other modes of presentation of Venus as being big or appearing in the sky in the evenings or being the second planet in proximity to the sun will not satisfy conditions i–iv. Thus, although a subject may have all these modes of presentation of Venus and associate them with ‘Venus’ (i.e. (T1)), only the mode of presentation of Venus as Venus will do as the sense of ‘Venus’. Hence, only one thought will be expressed by a sentence like ‘Venus is a planet’ (i.e. (T2)). (shrink)

Al responder al reto que Donnellan les presenta a los russellianos de explicar los usos referenciales de las descripciones definidas, éstos recurren a la distinción entre el significado del hablante y el significado semántico. Suponiendo que, a diferencia de las descripciones definidas, los demostrativos sólo pueden usarse referencialmente, defiendo la idea de que aun en estos casos se puede distinguir el significado del hablante del significado semántico. Explico cómo puede establecerse la distinción en el caso de los demostrativos complejos y (...) de los simples. La distinción depende, en parte, de distinguir las intenciones referenciales que completan al demostrativo de las intenciones comunicativas. (shrink)

Las sensaciones constituyen el mayor obstáculo para dar una explicación satisfactoria de la mente en términos no mentales, y se distinguen por la manera como se sienten, esto es, por sus qualia o su carácter fenoménico, que se resiste a ser explicado y que hace patente el hiato entre lo físico y lo mental. Pero, ¿en qué consiste este aspecto de las sensaciones? ¿Lograremos alguna vez dar cuenta de él adecuadamente? Éstas son dos de las preguntas fundamentales que se discuten (...) en los doce artículos de este volumen, los cuales, en particular, se sitúan en el debate actual sobre los problemas que los qualia presentan a las teorías fisicalistas, funcionalistas e intencionalistas de la mente. En el primero, las compiladoras ofrecen un panorama general de la discusión contemporánea en torno a las sensaciones y su carácter fenoménico; los demás son textos centrales en esta discusión, de T. Nagel, C. McGinn, F. Jackson, D. Lewis, G. Harman, N. Block, J. Fodor, M. Tye, D. Dennett y S. Shoemaker. (shrink)

Rhetorical Structure Theory has enjoyed continuous attention since its origins in the 1980s. It has been applied, compared to other approaches, and also criticized in a number of areas in discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. In this article, we review some of the discussions about the theory itself, especially addressing issues of the reliability of analyses and psychological validity, together with a discussion of the nature of text relations. We also propose areas for further research. A follow-up (...) article will discuss applications of the theory in various fields. (shrink)

Fake news has become an important topic of research in a variety of disciplines including linguistics and computer science. In this paper, we explain how the problem is approached from the perspective of natural language processing, with the goal of building a system to automatically detect misinformation in news. The main challenge in this line of research is collecting quality data, i.e., instances of fake and real news articles on a balanced distribution of topics. We review available datasets and introduce (...) the MisInfoText repository as a contribution of our lab to the community. We make available the full text of the news articles, together with veracity labels previously assigned based on manual assessment of the articles’ truth content. We also perform a topic modelling experiment to elaborate on the gaps and sources of imbalance in currently available datasets to guide future efforts. We appeal to the community to collect more data and to make it available for research purposes. (shrink)

This paper brings together cutting-edge, quantitative corpus methodologies and discourse analysis to explore the relationship between text complexity and subjectivity as descriptive features of opinionated language. We are specifically interested in how text complexity and markers of subjectivity and argumentation interact in opinionated discourse. Our contributions include the marriage of quantitative approaches to text complexity with corpus linguistic methods for the study of subjectivity, in addition to large-scale analyses of evaluative discourse. As our corpus, we use the Simon Fraser Opinion (...) and Comments Corpus, which comprises approximately 10,000 opinion articles and the corresponding reader comments from the Canadian online newspaper The Globe and Mail, as well as a parallel corpus of hard news articles also sampled from The Globe and Mail. Methodologically, we combine conditional inference trees with the analysis of random forests, an ensemble learning technique, to investigate the interplay between text complexity and subjectivity. Text complexity is defined in terms of Kolmogorov complexity, that is, the complexity of a text is measured based on its description length. In this approach, texts which can be described more efficiently are considered to be linguistically less complex. Thus, Kolmogorov complexity is a measure of structural surface redundancy. Our take on subjectivity is inspired by research in evaluative language, stance and Appraisal and defined as the expression of evaluation and opinion in language. Drawing on a sentiment analysis lexicon and the literature on stance markers, a custom set of subjectivity and argumentation markers is created. The results show that complexity can be a powerful tool in the classification of text into different text types, and that stance adverbials serve as distinctive features of subjectivity in online news comments. (shrink)

This study explores women’s and men’s perceptions of the specific barriers that prevent women from participating fully in the cultural labour market. To this end, an online questionnaire was administered to 375 cultural professionals in Catalonia regarding their perceptions of the barriers faced by women in a range of areas. The results show similar views between genders regarding the difficulties associated with the work–life balance as the most important obstacle preventing women from entering specific cultural fields and from rising to (...) decision-making positions. However, perceptions of the barriers impacting the recognition of women’s career achievements differed greatly between men and women. While men place more emphasis on issues of work–life balance, women more frequently mention the existence of a glass ceiling and their exclusion from networks of influence. Regarding the visibility of women’s artistic creations, although intersectionality is mentioned by both genders as the main limiting factor, there are marked differences between women’s and men’s perception of the other barriers. Men thus more frequently refer to the barriers of work–life balance and the association of creativity with maleness as the main factors limiting the visibility of women’s artistic creations. In short, this study provides evidence to stakeholders of the different perceptions that men and women have in relation to the main barriers that prevent women from climbing the career ladder; gaining recognition and visibility for their work; and, in some creative sectors, even from entering the labour market. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 1 Seiten: 1-89.

Los principales referentes intelectuales de Ángel Álvarez de Miranda, historiador de las religiones.

Nanotechnologies are a controversial topic, as they seem promising but also cause concern. Previous research has highlighted the potential link between nanotechnologies and other hazardous technologies. The aim of this research was to analyse the discourse on this topic by three groups of participants: laypersons, scientists and environmentalists. Thirty-four people (13 laypersons, ten scientists and eleven environmentalists) were interviewed using a semi-structured interview. Lexical and thematic analyses showed that scientists engage in explanatory discourse and perceive fewer risks than laypersons and (...) environmentalists. The latter two groups describe applications and list the main actors in the development of nanotechnologies. Environmentalists are significantly more likely to make spontaneous associations with other technologies, such as electromagnetic waves, and perceive more risks than the other two groups. Contrary to our expectations, laypersons make fewer associations with biotechnologies than experts or environmentalists. The results are discussed in terms of the interest of a qualitative approach to uncovering new objects spontaneously associated with nanotechnologies, as well as in terms of a risk governance framework. (shrink)

By bringing queer ecologies to bear on the blue humanities, this essay promotes a queer hydropoetic investigation that attends to the forms, aesthetics, and politics of pools. Pools are sites of aquatic enjoyment, sport, and revelation that have long been understudied within the blue humanities. We ask whether the promises and failures of swimming in these geographies can provide a queer heuristic in which submersion, immersion, and staying afloat subtend coming out, queer eroticism, and queer of color coalitional politics. Our (...) tripartite examination engages the independent film Saved! (2004), the ecosexual documentary Water Makes Us Wet (2019), and the young adult novel and graphic novel adaptation of Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath (2016/2019 and 2020, respectively). Our analysis of pools, as intimate bodies of water that capture media and literature alike, reorients the blue humanities to consider closer proximities and smaller scales of water’s queer potentiality. (shrink)

Many definitions and theories of self assume that ‘self’ refers to some thing or process that exists as part of the universe. Similarly, ‘consciousness’ is assumed to refer to a property of such a part. These basic assumptions are mistaken, and generate some of the deepest confusions in the philosophy of mind. Such distinctions as seer/seen, hearer/heard, and thinker/thought generalize to subject/object. The distinction between subject and object is prior to any theories about the nature of the self: before I (...) can even begin to wonder what I am, I must have already realized that I am. Whatever I may call it cannot be conceived correctly as any kind of object or property. The distinction between subject and object is more fundamental than the Cartesian distinction between mind and matter, with which it is commonly conflated. ‘I am conscious’ and ‘I am’ are variant expressions of the same basic realization, suggesting that ‘consciousness’ and ‘being’ are convergent concepts. (shrink)

Shepherd’s philosophy centers on her rejection of Hume’s arguments against the demonstrability of causal principles. According to Shepherd, the causal maxim—everything that begins to exist must have a cause—is demonstratively true. She begins her first major philosophical work with a proof of this maxim. While scholars have complained that the proof seems blatantly circular, a closer look at Shepherd’s texts and their Lockean background dispels this worry. Shepherd’s premises are motivated not by the causal maxim or her theory of causation, (...) but by a metaphysics that distinguishes between substances and affections and by an empirical understanding of a ‘beginning of existence.’. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 1 Seiten: 309-313.

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 1 Seiten: 313-315.

Philosophy and psychoanalytical psychology converge in this examination of some of the central themes in this work on María Zambrano, such as exile, mercy, and the development of the individual. With a special focus on the psychology of the unconscious and the universe of symbolism, the book also provides thought-provoking interpretations of two emblematic tragic figures, those of Oedipus and Antigone, and an interesting approach to the figure of Cervantes' Dulcinea.

This paper critically analyses the hypothesis of the aetiological link between EDCs and trans identities from a scientific point of view, evincing its lack of evidence. It also problematizes the hypothesis by drawing from gender studies scholars who have denounced the transsex panic underlying the scientific literature on the effects of EDC on non-human animals, as well as from philosophical, biological, STG studies’, and neuroscientific elaborations that address sex-gender identities. It finds that the hypothesis that causally links prenatal exposure to (...) EDCs and trans identities, which fuses biological determinism with a toxic and perturbing element, not only obscures the dynamic processual and relational character of trans identities, but also offers a pathologising understanding of them. (shrink)