About this topic
Summary There is a tradition of philosophers and linguists working together on topics in formal semantics and pragmatics. Recently, both linguists and philosophers have begun to use empirical methods to address these issues. This category focuses particularly on empirical works on semantics and pragmatics done by philosophers and empirical works on semantics and pragmatics with an explicit philosophical focus.
Key works Szabó & Knobe 2013, Knobe & Yalcin 2014, and Egré & Cova 2015 are early examples of collaborations between linguistics-minded philosophers of language and experimental philosophers.
Introductions Hansen 2015 provides a thorough overview of works at the intersection of experimental philosophy and formal semantics and pragmatics. Most works in this PhilPapers category falls under what Hansen calls "positive experimental philosophy of language". In addition, Phelan 2014 surveys works in experimental pragmatics and discusses their philosophical significance.
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  1. Experimental Philosophy of Connexivity.Niki Pfeifer & Leon Schöppl - manuscript
    While Classical Logic (CL) used to be the gold standard for evaluating the rationality of human reasoning, certain non-theorems of CL—like Aristotle’s and Boethius’ theses—appear intuitively rational and plausible. Connexive logics have been developed to capture the underlying intuition that conditionals whose antecedents contradict their consequents, should be false. We present results of two experiments (total n = 72), the first to investigate connexive principles and related formulae systematically. Our data suggest that connexive logics provide more plausible rationality frameworks for (...)
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  2. Asymmetry in presupposition projection: The case of conjunction.Matthew Mandelkern, Jeremy Zehr, Jacopo Romoli & Florian Schwarz - forthcoming - Semantics and Linguistic Theory 27.
    Is the basic mechanism behind presupposition projection fundamentally asymmetric or symmetric? This is a basic question for the theory of presupposition, which also bears on broader issues concerning the source of asymmetries observed in natural language: are these simply rooted in superficial asymmetries of language use— language use unfolds in time, which we experience as fundamentally asymmetric— or can they be, at least in part, directly referenced in linguistic knowledge and representations? In this paper we aim to make progress on (...)
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  3. 'Extremely Racist' and 'Incredibly Sexist': An Empirical Response to the Charge of Conceptual Inflation.Shen-yi Liao & Nat Hansen - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (1):72-94.
    Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like 'racist', 'sexist', and 'homophobic' are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation, as well as responses to it, are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how 'racist' and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary language. Once we examine large linguistic corpora to see (...)
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  4. Experimenting with every American king.Poppy Mankowitz - 2023 - Natural Language Semantics 31 (4):349-387.
    The standard contemporary semantics for ‘every’ predict the truth of occurrences of sentences with restrictors that denote the empty set, such as ‘Every American king lives in New York’. The literature on empty restrictors has been concerned with explaining a particular violation of this prediction: many assessors consider empty-restrictor sentences to be odd rather than valued, and they are apparently more likely to do so when such sentences include determiners like ‘every’ as opposed to those like ‘no’. Empirical investigation of (...)
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  5. Contextualism vs. Relativism: More empirical data.Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer - 2022 - In Jeremy Wyatt, Julia Zakkou & Dan Zeman (eds.), Perspectives on Taste. Routledge.
    Contextualism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims (involving e.g. predicates of personal taste or epistemic modals) depends on the context of utterance. Relativism is the view that the extension of perspectival claims depends on the context of assessment. Both views make concrete, empirically testable predictions about how such claims are used by ordinary English language speakers. This chapter surveys some of the recent empirical literature on the topic and presents four new experiments (total N=724). Consistent with contextualism (...)
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  6. Folk intuitions about reference change and the causal theory of reference.Steffen Koch & Alex Wiegmann - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (25).
    In this paper, we present and discuss the findings of two experiments about reference change. Cases of reference change have sometimes been invoked to challenge traditional versions of semantic externalism, but the relevant cases have never been tested empirically. The experiments we have conducted use variants of the famous Twin Earth scenario to test folk intuitions about whether natural kind terms such as ‘water’ or ‘salt’ switch reference after being constantly (mis)applied to different kinds. Our results indicate that this is (...)
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  7. Perspectives on Taste: Aesthetics, Language, Metaphysics, and Experimental Philosophy.Jeremy Wyatt, Julia Zakkou & Dan Zeman (eds.) - 2022 - Routledge.
    This book offers a sustained, interdisciplinary examination of taste. It addresses a range of topics that have been at the heart of lively debates in philosophy of language, linguistics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and experimental philosophy. Our everyday lives are suffused with discussions about taste. We are quick to offer familiar platitudes about taste, but we struggle when facing the questions that matter--what taste is, how it is related to subjectivity, what distinguishes good from bad taste, why it is valuable to make (...)
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  8. 'Being tall compared to' compared to 'being tall' and 'being taller'.Jaime Castillo-Gamboa, Alexis Wellwood & Deniz Rudin - 2021 - Proceedings of Elm 1:78-89.
    This paper investigates the semantics of implicit comparatives (Alice is tall compared to Bob) and its connections to the semantics of explicit comparatives (Alice is taller than Bob) and sentences with adjectives in plain positive form (Alice is tall). We consider evidence from two experiments that tested judgments about these three kinds of sentence, and provide a semantics for implicit comparatives from the perspective of degree semantics.
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  9. A direction effect on taste predicates.Alexander Dinges & Julia Zakkou - 2020 - Philosophers' Imprint 20 (27):1-22.
    The recent literature abounds with accounts of the semantics and pragmatics of so-called predicates of personal taste, i.e. predicates whose application is, in some sense or other, a subjective matter. Relativism and contextualism are the major types of theories. One crucial difference between these theories concerns how we should assess previous taste claims. Relativism predicts that we should assess them in the light of the taste standard governing the context of assessment. Contextualism predicts that we should assess them in the (...)
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  10. Deciding without Intending.Alexandra M. Nolte, Wesley Buckwalter, David Rose & John Turri - 2020 - Journal of Cognition 3 (1):12.
    According to a consensus view in philosophy, “deciding” and “intending” are synonymous expressions. Researchers have recently challenged this view with the discovery of a counterexample in which ordinary speakers attribute deciding without intending. The aim of this paper is to investigate the strengths and limits of this discovery. The result of this investigation revealed that the evidence challenging the consensus view is strong. We replicate the initial finding against consensus and extend it by utilizing several new measures, materials, and procedures. (...)
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  11. Natural Language Processing and Semantic Network Visualization for Philosophers.Mark Alfano & Andrew Higgins - 2019 - In Eugen Fischer & Mark Curtis (eds.), Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy. Bloomsbury.
    Progress in philosophy is difficult to achieve because our methods are evidentially and rhetorically weak. In the last two decades, experimental philosophers have begun to employ the methods of the social sciences to address philosophical questions. However, the adequacy of these methods has been called into question by repeated failures of replication. Experimental philosophers need to incorporate more robust methods to achieve a multi-modal perspective. In this chapter, we describe and showcase cutting-edge methods for data-mining and visualization. Big data is (...)
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  12. Lying, fast and slow.Angelo Turri & John Turri - 2019 - Synthese 198 (1):757-775.
    Researchers have debated whether there is a relationship between a statement’s truth-value and whether it counts as a lie. One view is that a statement being objectively false is essential to whether it counts as a lie; the opposing view is that a statement’s objective truth-value is inessential to whether it counts as a lie. We report five behavioral experiments that use a novel range of behavioral measures to address this issue. In each case, we found evidence of a relationship. (...)
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  13. Might do Better: Flexible Relativism and the QUD.Bob Beddor & Andy Egan - 2018 - Semantics and Pragmatics 11.
    The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group’s information. Relativists often object that contextualism fails to do justice to the way we assess utterances containing epistemic modals for truth or falsity. However, recent empirical work seems to cast doubt on the relativist’s claim, suggesting that ordinary speakers’ judgments about epistemic modals are more closely in line with contextualism than relativism (...)
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  14. David Lewis in the lab: experimental results on the emergence of meaning.Justin Bruner, Cailin O’Connor, Hannah Rubin & Simon M. Huttegger - 2018 - Synthese 195 (2):603-621.
    In this paper we use an experimental approach to investigate how linguistic conventions can emerge in a society without explicit agreement. As a starting point we consider the signaling game introduced by Lewis. We find that in experimental settings, small groups can quickly develop conventions of signal meaning in these games. We also investigate versions of the game where the theoretical literature indicates that meaning will be less likely to arise—when there are more than two states for actors to transfer (...)
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  15. the semantics of gradability, vagueness and scale structure.Elena Castroviejo, Louise McNally & Galit W. Sassoon - 2018 - Springer.
    This volume is the first to focus specifically on experimental studies of the semantics of gradability, scale structure and vagueness. It presents support for and challenges to current formal analyses of these phenomena in view of experimentally collected data, highlighting the ways semantic and pragmatic theory can benefit from experimental methodologies. The papers in the volume contribute to an explicit and detailed account of the use, representation, and online processing of gradable and vague expressions using various kinds of controlled speaker (...)
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  16. What is — or, for that matter, isn’t — ‘experimental' semantics?Pauline Jacobson - 2018 - In Derek Ball & Brian Rabern (eds.), The Science of meaning: Essays on the metatheory of natural language semantics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 46-72.
    This paper examines the currently fashionable notion of 'experimental semantics', and argues that most work in natural language semantics has always been experimental. The oft-cited dichotomy between 'theoretical' (or 'armchair') and 'experimental' is bogus and should be dropped form the discourse. The same holds for dichotomies like 'intuition-based' (or 'thought experiments') vs. 'empirical' work (and 'real experiments'). The so-called new 'empirical' methods are often nothing more than collecting the large-scale 'intuitions' or, doing multiple thought experiments. Of course the use of (...)
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  17. A process model of the understanding of uncertain conditionals.Gernot D. Kleiter, Andrew J. B. Fugard & Niki Pfeifer - 2018 - Thinking and Reasoning 24 (3):386-422.
    ABSTRACTTo build a process model of the understanding of conditionals we extract a common core of three semantics of if-then sentences: the conditional event interpretation in the coherencebased probability logic, the discourse processingtheory of Hans Kamp, and the game-theoretical approach of Jaakko Hintikka. The empirical part reports three experiments in which each participant assessed the probability of 52 if-then sentencesin a truth table task. Each experiment included a second task: An n-back task relating the interpretation of conditionals to working memory, (...)
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  18. What is in a name?: The development of cross-cultural differences in referential intuitions.Jincai Li, Liu Longgen, Elizabeth Chalmers & Jesse Snedeker - 2018 - Cognition 171 (C): 108-111.
    Past work has shown systematic differences between Easterners' and Westerners' intuitions about the reference of proper names. Understanding when these differences emerge in development will help us understand their origins. In the present study, we investigate the referential intuitions of English- and Chinese-speaking children and adults in the U.S. and China. Using a truth-value judgment task modeled on Kripke's classic Gödel case, we find that the cross-cultural differences are already in place at age seven. Thus, these differences cannot be attributed (...)
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  19. Dual character concepts.Kevin Https://Orcidorg Reuter - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 14 (1):e12557.
    Some of philosophy's most central concepts, including art, friendship, and happiness, have been argued to be dual character concepts. Their main characteristic is that they encode not only a descriptive dimension but also an independent normative dimension for categorization. This article introduces the class of dual character concepts and discusses various accounts of their content and structure. A specific focus will be placed on their relation to two other classes of concepts, thick concepts and natural kind concepts. The study of (...)
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  20. Thinking about the Liar, Fast and Slow.Robert Barnard, Joseph Ulatowski & Jonathan Weinberg - 2017 - In Bradley Armour-Garb (ed.), Reflections on the Liar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 39-70.
    The liar paradox is widely conceived as a problem for logic and semantics. On the basis of empirical studies presented here, we suggest that there is an underappreciated psychological dimension to the liar paradox and related problems, conceived as a problem for human thinkers. Specific findings suggest that how one interprets the liar sentence and similar paradoxes can vary in relation to one’s capacity for logical and reflective thought, acceptance of certain logical principles, and degree of philosophical training, but also (...)
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  21. Must we measure what we mean?Nat Hansen - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (8):785-815.
    This paper excavates a debate concerning the claims of ordinary language philosophers that took place during the middle of the last century. The debate centers on the status of statements about ‘what we say’. On one side of the debate, critics of ordinary language philosophy argued that statements about ‘what we say’ should be evaluated as empirical observations about how people do in fact speak, on a par with claims made in the language sciences. By that standard, ordinary language philosophers (...)
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  22. Color Adjectives, Standards, and Thresholds: An Experimental Investigation.Nat Hansen & Emmanuel Chemla - 2017 - Linguistics and Philosophy 40 (3):1--40.
    Are color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.) relative adjectives or absolute adjectives? Existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives attempt to answer that question using informal ("armchair") judgments. The informal judgments of theorists conflict: it has been proposed that color adjectives are absolute with standards anchored at the minimum degree on the scale, that they are absolute but have near-midpoint standards, and that they are relative. In this paper we report two experiments, one based on entailment patterns and one based (...)
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  23. Epistemic Modal Disagreement.Jonah Katz & Joe Salerno - 2017 - Topoi 36 (1):141-153.
    At the center of the debate between contextualist versus relativist semantics for epistemic modal claims is an empirical question about when competent subjects judge epistemic modal disagreement to be present. John MacFarlane’s relativist claims that we judge there to be epistemic modal disagreement across the widest range of cases. We wish to dispute the robustness of his data with the results of two studies. Our primary conclusion is that the actual disagreement data is not consistent with relativist predictions, and so, (...)
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  24. Aesthetic Adjectives: Experimental Semantics and Context-Sensitivity.Shen-yi Liao & Aaron Meskin - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (2):371–398.
    One aim of this essay is to contribute to understanding aesthetic communication—the process by which agents aim to convey thoughts and transmit knowledge about aesthetic matters to others. Our focus will be on the use of aesthetic adjectives in aesthetic communication. Although theorists working on the semantics of adjectives have developed sophisticated theories about gradable adjectives, they have tended to avoid studying aesthetic adjectives—the class of adjectives that play a central role in expressing aesthetic evaluations. And despite the wealth of (...)
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  25. Differences in the Evaluation of Generic Statements About Human and Non‐Human Categories.Arber Tasimi, Susan Gelman, Andrei Cimpian & Joshua Knobe - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (7):1934-1957.
    Generic statements express generalizations about categories. Current theories suggest that people should be especially inclined to accept generics that involve threatening information. However, previous tests of this claim have focused on generics about non-human categories, which raises the question of whether this effect applies as readily to human categories. In Experiment 1, adults were more likely to accept generics involving a threatening property for artifacts, but this negativity bias did not also apply to human categories. Experiment 2 examined an alternative (...)
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  26. Conditionals, Counterfactuals, and Rational Reasoning: An Experimental Study on Basic Principles.Leena Tulkki & Niki Pfeifer - 2017 - Minds and Machines 27 (1):119-165.
    We present a unified approach for investigating rational reasoning about basic argument forms involving indicative conditionals, counterfactuals, and basic quantified statements within coherence-based probability logic. After introducing the rationality framework, we present an interactive view on the relation between normative and empirical work. Then, we report a new experiment which shows that people interpret indicative conditionals and counterfactuals by coherent conditional probability assertions and negate conditionals by negating their consequents. The data support the conditional probability interpretation of conditionals and the (...)
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  27. How “ought” exceeds but implies “can”: Description and encouragement in moral judgment.John Turri - 2017 - Cognition 168 (C):267-275.
    This paper tests a theory about the relationship between two important topics in moral philosophy and psychology. One topic is the function of normative language, specifically claims that one “ought” to do something. Do these claims function to describe moral responsibilities, encourage specific behavior, or both? The other topic is the relationship between saying that one “ought” to do something and one’s ability to do it. In what respect, if any, does what one “ought” to do exceed what one “can” (...)
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  28. Can we Agree About agree?Emmanuel Chemla & B. R. George - 2016 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (1):243-264.
    This squib attempts to constrain semantic theories of agree wh constructions by broadening the data set and collecting naive speakers’ intuitions. Overall, our data suggest relatively permissive truth-conditions for these constructions. They also suggest a previously undiscussed presupposition for agree wh and also indicate that agree wh is not straightforwardly reducible to agree that. Although some accounts suggest differences in truth conditions among different asymmetrical agree with constructions and symmetrical agree constructions, we do not find any indication of such truth-conditional (...)
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  29. Generics and Experimental Philosophy.Adam Lerner - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 404-416.
    Theorists have had less success in analyzing the truth conditions of generics. Philosophers of language have offered a number of theories. This chapter surveys several semantic accounts of generics. However, the focus is on generics and experimental philosophy. It briefly reviews empirical work that bears on these semantic accounts. While generics constitute an interesting linguistic phenomenon worthy of study in their own right, the study of generics also has wide‐ranging implications for questions beyond the philosophy of language, including questions in (...)
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  30. Aesthetic Adjectives Lack Uniform Behavior.Shen-yi Liao, Louise McNally & Aaron Meskin - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (6):618-631.
    The goal of this short paper is to show that esthetic adjectives—exemplified by “beautiful” and “elegant”—do not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling data involves distinguishing two properties of gradable adjectives that have been frequently conflated: whether an adjective’s applicability is sensitive to a comparison class, and whether an adjective’s applicability is context-dependent.
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  31. Lying, uptake, assertion, and intent.Angelo Turri & John Turri - 2016 - International Review of Pragmatics 8 (2):314-333.
    A standard view in social science and philosophy is that a lie is a dishonest assertion: to lie is to assert something that you think is false in order to deceive your audience. We report four behavioral experiments designed to evaluate some aspects of this view. Participants read short scenarios and judged several features of interest, including whether an agent lied. We found evidence that ordinary lie attributions can be influenced by aspects of audience uptake, are based on judging that (...)
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  32. Moral asymmetries and the semantics of many.Paul Egré & Florian Cova - 2015 - Semantics and Pragmatics 8 (13):1-45.
    We present the results of four experiments concerning the evaluation people make of sentences involving “many”, showing that two sentences of the form “many As are Bs” vs. “many As are Cs” need not be equivalent when evaluated relative to a background in which B and C have the same cardinality and proportion to A, but in which B and C are predicates with opposite semantic and affective values. The data provide evidence that subjects lower the standard relevant to ascribe (...)
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  33. Linguistic experiments and ordinary language philosophy.Nat Hansen & Emmanuel Chemla - 2015 - Ratio 28 (4):422-445.
    J.L. Austin is regarded as having an especially acute ear for fine distinctions of meaning overlooked by other philosophers. Austin employs an informal experimental approach to gathering evidence in support of these fine distinctions in meaning, an approach that has become a standard technique for investigating meaning in both philosophy and linguistics. In this paper, we subject Austin's methods to formal experimental investigation. His methods produce mixed results: We find support for his most famous distinction, drawn on the basis of (...)
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  34. Experimental Philosophy of Language.Nathaniel Hansen - 2015 - Oxford Handbooks Online.
    Experimental philosophy of language uses experimental methods developed in the cognitive sciences to investigate topics of interest to philosophers of language. This article describes the methodological background for the development of experimental approaches to topics in philosophy of language, distinguishes negative and positive projects in experimental philosophy of language, and evaluates experimental work on the reference of proper names and natural kind terms. The reliability of expert judgments vs. the judgments of ordinary speakers, the role that ambiguity plays in influencing (...)
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  35. Modal Disagreements.Justin Khoo - 2015 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (5):511-534.
    It is often assumed that when one party felicitously rejects an assertion made by an- other party, the first party thinks that the proposition asserted by the second is false. This assumption underlies various disagreement arguments used to challenge contex- tualism about some class of expressions. As such, many contextualists have resisted these arguments on the grounds that the disagreements in question may not be over the proposition literally asserted. The result appears to be a dialectical stalemate, with no independent (...)
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  36. General terms, hybrid theories and ambiguitiy. A discussion of some experimental results.Genoveva Marti - 2015 - In Jussi Haukioja (ed.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Language. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 157-172.
    I examine two sets of experimental results about the semantics of general terms, by Genone and Lombrozo (2012) and by Nichols, Pinillos and Mallon (forthcoming) that allegedly reveal significant variations in semantic intuitions as regards the correct application of general terms. The two sets of authors propose two entirely different semantic treatments: Genone and Lombrozo espouse a hybrid semantics whereas Nichols, Pinillos and Mallon are inclined towards an appeal to ambiguity. I cast some doubts on the coherence of a hybrid (...)
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  37. Empirical Methods of Linguistics in Philosophy.Roland Bluhm - 2014 - The Reasoner 8 (4):41.
    Report on the workshop "Empirical Methods of Linguistics in Philosophy", which took place at TU Dortmund University, Germany, on March 13–14, 2014.
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  38. Epistemic modals and context: Experimental data.Joshua Knobe & Seth Yalcin - 2014 - Semantics and Pragmatics 7 (10):1-21.
    Recently, a number of theorists (MacFarlane (2003, 2011), Egan et al. (2005), Egan (2007), Stephenson (2007a,b)) have argued that an adequate semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals calls for some technical notion of relativist truth and/or relativist content. Much of this work has relied on an empirical thesis about speaker judgments, namely that competent speakers tend to judge a present-tense bare epistemic possibility claim true only if the prejacent is compatible with their information. Relativists have in particular appealed to judgments (...)
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  39. Reference and Experimental Semantics.Genoveva Marti - 2014 - In Edouard Machery & Elizabeth O’Neill (eds.), Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 17-26.
    Experimental semanticists have concluded that there is wide variation in referential intuitions among speakers, for it appears that some speakers display referential intuitions that are in line with descriptivism, whereas other speakers’ intuitions are in line with the predictions of the causal-historical picture. In this chapter, I first situate the debate by comparing descriptivist and non-descriptivist approaches to reference. After examining some of the experimental results, I argue that the tests conducted do not elicit data that are relevant for semantic (...)
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  40. Experimental Pragmatics: An Introduction for Philosophers.Mark Phelan - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (1):66-79.
    In the past several decades, psychologists and linguists have begun experimentally investigating linguistic pragmatic phenomena. They share the assumption that the best way to study the use of language in context incorporates an experimental methodology, here understood to comprise controlled studies and careful field observations. This article surveys some key projects in experimental pragmatics and relates these projects to ongoing philosophical discussions.
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  41. Syntax and intentionality: An automatic link between language and theory-of-mind.Brent Strickland, Matthew Fisher, Frank Keil & Joshua Knobe - 2014 - Cognition 133 (1):249–261.
    Three studies provided evidence that syntax influences intentionality judgments. In Experiment 1, participants made either speeded or unspeeded intentionality judgments about ambiguously intentional subjects or objects. Participants were more likely to judge grammatical subjects as acting intentionally in the speeded relative to the reflective condition (thus showing an intentionality bias), but grammatical objects revealed the opposite pattern of results (thus showing an unintentionality bias). In Experiment 2, participants made an intentionality judgment about one of the two actors in a partially (...)
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  42. Vagueness and Order Effects in Color Categorization.Paul Egré, Vincent de Gardelle & David Ripley - 2013 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 22 (4):391-420.
    This paper proposes an experimental investigation of the use of vague predicates in dynamic sorites. We present the results of two studies in which subjects had to categorize colored squares at the borderline between two color categories (Green vs. Blue, Yellow vs. Orange). Our main aim was to probe for hysteresis in the ordered transitions between the respective colors, namely for the longer persistence of the initial category. Our main finding is a reverse phenomenon of enhanced contrast (i.e. negative hysteresis), (...)
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  43. A slugfest of intuitions: contextualism and experimental design.Nat Hansen - 2013 - Synthese 190 (10):1771-1792.
    This paper considers ways that experimental design can affect judgments about informally presented context shifting experiments. Reasons are given to think that judgments about informal context shifting experiments are affected by an exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments and by experimenter bias. Exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments may produce experimental artifacts by obscuring important differences of degree between the phenomena being investigated. Experimenter bias is an effect generated when, for example, experimenters disclose (even unconsciously) their own beliefs (...)
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  44. Experimenting on Contextualism.Nat Hansen & Emmanuel Chemla - 2013 - Mind and Language 28 (3):286-321.
    This paper concerns the central method of generating evidence in support of contextualist theories, what we call context shifting experiments. We begin by explaining the standard design of context shifting experiments, which are used in both quantitative surveys and more traditional thought experiments to show how context affects the content of natural language expressions. We discuss some recent experimental studies that have tried and failed to find evidence that confirms contextualist predictions about the results of context shifting experiments, and consider (...)
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  45. Tolerance effect in categorisation with vague predicates.Minyao Huang - 2013 - Pragmatics and Cognition 21 (2):340-358.
    Vagueness is understood as the problem of associating imprecise application criteria with ordinary predicates such as ‘bald’ or ‘blue’. It is often construed as due to one’s tolerance to a minute difference in forming a verdict on the application of a vague predicate. This paper reports an experiment conducted to test the effect of tolerance, using as paradigm categorisation tasks performed with respect to transitional series, e.g., a series of tomatoes from red to orange. The findings suggest a negative effect (...)
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  46. Dual character concepts and the normative dimension of conceptual representation.Joshua Knobe, Sandeep Prasada & George E. Newman - 2013 - Cognition 127 (2):242-257.
    Five experiments provide evidence for a class of ‘dual character concepts.’ Dual character concepts characterize their members in terms of both (a) a set of concrete features and (b) the abstract values that these features serve to realize. As such, these concepts provide two bases for evaluating category members and two different criteria for category membership. Experiment 1 provides support for the notion that dual character concepts have two bases for evaluation. Experiments 2-4 explore the claim that dual character concepts (...)
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  47. Conceptual distinctions amongst generics.Sandeep Prasada, Sangeet Khemlani, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Sam Glucksberg - 2013 - Cognition 126 (3):405-422.
    Generic sentences (e.g., bare plural sentences such as “dogs have four legs” and “mosquitoes carry malaria”) are used to talk about kinds of things. Three experiments investigated the conceptual foundations of generics as well as claims within the formal semantic approaches to generics concerning the roles of prevalence, cue validity and normalcy in licensing generics. Two classes of generic sentences that pose challenges to both the conceptually based and formal semantic approaches to generics were investigated. Striking property generics (e.g. “sharks (...)
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  48. Modals with a Taste of the Deontic.Zoltán Gendler Szabó & Joshua Knobe - 2013 - Semantics and Pragmatics 6 (1):1-42.
    The aim of this paper is to present an explanation for the impact of normative considerations on people’s assessment of certain seemingly purely descriptive matters. The explanation is based on two main claims. First, a large category of expressions are tacitly modal: they are contextually equivalent to modal proxies. Second, the interpretation of predominantly circumstantial or teleological modals is subject to certain constraints which make certain possibilities salient at the expense of others.
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  49. Do Lions have Manes? For Children, Generics are about Kinds, not Quantities.Amanda Brandone, Andrei Cimpian, Sarah-Jane Leslie & Susan Gelman - 2012 - Child Development 83:423-433.
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  50. Incremental vs. symmetric accounts of presupposition projection: an experimental approach.Emmanuel Chemla & Philippe Schlenker - 2012 - Natural Language Semantics 20 (2):177-226.
    The presupposition triggered by an expression E is generally satisfied by information that comes before rather than after E in the sentence or discourse. In Heim’s classic theory (1983), this left-right asymmetry is encoded in the lexical semantics of dynamic connectives and operators. But several recent analyses offer a more nuanced approach, in which presupposition satisfaction has two separate components: a general principle (which varies from theory to theory) specifies under what conditions a presupposition triggered by an expression E is (...)
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