Philosophy of Language

This paper addresses both semantic issues of countability in linguistics, and philosophical issues arising from the problem of the many. I argue (i) that the problem of the many is orthogonal to vagueness and we should look to the semantics of count nouns and numerals for its solution; (ii) that the problem of the many is a challenge for contemporary mereological analyses of count nouns in semantics; but (iii) that the count criterion in these theories can be weakened to avoid (...) the problem. Specifically, _weak quantization_ is proposed as the criterion: a sum, _x_, counts as _n_ _P_s if and only if _x_ has _n_ disjoint parts, each of which is in the extension of _P_, but where the sum of no two of them is also in the extension of _P_. I show how importing this idea into the semantics of numerals provides a semantic means of dissolving the paradox. (shrink)

Stalnaker (_Context_, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014) defends two ideas about common ground. The first is that the common ground of a conversation is definable in terms of an iterated propositional attitude of _acceptance_, so that _p_ is common ground iff _p_ is commonly accepted. The second is the idea that the “default setting" of conversational acceptance is belief, so that as a default, what is accepted in conversation coincides with what is (commonly) believed. In this paper, I argue that (...) we should favor a pair of contrasting theses instead. First, I argue that we should identify the common ground with what is common knowledge about what is accepted, so that _p_ is common ground iff it is common knowledge that _p_ is accepted. Thus the attitude that is iterated in the definition of common ground is not acceptance but knowledge. Second, I argue that the “default setting" for conversational acceptance is not belief, but knowledge. (shrink)

This paper explores a puzzling polarity-based asymmetry in the use of _even_ in sentences that deny presuppositions. It argues that this asymmetry is produced by the interaction of _even_’s controversial additive presupposition with the alternatives that are salient in the relevant contexts and demonstrates that this proposal makes good crosslinguistic predictions. Along the way, this paper shows that presupposition denials are a fruitful testing ground for uncovering details about the behaviour of _even_ and the role of presuppositions triggered within focus (...) alternatives. (shrink)

Given any set _E_ of expressions freely generated from a set of atoms by syntactic operations, there exist trivially compositional functions on _E_ (to wit, the injective and the constant functions), but also plenty of non-trivially compositional functions. Here we show that within the space of non-injective functions (and so _a fortiori_ within the space of non-injective and non-constant functions), compositional functions are not sufficiently abundant in order to generate the consequence relation of every propositional logic. Logical consequence relations thus (...) impose substantive constraints on the existence of compositional functions when coupled with the condition of non-injectivity (though not without it). We ask how the _apriori_ exclusion of injective functions from the search space might be justified, and we discuss the prospects of claims to the effect that any function can be “encoded” in a compositional one. (shrink)

We argue that the commonly accepted existence of grammatical concepts such as Person (in the grammatical sense) or Tense poses an unrecognized challenge to the idea that human thought is independent of language. The argument is that such concepts identify aspects of linguistic expressions that also systematically define the contents and identity of the thoughts expressed in language. Since grammatical concepts are not known to have non-grammatical analogues, the thoughts in question do not appear to be non-linguistic in nature. We (...) conclude that language is unlikely to be merely a medium in which independently constituted thoughts are expressed. (shrink)

The 1999 volume in the series "Logical Analysis of Language" edited by Nina D. Arutyunova and Irina B. Levontina. The contributions to this volume discuss logical, gnoseological and anthropological problems with focus on natural language ontologies and the image of human across diverse languages and cultures.

According to Max Deutsch, conceptual engineers face a dilemma: either they target semantic meanings, in which case they are engaged in an infeasible activity (the “implementation challenge”), or they target speaker meanings, in which case they are engaged in a trivial enterprise (the “trivialization challenge”). Focusing on the first horn of the dilemma, I argue that the “transubstantiation version” of the implementation challenge only holds for representationalist approaches to conceptual engineering, according to which concepts are individuated by their representational relation (...) to phenomena or sets of objects in the world. From a non-representationalist (e.g. pragmatist) perspective, the dilemma is therefore dissolved. Nevertheless, Deutsch’s article still deserves a response from the pragmatist, since it raises a more general challenge to conceptual engineering that I dub the “practical implementation challenge”. I offer a pragmatist solution to that challenge, drawing on John Dewey’s theory of inquiry and Robert Brandom’s inferentialism. This solution includes recommendations distributed across all stages of the engineering process, in privileging projects that are (1) problem-driven, (2) bottom-up; ensuring that the proposal is (3) clearly justified, (4) maintains continuity with the existing inferential role; and finally, in (5) enforcing the novel concept in practices of deontic scorekeeping, (6) backed up by institutional or intellectual authority. (shrink)

The shaping influence of the native language on thought and culture is a much debated topic in philosophy and cultural studies, with a special focus on Chinese as the alleged antipode of the Indo-European languages. This article presents an overview of the history of the debate and discusses claims to the effect that Chinese – unlike Indo-European – is a language in the mode of "indifference" , with considerable effects on culture, if not on world history. It is argued that (...) these claims are based on wrong assumptions about the Chinese language and about the relationship of language and thought. (shrink)

In the semantic debate about perspectival expressions – predicates of taste, aesthetic and moral terms, epistemic modals, etc. – intuitions about armchair scenarios (e.g., disagreement, retraction) have played a crucial role. More recently, various experimental studies have been conducted, both in relation to disagreement (e.g., Cova, 2012; Foushee and Srinivasan, 2017; Solt, 2018) and retraction (e.g., Knobe and Yalcin, 2014; Khoo, 2018; Beddor and Egan, 2018; Dinges and Zakkou, 2020; Kneer 2021; 2022; Almagro, Bordonaba Plou and Villanueva, 2023; Marques, 2024), (...) with the aim of establishing a more solid foundation for semantic theorizing. Both these types of data have been used to argue for or against certain views (e.g., contextualism, relativism). In this paper, I discern a common thread in the use of these data and argue for two claims: i) which perspective is adopted by those judging the armchair scenarios put forward and by the participants in experimental studies crucially matters for the viability of the intended results; ii) failure to properly attend to this puts recent experimental work at risk. Finally, I consider the case of cross-linguistic disagreement and retraction and assess their importance for the semantic debate about perspectival expressions, as well as for the claim that perspective matters in putting forward the data on which decisions about the right semantic view are made. (shrink)

Amid the many figures who number among the Thomists writing during the early 20th century period of revival in scholastic thought in the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of the encyclical letter Aeterni Patris (1879) of Leo XIII, there is numbered the French convert, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973). Over the course of his long lifetime, Maritain authored works covering a host of philosophical and theological topics: epistemology, the philosophy of the sciences and natural philosophy, aesthetics, moral philosophy, political philosophy, metaphysics, (...) the philosophy of history, etc. The details concerning Maritain’s youth and conversion have been ably told by others and can be consulted by the interested reader. Detailed bibliographies of his works are available for those interested in engaging the full breadth of his writing. In this article, I will focus on the particular shape of Maritain’s Thomism and his place in the overall hermeneutics of the Thomistic tradition, in particular the debt that he owes to John Poinsot (1589–1644), to whom he refers as “John of St. Thomas,” in accord with the standard appellations within the Thomistic tradition in which he wrote. Following a general account of Maritain’s “style” of Thomism, I will provide a specific catalogue of some central themes in his thought that bear the clear impress of his engagement with the thought of John of St. Thomas. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this article intends to provide the reader with a sufficient appraisal of the main lines of influence exercised upon Maritain’s thought by the Baroque Commentator, without whose philosophical and theological works Maritain’s own labors would be unthinkable. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an analysis of gender-unfair usages and gender-fair strategies as they may be observed in the Italian language. First, I contextualize the topic within the contemporary debate and analyze how linguistic uses are unfair and become vehicles of stereotypes. Subsequently, I provide an overview of the strategies that can be adopted in Italian, which may be broadly categorized as giving visibility to or obscuring genders. Next, I present a series of compelling arguments in favour of using (...) visibility strategies. I conclude by arguing that the most effective strategy for challenging androcentrism in language and gender stereotypes is to make gender identities visible. (shrink)

Contemporary research on East Asian philosophy is based on the discovery of common philosophical elements shared by apparently mutually irrelevant East Asian thinkers. One of such elements is the question of meaning or semantic dimension with special relevance to Buddhist inspiration, which is clearly seen in the philosophies of the Kyoto school and New Confucianism. Although the question of meaning is almost common to the whole 20th century philosophy, this paper shows that the East Asian theory of meaning has two (...) characteristic notions: self-awareness and bidirectionality. It is from this perspective that Mou Zongsan’s two-tier metaphysical scheme can be effectively compared to Nishida Kitarō’s theory of place. Drawing on Sinitic Buddhism, they explore the semantic dimension by means of the ever-deepening self-awareness; the same Buddhist inspiration points to another core notion, bidirectionality, which characterizes that which is neither corporeal or mental. Contrary to the widely accepted view, I interpret the so-called “logic” of soku or ji not as a type of logical system, but as a bidirectional expression peculiar to the “self-aware” theory of meaning. (shrink)

The modelling of concepts, besides involving disciplines like philosophy of mind and psychology, is a fundamental and lively research problem in several artificial intelligence (AI) areas, such as knowledge representation, machine learning, and natural language processing. In this scenario, the most prominent proposed solutions adopt different (often incompatible) assumptions about the nature of such a notion. Each of these solutions has been developed to capture some specific features of concepts and support some specific (artificial) cognitive operations. This paper critically reviews (...) the most notable computational approaches to the representation of concepts. The main goals are (i) to provide a shared terminology for the desiderata of concepts and their computational representation; (ii) to classify and assess the heterogeneous computational approaches according to the provided terminology; (iii) to provide a reader who may not be very familiar with theories of concepts with an introduction to major themes in this research and with pointers to different research projects, and (iv) to offer philosophers, and potentially AI practitioners, a well-informed guide for selecting among various (and possibly competing) computational representations of concepts. (shrink)

In this paper, we show that native speakers spontaneously divide the complex meaning of a new word into a presuppositional component and an assertive component. These results argue for the existence of a productive triggering algorithm for presuppositions, one that is not based on alternative lexical items nor on contextual salience. On a methodological level, the proposed learning paradigm can be used to test further theories concerned with the interaction of lexical properties and conceptual biases.

This paper delves into the temporal interpretation of fronting constructions in English, a topic that has received limited attention in the literature on tense semantics. It presents new empirical findings revealing that specific fronting configurations, involving present tense morphology in a complement CP under a matrix past tense, can yield a theoretically unexpected simultaneous interpretation. A novel theoretical framework for understanding English tense is proposed, which accounts for the temporal interpretation of both fronting and non-fronting versions of attitude reports. The (...) framework introduces a null simultaneous tense as a replacement for the conventional indexical present and the Sequence-of-Tense (SOT) _de se_ tense. It is argued that in complement CPs the null simultaneous tense, as well as past tense, can be anchored either to the attitude time or to the utterance time. In either case, each tense receives a _de re_ interpretation. Moreover, the paper contends that evidence from fronting constructions supports Kratzer’s (Proceedings of semantics and linguistic theory 8, pp. 92–110, 1998 ) proposal that the transmission of temporal features (as part of the mechanism of SOT) occurs at PF. Finally, the proposed revision of the English tense system contributes to a more unified cross-linguistic perspective on tense. It is demonstrated how the temporal readings of attitude reports arising in such non-SOT languages as Russian, Japanese, and Hebrew can be captured within the system developed for English, with known contrasts attributed to the absence of Feature Transmission in those languages. Further known and new data from English, Modern Greek, and German are examined, revealing variations in SOT effects across SOT languages. These data are used as additional evidence supporting the claim that cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of complement tense stems solely from differences in Feature Transmission. Regarding the semantic profile of tenses, it can be considered largely invariant. (shrink)

A sentence containing disjunction in the scope of a possibility modal, such as _Angie is allowed to buy the boat or the car_, gives rise to the free choice inference that Angie can freely choose between the two. This inference poses a well-known puzzle, in that it is not predicted by a standard treatment of modals and disjunction (e.g., Kamp (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74:57–74, 1974 )). To complicate things further, free choice tends to disappear under negation: _Angie is (...) not allowed to buy the boat or the car_ doesn’t merely convey the negation of free choice, but rather the stronger double prohibition reading that Angie cannot buy either one. There are two main approaches to the free choice - double prohibition pattern in the literature. While they both capture the relevant data points, they make a testable, divergent prediction regarding the status of positive and negative sentences in a context in which Angie can only buy one of the two objects, e.g., the boat. In particular, the implicature-based approach (e.g., Fox (Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, pp. 71–120, 2007 ); Klinedinst (Plurality and possibility, PhD diss., UCLA, 2007 ); Bar-Lev and Fox (Proceedings of SALT 27, pp. 95–115, 2017 ); Bar-Lev and Fox (Natural Language Semantics 28:175–223, 2020 )) predicts that the positive sentence is true in such a context, but associated with a false implicature, while it predicts the negative sentence to be straightforwardly false. The homogeneity-based approach in Goldstein (Semantics & Pragmatics 12:1–53, 2019 ) predicts both the positive and negative sentences to be equally undefined (see also Aloni (Semantics & Pragmatics 15:5, 2022 ); Willer (Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium, pp. 511–520, 2017 )) for similar predictions). Investigating the contrast between these sentences in such a context therefore provides a clear way to address the debate between implicature and non-implicature accounts of free choice. We present a set of four experiments aiming to do just this, by comparing free choice inferences to regular implicatures, using a ternary judgment task. The results overall present a challenge for the implicature approach. We discuss how the implicature approach could be amended to account for our results, based on a recent proposal by Enguehard and Chemla (Linguistics & Philosophy 44:79–112, 2021 ) on the distribution of implicatures. (shrink)

In this contribution, we formulate the thesis that the methodological criticism against Wolff raised by Kant in his early writings is fully justified only if one grasps the different philosophies of language in the two authors. Depending on the function performed by linguistic usage in the analysis of concepts, a certain relationship between word, concept and thing is determined, which conditions the success of the analysis itself. Since Wolff abandons the use of language as soon as he has reached the (...) degree of clarity and distinction of concepts, his definitions end up being inventions of meanings, constructions of concepts. This seems to be the reason why Kant emphasises that the only concepts that can be analysed are given, i.e. applied, concepts, and that words do not obtain their meaning except in linguistic use. In general, Kant appears to be averse to the technicalization of language, which distances the philosopher from the world that should be the object of their knowledge. (shrink)