W artykule omawiam teorię prawdy zaproponowaną przez Haima Gaifmana z perspektywy radzenia sobie z różnymi problematycznymi zdaniami. Zamierzam pokazać, że koncepcja ta narażona jest na poważne zastrzeżenia, tak samo jak związana z nią teoria Saula Kripkego. Gaifman punktem wyjścia swojej teorii czyni łamigłówkę silnego kłamcy. W celu jej rozwiązania postuluje, by wartości logiczne przypisywać nie zdaniom-typom, lecz ich egzemplarzom. Przyjmuje ponadto, że wartość logiczna danego zdania-egzemplarza zależy nie tylko od leksykalnych i strukturalnych własności odpowiadającego mu zdania-typu, ale także od jego (...) umiejscowienia w sieci powiązań zachodzących pomiędzy poszczególnymi zdaniami-egzemplarzami. Dwa egzemplarze tego samego zdania-typu mogą mieć różne wartości logiczne. Przedstawiona teoria jest więc paradygmatem kontekstualnej teorii prawdy. Pojęcie zdania-egzemplarza Gaifman zastępuje ogólniejszym od niego pojęciem znacznika. Wartość logiczna jest przypisywana znacznikowi przez odpowiedni algorytm (tzw. pointer semantics). Artykuł zawiera omówienie zarówno aparatu technicznego teorii Gaifmana, jak i jego wad. (shrink)

Regardless of the form it may take, the process of translation still tends to be viewed as a technical activity, a cumbersome yet necessary operation to be performed in pursuit of higher goals. Yet as a phenomenon, with its profoundness it seems to be calling for closer attention. Thus the following work aims to prove how relevant the notion of translation is for the philosophical debate—specifically, for the enquiry into the nature of truth as considered from the pragmatic perspective. Firstly (...) then, theories of the two fathers of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce’s and William James’s, will be briefly recalled. Subsequently, the analysis will expose the role of translation process in each account. Recognition of the translative element will shed a new light on Peirce’s and James’s dispersed remarks concerning truth and offer an interesting ground on which they may be consolidated. Finally, the study yields a broader perspective on the idea of translation process as such, underscoring its philosophical potential. (shrink)

Artykuł jest próbą opisu presupozycji w sensie Strawsona przy użyciu aparatury pojęciowej teorii aktów mowy. Porównanie dwóch pojęć, presupozycji propozycjonalnej Strawsona z presupozycją jako warunkiem przygotowawczym mocy illokucyjnej, prowadzi do wniosku, iż są to zupełnie różne pojęcia. Tymczasem w świetle intuicji językowej, dodatkowo opartej na pracy Austina (1962), wydaje się, że istnieje tylko jeden rodzaj presupozycji: warunki przygotowawcze. To oznaczałoby, iż presupozycja propozycjonalna presuponowana przez dane zdanie jest, w pewnym sensie, redukowalna do warunku przygotowawczego czynności illokucyjnej wykonywanej przez wypowiedzenie tego (...) zdania. Ta hipoteza jest tutaj uzasadniana przez podanie przykładów presupozycji propozycjonalnych, presuponowanych przez zdania używane do wykonania elementarnych aktów illokucyjnych różnych typów. (shrink)

Korta and Perry (2011) argue that the object a speaker refers to with a demonstrative expression combined with a pointing gesture is determined by her directing intention rather than by her demonstration. They acknowledge that our use of the ordinary concept of “what is said” is affected by our judgements about the speaker’s responsibility for the results of her careless pointing; however, they claim that the effects are perlocutionary and have no bearing on determining the referential content of the speaker’s (...) act. I argue that the consequences of careless pointing are illocutionary and play a role in determining demonstrative reference. I also distinguish between two types of referential content which are attributable to the speaker’s utterance and shape its discursive behaviour: what is intended, which is determined by the speaker’s directing intention, and what is public, which depends on what she can legitimately be held responsible for. (shrink)

Insinuations are indirect speech acts done for various reasons: a speaker S may insinuate P (i) because an insinuation is more polite, and S can save face by non-explicitly saying P (Brown, Levinson, 1987; Searle, 1975), (ii) because S can deny having insinuated P and avoid the responsibility of explicitly stating P, or (iii) because S perceives herself to be in a competitive rather than cooperative conversation, and she wants to pursue her interests strategically (Asher, Lascarides, 2013; Camp, 2018; Lee, (...) Pinker, 2010; Pinker et al., 2008). These views assume that to insinuate P, S must also intend to use the deniability of P for dealing with a possible non-cooperative hearer. I argue that this requirement is too strong and falls short of accounting for cases in which S intentionally performs a deniable indirect speech act, but S has no intention to use that deniability. (shrink)

This paper offers a systematic classification and characterization of speech acts and their norms. Recently, the normative approach has been applied to various speech acts, most notably to constatives. I start by showing how the work on the norms of assertion has influenced various approaches to the norms of other speech acts. I focus on the fact that various norms of assertion have different extensions, i.e., they denote different clusters of illocutions as belonging to an assertion. I argue that this (...) has consequences for theorising about norms of other speech acts and generates certain arbitrary divisions. In the central part, I analyse two groups of speech acts. Firstly, ordinary speech acts, like predictions or retractions. Secondly, I indicate how the normative view can be extended to so-called ancillary speech acts, like presuppositions or implicatures. I end with a discussion of possible extensions of the normative approach, focusing on the debate on lying. (shrink)

When J. L. Austin first presented his work on speech acts, it concentrated primarily on explaining how our utterances can change the non-linguistic reality around us. A new fruitful area of study explaining how saying something can constitute doing something else than saying was established, and for a very long time—in fact, until this day—philosophers debate what makes a promise a promise and not just a plan, what distinguishes an assertion from a conjecture, and what kind of mental states are (...) required of a speaker for her illocution to be successful. The original framework, as presented by Austin’s colleague, John Searle, has shaped a vast landscape of many very different research projects, such as explaining the normative structure underlying performing speech acts, exploring the connections between illocutions and other pragmatic phenomena such as implicature and presupposition, or investigating how speech acts influence the conversational scoreboard, to name just a few. Yet another area of research centres on applying speech act theoretic devices to tackle apparently distant problems in philosophy of language, such as reference, disagreement or lying. (shrink)

Fictional characters do not really exist. Names of fictional characters refer, to fictional characters. We should divorce the idea of reference from that of existence (the picture of the name as a tag has limited applications; the Predicate Calculus, with its existential quantifier, does not adequately reflect the relevant concepts in natural language; and model theory, with its domains, might also have been misleading). Many puzzle-cases are resolved this way (among other things, there is no problem assigning negative existential statements (...) the appropriate truth values). And fictional characters, although not existing, have real powers through their representations, which are real. (shrink)

This paper discusses the question of whether all counterfactuals with necessarily false antecedents (counterpossibles) are vacuously true. The orthodox view of counterpossibles (vacuism) answers that question in the affirmative. This paper explains vacuism before turning to examples from science that seem to require us to reason non-trivially using counterpossibles, and it seems that the counterpossibles used in such cases can be true or false. This is a threat to vacuism. It is then argued that the same kind of reasoning which (...) produces non-trivial counterpossibles in scientific cases can be extended to the case of counterpossibles in mathematics. Ordinary counterfactual reasoning relies on rejecting background assumptions in order to assume the truth of the antecedent. A failure to perform this process in the counterpossible case is what leads one to vacuism and it is explained how this process produces non-vacuous; counterfactuals, scientific counterpossibles, and mathematical counterpossibles. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise the problem of dealing with counterpossible conditionals for theories of subject matter. I argue that existing accounts of subject matter need to be revised and extended to be able to a) provide reasonable (potentially non-degenerate) verdicts about what counterpossibles are about, b) explain the intuition that counterpossibles are in some sense about what would happen if the antecedent were true, and c) explain in what sense counterpossibles can be about individuals. I sketch how one could (...) extend atom-based and way-based theories of subject matters to handle the problem. Then, I raise the problem that it might be desirable for a theory of subject matter to prevent the inference that certain counterpossibles are about the kinds of things that they seem to mention. (shrink)

It is commonly believed that the role of context cannot be ignored in the analysis of conditionals, and counterfactuals in particular. On truth conditional accounts involving possible worlds semantics, conditionals have been analysed as expressions of relative necessity: “If A, then B” is true at some world w if B is true at all the A-worlds deemed relevant to the evaluation of the conditional at w. A drawback of this approach is that for the evaluation of conditionals with the same (...) antecedents at some world, the same worlds are deemed as relevant for all occasions of utterance. But surely this is inadequate, if shifts of contexts between occasions are to be accounted for. Both the linguistic and logical implications of this defect are discussed, and in order to overcome it a modification of David Lewis’ ordering semantics for counterfactuals is developed for a modified language. I follow Lewis by letting contexts determine comparative similarity assignments, and show that the addition of syntactic context parameters (context indices) to the language gives the freedom required to switch between sets of relevant antecedent worlds from occasion to occasion by choosing the corresponding similarity assignment accordingly. Thus an account that extends Lewis’ analysis of a language containing a single counterfactual connective > to a language containing infinitely many counterfactual connectives >_c, each indexed by a different context name c, overcomes the limitations of traditional analyses. Finally it is also shown that these traditional accounts can be recovered from the modified account if certain contextual restrictions are in place. -/- . (shrink)