14 found
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  1. A Problem for Generic Generalisations in Scientific Communication.Mark Bowker - 2023 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (1):123-132.
    Generic generalisations like ‘Opioids are highly addictive’ are very useful in scientific communication, but they can often be interpreted in many different ways. Although this is not a problem when all interpretations provide the same answer to the question under discussion, a problem arises when a generic generalisation is used to answer a question other than that originally intended. In such cases, some interpretations of the generalisation might answer the question in a way that the original speaker would not endorse. (...)
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  2.  65
    Ineliminable underdetermination and context-shifting arguments.Mark Bowker - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (2):215-236.
    ABSTRACT The truth-conditions of utterances are often underdetermined by the meaning of the sentence uttered, as suggested by the observation that the same sentence has different intuitive truth-values in different contexts. The intuitive difference is usually explained by assigning different truth-conditions to different utterances. This paper poses a problem for explanations of this kind: These truth-conditions, if they exist, are epistemically inaccessible. I suggest instead that truth-conditional underdetermination is ineliminable and these utterances have no truth-conditions. Intuitive truth-values are explained by (...)
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  3. Saying a bundle: meaning, intention, and underdetermination.Mark Bowker - 2019 - Synthese 196 (10):4229-4252.
    People often speak loosely, uttering sentences that are plainly false on their most strict interpretation. In understanding such speakers, we face a problem of underdetermination: there is often no unique interpretation that captures what they meant. Focusing on the case of incomplete definite descriptions, this paper suggests that speakers often mean bundles of propositions. When a speaker means a bundle, their audience can know what they mean by deriving any one of its members. Rather than posing a problem for the (...)
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  4. Shifting Perspective on Indexicals.Mark Bowker - 2022 - Pragmatics 32 (4):518-536.
    The debate over the meanings of indexical expressions has relied heavily on the method of counterexamples. This paper challenges that method by showing that purported counterexamples can often be explained away by appeal to perspective shifts. For these counterexamples to establish anything about indexical reference, we must identify the conditions under which theorists can legitimately appeal to perspective shifts. Some tests for semantic content are considered and it is argued that none of them can tell us when appeal to perspective (...)
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  5. Truth in Fiction, Underdetermination, and the Experience of Actuality.Mark Bowker - 2021 - British Journal of Aesthetics 61 (4):437-454.
    It seems true to say that Sherlock Holmes is a detective, despite there being no Sherlock Holmes. When asked to explain this fact, philosophers of language often opt for some version of Lewis’s view that sentences like ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’ may be taken as abbreviations for sentences prefixed with ‘In the Sherlock Holmes stories …’. I present two problems for this view. First, I provide reason to deny that these sentences are abbreviations. In short, these sentences have aesthetic (...)
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  6. A serpent in the garden?Mark Bowker - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper presents Elmar Unnsteinsson’s novel theory of Edenic Intentionalism, on which a speaker cannot refer to an object when the speaker is relevantly confused about its identity. A challenge to the theory is presented and several possible responses considered. The challenge is this: According to Edenic Intentionalism, reference often fails even when speakers seem to refer successfully. Elmar therefore supplements Edenic Intentionalism with an explanation of how communication can succeed without reference. If such an explanation is available, it isn’t (...)
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  7.  94
    Underdetermination, domain restriction, and theory choice.Mark Bowker - 2018 - Mind and Language 34 (2):205-220.
    It is often possible to know what a speaker intends to communicate without knowing what they intend to say. In such cases, speakers need not intend to say anything at all. Stanley and Szabó's influential survey of possible analysis of quantifier domain restriction is, therefore, incomplete and the arguments made by Clapp and Buchanan against Truth Conditional Compositionality and propositional speaker-meaning are flawed. Two theories should not always be viewed as incompatible when they associate the same utterance with different propositions, (...)
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  8.  56
    Keeping context in mind: a non-semantic explanation of apparent context-sensitivity.Mark Bowker - 2023 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (1):191-209.
    Arguments for context-sensitivity are often based on judgments about the truth values of sentences: a sentence seems true in one context and false in another, so it is argued that the truth conditions of the sentence shift between these contexts. Such arguments rely on the assumption that our judgments reflect the actual truth values of sentences in context. Here, I present a non-semantic explanation of these judgments. In short, our judgments about the truth values of sentences are driven by heuristics (...)
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  9. Rich Situated Attitudes.Kristina Liefke & Mark Bowker - 2017 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science 10247:45-61.
    We outline a novel theory of natural language meaning, Rich Situated Semantics [RSS], on which the content of sentential utterances is semantically rich and informationally situated. In virtue of its situatedness, an utterance’s rich situated content varies with the informational situation of the cognitive agent interpreting the utterance. In virtue of its richness, this content contains information beyond the utterance’s lexically encoded information. The agent-dependence of rich situated content solves a number of problems in semantics and the philosophy of language (...)
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  10.  82
    Introducing new work on indeterminacy and underdetermination.Mark Bowker - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-14.
  11.  19
    Cognitive Context-Sensitivity.Mark Bowker - 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 Workshop on Context: Semantics, Pragmatics and Cognition.
    This paper introduces a notion of cognitive context-sensitivity, in contrast with linguistic context-sensitivity. When a sentence is cognitively contextsensitive, the truth-value assigned to the sentence can vary with context, without any corresponding shift in the interpretation of the terms or structure of the sentence. The notion will be deployed to explain the context-sensitivity of generic generalizations.
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  12.  47
    Indeterminacy and Underdetermination.Mark Bowker & Maria Baghramian (eds.) - 2022
    From Aristotle’s puzzle about the indeterminacy of future contingents to Duhem and Quine’s observations about the underdetermination of theory by evidence, the concepts of indeterminacy and underdetermination have been a recurrent theme in philosophy. As well as a continued interest in classic problems, recent years have seen new applications of these notions in various research contexts. This Topical Collection showcases recent work on indeterminacy and underdetermination from diverse branches of philosophy, including philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, (...)
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  13.  70
    Saying nothing : in defence of syntactic and semantic underdetermination.Mark Bowker - 2016 - Dissertation, University of St Andrews
    According to the Encoding Model, speakers communicate by encoding the propositions they want to communicate into sentences, in accordance with the conventions of a language L. By uttering a sentence that encodes p, the speaker says that p. Communication is successful only if the audience identifies the proposition that the speaker intends to communicate, which is achieved by decoding the uttered sentence in accordance with the conventions of L. A consequence of the Encoding Model has been the proliferation of underdetermination (...)
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  14.  47
    Weighing Solutions to the Lottery Puzzle.Mark Bowker - 2010 - Stance 3 (1):25-32.
    The lottery puzzle can elicit strong intuitions in favour of skepticism, according to which we ordinary language-users speak falsely about knowledge with shocking regularity. Various contextualist and invariantist responses to the puzzle attempt to avoid this unwelcome result and preserve the competence of ordinary speakers. I will argue that these solutions can be successful only if they respect intuitions of a certain kind, and proceed to judge competing solutions by this criterion.
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