Attitudes and relativism

Data about attitude reports provide some of the most interesting arguments for, and against, various theses of semantic relativism. This paper is a short survey of three such arguments. First, I’ll argue (against recent work by von Fintel and Gillies) that relativists can explain the behaviour of relativistic terms in factive attitude reports. Second, I’ll argue (against Glanzberg) that looking at attitude reports suggests that relativists have a more plausible story to tell than contextualists about the division of labour between semantics and meta-semantics. Finally, I’ll offer a new argument for invariantism (i.e. against both relativism and contextualism) about moral terms. The argument will turn on the observation that the behaviour of normative terms in factive and non-factive attitude reports is quite unlike the behaviour of any other plausibly context-sensitive term. Before that, I’ll start with some taxonomy, just so as it’s clear what the intended conclusions below are supposed to be. 1 How Not to be a Strawman Here are three mappings that we, as theorists about language, might be interested in. • Physical Movements → Speech Acts. I’m currently moving my fingers acros

The Unthinkable, Might It Be?

A basic intuition about epistemic possibility is the following: It might be that p iff it is open whether p. The standard way of cashing out this intuition is: It might be that p iff it is reconcilable with one’s informational state that p. However, there are certain examples which point to a lacuna in this conception. They indicate that epistemic possibility is restricted to what one can conceive as an alternative, what one can have a cognitive attitude to

The Utility of Content-Relativism

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An analysis of the centrality of intuition talk in the discussion on taste disagreements

This article has partly been elaborated in the framework of the project A Computational Dynamic Analysis of Public Debates on Politics, Aesthetics and Taste, No 3180096 of FONDECYT postdoctoral competition 2018, funded by CONICYT/FONDECYT/POSTDOCTORADO/No Proyecto 3180096. I am grateful to two anonymous referees for their invaluable comments, and to the audiences of the Seminario de Filosofia y Matematicas (Universidad de Valparaiso, Chile) and the GLiF Seminars (Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Spain), where I presented previous versions of this work.According to Cappelen (2012), analytic philosophers have traditionally used two arguments to defend the role of intuitions in philosophy. On the one hand, The Argument from Philosophical Practice claims that analytic philosophers rely on intuitions when defending their theories. On the other hand, The Argument from Intuition Talk contends that intuitions must play a prominent role in analytic philosophy because analytic philosophers use intuition talk profusely. Cappelen (2012) identifies three questions to be considered when assessing the Argument from Intuition Talk: a quantitative question, a centrality question, and an interpretative question. The available studies have mainly focused on the quantitative and interpretative questions. In this paper, I examine the centrality question, taking as a case study the literature on taste disagreements — a topic that has received significant attention in the philosophy of language in the last fifteen years. To this end, I first build a corpus with the most relevant works in the area and then examine the centrality of intuition talk. The results show that the use of intuition talk is central in the literature on taste disagreements, and that intuitions are taken as evidence in favor of a given theory if the theory can account for them.Comision Nacional de Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnologica (CONICYT) CONICYT FONDECYT 318009

Conditionals and Curry

Curry's paradox for "if.. then.." concerns the paradoxical features of sentences of the form "If this very sentence is true, then 2+2=5". Standard inference principles lead us to the conclusion that such conditionals have true consequents: so, for example, 2+2=5 after all. There has been a lot of technical work done on formal options for blocking Curry paradoxes while only compromising a little on the various central principles of logic and meaning that are under threat. Once we have a sense of the technical options, though, a philosophical choice remains. When dealing with puzzles in the logic of conditionals, a natural place to turn is independently motivated semantic theories of the behaviour of "if... then...". This paper argues that the closest-worlds approach outlined in Nolan 1997 offers a philosophically satisfying reason to deny conditional proof and so block the paradoxical Curry reasoning, and can give the verdict that standard Curry conditionals are false, along with related "contraction conditionals"

El rol del holismo y del contextualismo en la interpretación constitucional. Consideraciones a la luz de las categorías teóricas de la tesis de Duhem-Quine

The analysis aims to discuss how the external context conditions the legal interpretation of the constitutional provisions that recognize fundamental rights. To this end, some methodological indications from the field of the so called “Duhem-Quine thesis” are adopted. The intention is not to suggest that some relationship of identity might exist between the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of language and the legal level, but rather to propose the possibility of an analogical transposition, within the framework of legal interpretation, of some essential acquisitions of epistemological and semantic holism.El estudio tiene como objetivo reflexionar sobre el condicionamiento ejercido por el contexto externo en la interpretación jurídica de las disposiciones constitucionales que reconocen derechos fundamentales. Para ello, se retoman algunas indicaciones metodológicas procedentes del ámbito de la llamada “tesis de Duhem-Quine”. No se pretende teorizar la existencia de una relación de identidad entre la filosofía de la física y la filosofía del lenguaje, por un lado, y el plano jurídico, por el otro, sino más bien la posibilidad de una transposición analógica, en el marco de la interpretación jurídica, de algunas adquisiciones esenciales del holismo epistemológico y semántico

Knowledge, Pragmatics, and Error

‘Know-that’, like so many natural language expressions, exhibits patterns of use that provide evidence for its context-sensitivity. A popular family of views – call it prag- matic invariantism – attempts to explain the shifty patterns by appeal to a pragmatic thesis: while the semantic meaning of ‘know-that’ is stable across all contexts of use, sentences of the form ‘S knows [doesn’t know] that p’ can be used to communicate a pragmatic content that depends on the context of use. In this paper, the author argues that pragmatic invariantism makes inaccurate predictions for a wide range of well- known use data and is committed to attributing systematic pragmatic error to ordinary speakers. But pragmatic error is unprecedented, and it is doubtful that speakers are systematically wrong about what they intend to communicate

Sly Pete in Dynamic Semantics

In 'Sly Pete' or 'standoff' cases, reasonable speakers accept incompatible conditionals, and communicate them successfully to a trusting hearer. This paper uses the framework of dynamic semantics to offer a new model of the conversational dynamics at play in standoffs, and to articulate several puzzles posed by such cases. The paper resolves these puzzles by embracing a dynamic semantics for conditionals, according to which indicative conditionals require that their antecedents are possible in their local context, and update this body of information by eliminating the possibilities where the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. In this way, the dynamic analysis draws on insights from the material conditional and contextualist analyses, while explaining how standoffs are genuine disagreements