4,241 research outputs found
Is Semantics Really Psychologically Real?
The starting point for this paper is a critical discussion of claims of psychological reality articulated within Borgâs (forth.) minimal semantics and Carpinteroâs (2007) character*-semantics. It has been proposed, for independent reasons, that their respective accounts can accommodate, or at least avoid the challenge from psychological evidence. I outline their respective motivations, suggesting various shortcomings in their efforts of preserving the virtues of an uncontaminated semantics in the face of psychological objection (I-II), and try to make the case that, at least for a theory of utterance comprehension, a truth-conditional pragmatic stance is far preferable. An alternative from a relevance-theoretic perspective is offered in terms of mutual adjustment between truth-conditional content and implicature(s), arguing that many âfreeâ pragmatic processes are needed to uncover the truth-conditional content, which can then warrant the expected implicature(s) (III). I finally illustrate the difficulties their accounts have in predicting the correct order of interpretation in cases of ironic metaphor, i.e. metaphor is computed first, as part of truth-conditional content, while irony is inferentially grounded in metaphorical content (IV)
Naturalistic Metaphysics at Sea
In this paper I return to the mid-20th-century debate between Quine and Carnap on the status of metaphysics questions with an eye toward advancing contemporary debates about whether naturalists can coherently undertake substantive metaphysical inquiry. Following Huw Price, I take the debate between Quine and Carnap to hinge, in part, on whether human inquiry is functionally unified. However, unlike Price, I suggest that this question is not best understood as a question about the function(s) of descriptive discourse. This goes along with rejecting a âlinguistic conceptionâ of the starting point of metaphysical inquiry, which, although shared by Quine and Carnap, Price gives us no good reason to think is mandatory for naturalists. I sketch two reasons naturalists have to reject a particular manifestation of this linguistic conception in Quineâs workâhis criterion of ontological commitment. Finally, I show how these reasons can help us identify the grains of truth in some recent critiques of âmainstream metaphysics of mind.
Introduction
This chapter will motivate why it is useful to consider the topic of derivations
and filtering in more detail. We will argue against the popular belief that
the minimalist program and optimality theory are incompatible theories in that the
former places the explanatory burden on the generative device (the computational
system) whereas the latter places it on the fi ltering device (the OT evaluator).
Although this belief may be correct in as far as it describes existing tendencies,
we will argue that minimalist and optimality theoretic approaches normally adopt
more or less the same global architecture of grammar: both assume that a generator
defines a set S of potentially well-formed expressions that can be generated on the
basis of a given input and that there is an evaluator that selects the expressions from
S that are actually grammatical in a given language L. For this reason, we believe
that it has a high priority to investigate the role of the two components in more detail
in the hope that this will provide a better understanding of the differences and similarities
between the two approaches. We will conclude this introduction with a brief
review of the studies collected in this book.
The syntax of slavic predicate case
In this article I provide a syntactic framework for case patterns found in Slavic secondary predicates
Whose Metaethical Minimalism?
T. M. Scanlonâs âReasons Fundamentalismâ rejects any naturalistic reduction of normative truths and it also rejects the type of non-naturalism that invokes a âspecial metaphysical reality.â Here I argue that this still does not commit Scanlonâas some have thoughtâto an extreme âmetaethical minimalismâ according to which there are no âtruth makersâ at all for normative truths. I emphasize that the issue here is not just about understanding Scanlon, since the actual position defended by Scanlon might, more significantly, point the way toward a satisfying non-reductive position in metaethics, one that embodies the ontological modesty that disavows any appeal to a âspecial metaphysical realityâ in Scanlonâs sense
Metasemantics, Moral Realism and Moral Doctrines
In this paper, I consider the relationship between Matthew Kramerâs moral realism as a moral doctrine and expressivism, understood as a distinctly non-representationalist metasemantic theory of moral vocabulary. More precisely, I will argue that Kramer is right in stating that moral realism as a moral doctrine does not stand in conflict with expressivism. But I will also go further, by submitting that advocates of moral realism as a moral doctrine must adopt theories such as expressivism in some shape or form. Accordingly, if you do not want to accept positions such as expressivism, you cannot defend moral realism as a moral doctrine. Similarly, if you want moral realism to compete with expressivism, you cannot accept Kramerâs take on moral realism either. Hence, moral realism as a moral doctrine stands and falls with theories such as expressivism, or so I shall argue
Explanatory roles for minimal content
A standard objection to so-called âminimal semanticsâ (Borg 2004, 2012, Cappelen and Lepore 2005) is that minimal contents are explanatorily redundant as they play no role in an adequate account of linguistic communication (those making this objection include Levinson 2000, Carston 2002, Recanati 2004). This paper argues that this standard objection is mistaken. Furthermore, I argue that seeing why the objection is mistaken sheds light both on how we should draw the classic Gricean distinction between saying and implicating, and how we should think about the key philosophical notion of assertion. Specifically, it reveals that these ideas are best understood primarily in socio-linguistic terms (resting on the degree of liability a speaker is held to have for linguistically conveyed content)
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