Apology, Forgiveness, and Revenge

This dissertation makes a contribution to moral philosophy by inquiring into the nature, content, justification, and scope of apology and forgiveness. In doing so, I get a theoretical purchase on their ethical importance. I view apology and forgiveness as inescapable moral negotiations, which I understand to be ethical activities that mend human relationships after they have been compromised by wrongdoing by at least one party to the relationship. I argue that the concepts of apology and forgiveness, though analytically separable, form a nested whole in our practical lives such that the intelligibility and meaningfulness of either is dependent on the recognition and feasibility of the other. I argue that apology and forgiveness are speech acts with an important moral function. I first examine the kind of speech acts that apology and forgiveness are, thereby exhibiting their logical structure. Though they bear a prima facie resemblance to the performatives in J. L. Austin's account, they also differ. In arguing that Austin's account fails to accommodate the unique logical structure of apology and forgiveness, I offer a model that captures the form of their idiosyncratic logic. In short, I submit that a moral apology - an apology that ranges over a moral domain instead of the domain of etiquette and manners - always implies a request for forgiveness, and that an apology is successful only insofar as forgiveness is granted. In a complimentary vein, I argue that forgiveness in the absence of apology strains the very intelligibility and meaningfulness of forgiveness. I then consider the moral structure of apology, which I maintain has three necessary parts, one of which is a complete acknowledgement of wrongdoing. A complete acknowledgement satisfies the epistemic dimension of apology, and I propose a novel account of acknowledgement. I go on to identify the moral emotions of guilt, shame, regret and remorse as constitutive of the affective dimension of apology, while arguing that humility represents its attitudinal dimension. Lastly, I argue that moral apologies are a form of what Margaret Urban Walker calls moral repair: the process of migrating from the state of loss and damage to a state in which at least a modicum of security in moral relations is reestablished. I then examine the moral structure of forgiveness and some of the motivations for and anticipated outcomes of revenge. After considering a rival account of forgiveness, I argue that forgiveness has a threefold common core: forgiveness involves the suspension or overcoming of hostile feelings toward the wrongdoer; forgiveness involves restoring the relationship damaged by the wrong; and forgiveness involves the removal or suspension of the wrong. However, forgiveness has its limits. I argue that we cannot forgive in the absence of an apology, the dead, ourselves, or unforgivable actions. When confronted by the unforgivable evils of an atrocity, many throughout history have considered revenge as an alternative, retaliatory way to restore the moral balance between the offender and the victim when moral repair cannot. I conclude that, despite its intuitive appeal, revenge does not achieve such moral balance as it is ultimately self-defeating, exacerbating the very instability that the vengeful often wish to eliminate

I can't believe it's not lexical: Deriving distributed veridicality

Given the assumption that selection is a strictly local relationship between a head and its complement, we expect the ability of a head to take a particular argument to be insensitive to linguistic material above that head. The verb believe poses a puzzle under this view: while believe ordinarily only permits declarative clausal complements, interrogative complements are allowed when believe occurs under clausal negation and can or will, and a veridical reading becomes available. I argue that this provides evidence that believe is not simply a standard Hintikkan representational belief verb, but rather is fundamentally question-embedding,and that the verb's lexical semantics, including an excluded middle presupposition, interact with the modal and negation to derive the veridicality of can't believe. I conclude that veridicality need not be lexical: the right mix of semantic ingredients can conspire to yield a veridical interpretation, even if those ingredients are distributed across multiple lexical items

The language marker hypothesis

According to the language marker hypothesis language has provided homo sapiens with a rich symbolic system that plays a central role in interpreting signals delivered by our sensory apparatus, in shaping action goals, and in creating a powerful tool for reasoning and inferencing. This view provides an important correction on embodied accounts of language that reduce language to action, perception, emotion and mental simulation. The presence of a language system has, however, also important consequences for perception, action, emotion, and memory. Language stamps signals from perception, action, and emotional systems with rich cognitive markers that transform the role of these signals in the overall cognitive architecture of the human mind. This view does not deny that language is implemented by means of universal principles of neural organization. However, language creates the possibility to generate rich internal models of the world that are shaped and made accessible by the characteristics of a language system. This makes us less dependent on direct action-perception couplings and might even sometimes go at the expense of the veridicality of perception. In cognitive (neuro)science the pendulum has swung from language as the key to understand the organization of the human mind to the perspective that it is a byproduct of perception and action. It is time that it partly swings back again

On the veridicality of perfective clause-embedding verbs in Polish

Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der wahrheitsbasierten Bedeutung perfektiver satzeinbettender Prädikate im Polnischen, i.e. mit dem Zusammenhang zwischen Aspekt und Wahrheitsinferenz. Den Kern meiner Dissertation bilden sogenannte ‚reveal-type predicates‘ wie ‘beweisen’, ‘zeigen’ oder ‘offenbaren [dass]’. In Abhängigkeit von deren aspektueller Markierung bringen sie entweder eine maximale (bei perfektiven Verben) oder eine partielle Evidenz (bei imperfektiven Verben) für die Wahrheit einer eingebetteten Proposition mit sich. Nur wenn die Evidenz maximal ist, wird der dass-Satz notwendigerweise als wahr interpretiert. Ich habe gezeigt, dass maximale Evidenz einer totalen Affiziertheit eines nominalen inkrementellen Themas (wie z. B. in ‘einen Schrank bauen.pfv’) entspricht (Maximalität von Evidenz = Maximalität vom Schrank). Somit sind reveal-type predicates inkrementell. Außerdem habe ich eine Akzeptabilitätsstudie mit 51 polnischen MuttersprachlerInnen geplant und durchgeführt, die die Veridikalität des Perfektivs und die Neutralität des Imperfektivs bestätigt hat. Die Interpretation der Ergebnisse wurde um eine Korpusuntersuchung ergänzt. Basierend auf den theoretischen Beobachtungen und den Studienergebnissen habe ich eine einheitliche Analyse für inkrementelle Verben vorgeschlagen, die entweder ein nominales oder ein propositionales Objekt verlangen. Die von mir für das Polnische entdeckten Korrelationen gelten auch für andere slawische (Tschechisch, Russisch) und einige nicht-slawische Sprachen (austronesische Sprachen, Französisch, Ungarisch).In my dissertation, I investigated a systematic interaction between the perfective aspect of a clause-embedding verb and a truth-oriented interpretation of embedded propositions in Polish. I demonstrated that the so-called reveal-type predicates (‘prove’, ‘reveal’, ‘show [that]’) are in complementary distribution with respect to triggering truth-related meaning of their sentential complements. Whereas perfective variants enforce embedded propositions to be true, imperfective counterparts are almost only compatible with false (or neutral) propositions. I further showed that clause-embedding reveal-type predicates exhibit an incremental structure and can therefore be treated by analogy to verbs that combine with nominal incremental themes. In the former case, we have a gradual creation of a proof, whereas in the latter case, we have a gradual creation of an object like ‘wardrobe’ (maximality of evidence = maximality of a wardrobe). I proposed a novel analysis of incremental theme verbs that combine with either nouns or clauses. According to my analysis, one possible realization of a partial-total affectedness of an incremental theme is a gradual creation of a proof for an embedded proposition. In order to obtain empirical evidence for the (non-)veridicality of (im)perfective reveal-type predicates in Polish, I conducted an acceptability judgement study with 51 Polish native speakers. I further conducted a corpus-based analysis of the frequency of investigated lexemes, which completed the interpretation of results. Apart from Polish, I provided evidence from other Slavic languages (Czech, Russian) and some non-Slavic languages (Austronesian languages, French, Hungarian)

Being Someone Else

Could I have been someone other than who I am? Philosophers from Williams to Nagel to Lewis have been tempted to answer 'yes', but how can we make sense of such a view? I argue that to say that it is contingent who I am is to say that it is contingent what perspective I have, in a distinctively metaphysical sense of perspective

Perception and the Fall from Eden

In the Garden of Eden, we had unmediated contact with the world. We were directly acquainted with objects in the world and with their properties. Objects were presented to us without causal mediation, and properties were revealed to us in their true intrinsic glory. When an apple in Eden looked red to us, the apple was gloriously, perfectly, and primitively red. There was no need for a long causal chain from the microphysics of the surface through air and brain to a contingently connected visual experience. Rather, the perfect redness of the apple was simply revealed to us. The qualitative redness in our experience derived entirely from the presentation of perfect redness in the world. Eden was a world of perfect color. But then there was a Fall. First, we ate from the Tree of Illusion. After this, objects sometimes seemed to have different colors and shapes at different times, even though there was reason to believe that the object itself had not changed. So the connection between visual experience and the world became contingent: we could no longer accept that visual experience always revealed the world exactly as it is. Second, we ate from the Tree of Science. After this, we found that when we see a

Reports in Discourse

Attitude or speech reports in English with a non-parenthetical syntax sometimes give rise to interpretations in which the embedded clause, e.g., "John was out of town" in the report "Jill said that John was out of town", seems to convey the main point of the utterance while the attribution predicate, e.g., "Jillsaid that", merely plays an evidential or source-providing role (Urmson, 1952). Simons (2007) posits that parenthetical readings arise from the interaction between the report and the preceding discourse context, rather than from the syntax or semantics of the reports involved. However, no account of these discourse interactions has been developed in formal semantics. Research on parenthetical reports within frameworks of rhetorical structure has yielded hypotheses about the discourse interactions of parenthetical reports, but these hypotheses are not semantically sound. The goal of this paper is to unify and extend work in semantics and discourse structure to develop a formal, discourse-based account of parenthetical reports that does not suffer the pitfalls faced by current proposals in rhetorical frameworks

Processing Attenuating NPIs in Indicative and Counterfactual Conditionals

Both indicative and counterfactual conditionals are known to be licensing contexts for negative polarity items (NPIs). However, a recent theoretical account suggests that the licensing of attenuating NPIs like English all that in the conditional antecedent is sensitive to pragmatic differences between various types of conditionals. We conducted three behavioral experiments in order to test key predictions made by that proposal. In Experiment 1, we tested hypothetical indicative and counterfactual conditionals with the English NPI all that, finding that the NPI is degraded in the former compared to the latter. In Experiment 2, we compared hypothetical indicative conditionals and premise conditionals with the same NPI, again finding a degradation only for the former. Both results align with theoretically derived predictions purporting that hypothetical indicative conditionals are degraded due to their susceptibility to conditional perfection. Finally, Experiment 3 provides empirical evidence that comprehenders readily strengthen counterfactual conditionals to biconditionals, in line with theoretical analyses that assume that conditional perfection and counterfactual inferences are compatible. Their ability to still host attenuating NPIs in the conditional antecedent, by contrast, falls into place via the antiveridical inference to the falsity of the antecedent. Altogether, our study sheds light on the interplay between NPI licensing and the semantic and pragmatic properties of various types of conditionals. Moreover, it provides a novel perspective on the processing of different kinds of conditionals in context, in particular, with regard to their (non)veridicality properties.Peer Reviewe