Where Is the Conflict between Internalism and Externalism? A Reply to Lohndal and Narita (2009)

Where Is the Conflict between Internalism and Externalism? A Reply to Lohndal and Narita (2009

Distinguishing semantics, pragmatics, and reasoning in the theory of conditionals

Khoo's theory of conditionals, while convincing in many respects, tries to make the semantics do a number of things that really belong either in the pragmatics of conditionals or in the way that people use conditionals in reasoning. By attending to these non-semantic aspects of conditionals, we may be able to capture much of what makes Khoo's theory attractive in a much more streamlined way

Vagueness as probabilistic linguistic knowledge

Consideration of the metalinguistic effects of utterances involving vague terms has led Barker [1] to treat vagueness using a modified Stalnakerian model of assertion. I present a sorites-like puzzle for factual beliefs in the standard Stalnakerian model [28] and show that it can be resolved by enriching the model to make use of probabilistic belief spaces. An analogous problem arises for metalinguistic information in Barker's model, and I suggest that a similar enrichment is needed here as well. The result is a probabilistic theory of linguistic representation that retains a classical metalanguage but avoids the undesirable divorce between meaning and use inherent in the epistemic theory [34]. I also show that the probabilistic approach provides a plausible account of the sorites paradox and higher-order vagueness and that it fares well empirically and conceptually in comparison to leading competitors

The rationality of inferring causation from correlational language

Recent work shows that participants make asymmetric causalinferences from apparently symmetric correlational statements(e.g., “Ais associated withB”). Can we make sense of thisbehavior in terms of rational language use? Experiment 1 in-vestigates these interpretive preferences—what we call “PACEeffects”—in light of theoretical and experimental pragmaticsand psycholinguistics. We uncover several linguistic factorsthat influence them, suggesting that a pragmatic explanationis possible. Yet, since PACE effects do not show that corre-lational language leads to causal implicatures strong enoughto influence action choice in practical decision contexts, Ex-periment 2 offers new evidence from an experiment that ex-plicitly compares the effects of causal vs. correlational claimson decision-making. Our results suggest that causal inferencesfrom correlation language are an intricate, but possibly ratio-nalizable, feature of natural language understanding

Syntactic satiation is driven by speaker-specific adaptation

Listeners adapt to variability in language use by updating their expectations over variants, often in speaker-specific ways. We propose that adaptation of this sort contributes to satiation, the phenomenon whereby the acceptability of unacceptable sentences increases after repeated exposure. We provide support for an adaptation account of satiation by showing that the satiation of purportedly unacceptable island-violating constructions demonstrates speaker-specificity, a key property of adaptation

Quantificational and modal interveners in degree constructions

Heim (2001) points out that the relational semantics for degrees predicts ambiguities in sentences with comparatives and quantifiers such as _every girl_ that are not observed. She also notes that the same ambiguities do appear with strong modals such as _must_ and _have to_, but not with weaker modals such as _should_, _ought_, and _want_. The problem is to explain why these classes of expressions would behave differently, given that they are all standardly treated as universal quantifiers. I present several counter-examples to Heim's account of this data and then argue that the puzzle involving universal DPs is the same as the puzzle of weak islands in amount wh-expressions, and that it yields to the analysis of weak islands due to Szabolcsi & Zwarts (1993), who argue that degree expressions are restricted in their interaction with the semantic operations meet. This accounts for universal DPs but leaves to be explained the possibility of modal intervention with strong modals. I argue that the split between universal DPs and strong modals supports recent work proposing that modals are not quantifiers over worlds but scalar expressions. An independently motivated scalar semantics for strong modals generates the ambiguity in a way that is compatible with Szabolcsi & Zwarts' theory, and that the predicted truth-conditions are correct for both readings with strong modals. The corresponding account of mid-strength modals explains their lack of ambiguity as merely apparent, due to the fact that the truth-conditions of the two readings are virtually indistinguishable, and neither embodies the missing reading that the quantificational theory leads us to look for. These results support both the scalar semantics for modality and Szabolcsi & Zwarts' semantic approach to intervention constraints