Ambiguity Tests, Polysemy, and Copredication

A family of familiar linguistic tests purport to help identify when a term is ambiguous. These tests are philosophically important: a familiar philosophical strategy is to claim that some phenomenon is disunified and its accompanying term is ambiguous. The tests have been used to evaluate disunification proposals about causation, pain, and knowledge, among others. These ambiguity tests, however, have come under fire. It has been alleged that the tests fail for polysemy, a common type of ambiguity, and one that is at issue in philosophically interesting cases. Furthermore, the objection that the tests fail for polysemy is often taken to be an undeniable bit of linguistic data. We argue that this is mistaken. The objection implicitly relies on controversial assumptions about how to account for copredicational sentences, in which a single argument is ascribed prima facie incompatible properties. Furthermore, on several viable theories of copredication, the objection fails. However, our discussion also reveals that even if ambiguity tests are preserved, they may be significantly harder to execute than previously thought

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Assertion, context, and epistemic accessibility

In his seminal paper 'Assertion', Robert Stalnaker distinguishes between the semantic content of a sentence on an occasion of use and the content asserted by an utterance of that sentence on that occasion. While in general the assertoric content of an utterance is simply its semantic content, the mechanisms of conversation sometimes force the two apart. Of special interest in this connection is one of the principles governing assertoric content in the framework, one according to which the asserted content ought to be identical at each world in the context set (the Uniformity principle). In this paper, we present a problem for Stalnaker's meta-semantic framework, by challenging the plausibility of the Uniformity principle. We argue that the interaction of the framework with facts about epistemic accessibility - in particular, failures of epistemic transparency - cause problems for the Uniformity principle and thus for Stalnaker's framework more generally

Ambiguity tests, polysemy, and copredication

A family of familiar linguistic tests purport to help identify when a term is ambiguous. These tests are philosophically important: a familiar philosophical strategy is to claim that some phenomenon is disunified and its accompanying term is ambiguous. The tests have been used to evaluate disunification proposals about causation, pain, and knowledge, among others. These ambiguity tests, however, have come under fire. It has been alleged that the tests fail for polysemy, a common type of ambiguity, and one that is at issue in philosophically interesting cases. Furthermore, the objection that the tests fail for polysemy is often taken to be an undeniable bit of linguistic data. We argue that this is mistaken. The objection implicitly relies on controversial assumptions about how to account for copredicational sentences, in which a single argument is ascribed prima facie incompatible properties. Furthermore, on several viable theories of copredication, the objection fails. However, our discussion also reveals that even if ambiguity tests are preserved, they may be significantly harder to execute than previously thought

Reflections on the Ideology of Reasons

In this chapter we offer a series of reflections on the ideology of reasons. Among the normative reasons for an agent X to phi, it is common to distinguish between those reasons that the agent possesses and those which she does not. After some background (5.1), we argue (5.2) that possession of a reason requires knowledge. In 5.3, we argue, first, that the normative reason construction is factive, and second, that possession ascriptions can be factored into a normative reason construction and a possession claim. In 5.4, we compare two prominent views concerning the nature of normative reasons: those of Kearns and Star and of John Broome. While both views have significant merit, we argue that they also face some non-trivial challenges, and discuss a range of considerations that can help to adjudicate between these two conceptions