Metaethical Relativism

Although relativism may be said to be one of the oldest doctrines in philosophy, dating back to the teachings of Protagoras in the 5th century B.C., when it comes to contemporary philosophy, there is no consensus on what makes a view qualify as "relativist". The problem is particularly accute in metaethics, since most of the views that up to a decade ago were described as “relativist” would be more accurately described as "contextualist" or even “expressivist” in light of the distinctions currenty drawn in philosophy of language and semantics. In this chapter, we distinguish two construals of relativism, developed in sections 2 and 3 respectively: the “metaphysical” construal, based on the idea that there is no single, absolute, universal morality, and the “semantic” construal, based on the idea that the truth value of moral claims is relative to a set of moral standards, or moral practices, or some other suitable parameter. Section 1 introduces the core relativist ideas in an informal way, and warns against possible misinterpretations

A Different Story about Indexicals

The received view about indexicals holds that they are directly referential expressions, and that the semantic contribution of an indexical consists of that thing or individual to which the indexical refers in the context of its utterance. The aim of this paper is to put forward a different picture. I argue that direct reference and indexicality are distinct and separate phenomena, even if they cooccur often. Still, it is the speaker who directly refers to the things that she is talking about, and those things matter for the truth of her utterance. Indexicals, on the other hand, merely help the interpreter identify the speaker's intended reference. Typically, indexicals encode descriptive conditions that the context must meet to make the utterance true. For example, the demonstrative 'this' encodes the condition that the subject matter, ie that about which one is talking, should be salient and proximal to the speaker. The semantic contribution of an indexical, I suggest, consists precisely of such descriptive conditions. I will offer a formal account, dubbed contextual update semantics, and show how it captures the main conceptual motivation and how it handles embedded indexicals, which may seem problematic at a first glance

The Problem of De Se Assertion

International audienceIt has been long known (Perry (1977, 1979), Lewis (1981)) that de se attitudes, such as beliefs and desires that one has about oneself, call for a special treatment in theories of attitudinal content. The aim of this paper is to raise similar concerns for theories of asserted content. The received view, inherited from Kaplan (1989), has it that if Alma says "I am hungry," the asserted content, or what is said, is the proposition that Alma is hungry (at a given time). I argue that the received view has difficulties handing de se assertion, i.e. contents that one expresses using the first person pronoun, to assert something about oneself. I start from the observation that when two speakers say "I am hungry," one may truly report them as having said the same thing. It has often been held that the possibility of such reports comes from the fact that the two speakers are, after all, uttering the same words, and are in this sense "saying the same thing". I argue that this approach fails, and that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to use the same words, or words endowed with the same meaning, in order to be truly reported as same-saying. I also argue that reports of same-saying in the case of de se assertion differ significantly from such reports in the case of two speakers merely implicating the same thing

Emotional Disagreement. The role of semantic content in the expression of, and disagreement over, emotional values

Special Issue "Perspectives on Values and Value Judgments", edited by Stéphane LemaireInternational audienceWhen we describe an event as sad or happy, we attribute to it a certain emotional value. Attributions of emotional value depend essentially on an agent (and on his or her emotional responses); and yet, people readily disagree over such values. My aim in this paper is to explain what happens in the case of "emotional disagreement", and, more generally, to provide some insight into the semantics of value-attributions

Against the Contingent A Priori

This paper uses a revized version of some of the arguments from my paper "The Contingent A Priori: Much Ado about Nothing" (Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 4, 2004; 291-300)Since Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity, the view that there are contingent a priori truths has been surprisingly widespread. In this paper, I argue against that view. My first point is that in general, occurrences of predicates “a priori” and “contingent” are implicitly relativized to some circumstance, involving an agent, a time, a location. My second point is that a priority entails necessity, whenever the two are relativized to the same circumstance. In other words, what is known to be the case a priori (by an agent in a circumstance) could not fail to be the case (in the same circumstance), hence is necessary

De Se Assertion

The first part of the present paper has been published as an independent article, under the title "The Problem of De Se Assertion", Erkenntnis 76 (2012): 49-58.It has been long known (Perry (1977, 1979), Lewis (1981)) that de se attitudes, such as beliefs and desires that one has about oneself, call for a special treatment in theories of attitudinal content. The aim of this paper is to raise similar concerns for theories of asserted content. The received view, inherited from Kaplan (1989), has it that if Alma says "I am hungry," the asserted content, or what is said, is the proposition that Alma is hungry (at a given time). I argue that the received view has difficulties handing de se assertion, i.e. contents that one expresses using the first person pronoun, to assert something about oneself. I start from the observation that when two speakers say "I am hungry," one may truly report them as having said the same thing. It has often been held that the possibility of such reports comes from the fact that the two speakers are, after all, uttering the same words, and are in this sense "saying the same thing". I argue that this approach fails, and that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to use the same words, or words endowed with the same meaning, in order to be truly reported as same-saying. I also argue that reports of same-saying in the case of de se assertion differ significantly from such reports in the case of two speakers merely implicating the same thing. Finally, I outline a new account of the content of assertion, similar to Lewis's account of de se attitudes. The proposal is, roughly, when Alma says "I am hungry", the asserted content just the property of being hungry, and it is a property that Alma asserts of herself. I then propose to generalize the account to the other cases in a way that departs from Lewis's account, and I close by showing how my proposal handles the cases discussed in the first part of the paper

Situation Semantics

chapter for the volume Introduction to the Philosophy of John Perry, ed. by Raphael van Riel and Albert NewenInternational audienceThis paper is an occasion to go back to Jon Barwise and John Perry's Situations and Attitudes (1983). The aim is to bring to the foreground the main tenets of situation semantics, and to give the reader with a fair sense of the theoretical motivations that were driving the framework, and that continue to be of major significance to Perry's larger philosophical enterprise. I start by rehearsing some of the central aspects of what can be described as the Fregean heritage, which is important in order to understand the context in which situation semantics saw light, and to appreciate the almost revolutionary nature of some of the ideas behind it. After having clarified the background, I turn to one of the main motivations behind situation semantics: the search for an account of meaning that relies upon an account of information, where the latter is crucially driven by the task of explaining how cognitive agents like us are led to act in ways they do, given how they are attuned to their environment

For Whom is the Problem of the Essential Indexical a Problem?

Philosophers used to model belief as a relation between agents and propositions, which bear truth values depending on, and only on, the way the world is, until John Perry and David Lewis came up with cases of essentially indexical belief; that is, belief whose expression involves some indexical word, whose reference varies with the context. I shall argue that the problem of the essential indexical at best shows that belief should be tied somehow to what is subsequently acted upon, and must make room for other relations than those properly predicated. But it does not show that belief cannot be modeled as a binary relation between an agent and some suitable object (pace Perry), nor that this object cannot be a proposition (pace Lewis)

Domain-Sensitivity

International audienceIn this paper, I argue that there are good motivations for a relativist account of domain-sensitivity of quantifier phrases. I will frame the problem as a puzzle involving what looks like a logically valid inference, yet whose premises are true while the conclusion is false. After discussing some existing accounts, literalist and contextualist, I will present and argue for an account that may be said to be relativist in the following sense: (i) a domain of quantification is required for determining truth value, but is idle in determining semantic content, and (ii) the same sentence, as used on one and the same occasion, may receive different truth values relative to different domains

review of Mark Richard's "When Truth Gives Out"

book reviewWhen Truth Gives Out, written in an engaging and accessible style, develops around the idea that the notion of truth, contrary to a lot of received wisdom from philosophy of language and logic, is not – or at least, not always – the right concept to employ in analyzing belief, assertion, or their evaluation. The review explains, discusses and critically assesses some of the main and most innovative ideas from Mark Richard's latest book