Department of English and General Linguis cs University of Łódź

PhiLang 2019 Sixth Interna onal Conference on Philosophy of Language and Linguis cs Łódz, 10-12 May 2019

Book of Abstracts

edited by Mar n Hinton & Wiktor Pskit

Department of English and General Linguistics Institute of English Studies University of Łódź

Sixth International Conference on Philosophy of Language and Linguistics

PhiLang 2019

Łódź, 10-12 May 2019

Organising Committee: Piotr Stalmaszczyk (chair) Aleksandra Majdzińska Wiktor Pskit Martin Hinton Ryszard Rasiński

Special Session

PhilArg: The Philosophy of Argumentation Convenor: Martin Hinton

Book of Abstracts

edited by Martin Hinton & Wiktor Pskit

Łódź, 2019 Contents

Anna Brożek (Plenary Speaker) ...... 7 The between logic and linguistics in the Lvov-Warsaw School ...... 7 Stacie Friend (Plenary Speaker) ...... 8 Co-identification again ...... 8 Ulrike Hahn (Plenary Speaker) ...... 9 Norms for real world argument ...... 9 Kasia M. Jaszczolt (Plenary Speaker) ...... 10 Rethinking Gricean: New challenges for metapragmatics ...... 10 Stephen Mumford (Plenary Speaker) ...... 11 Negation and denial ...... 11 Tadeusz Szubka (Plenary Speaker) ...... 12 Contemporary philosophy of language and its transformations ...... 12 Special Session: The Philosophy of Argumentation ...... 13 Katarzyna Budzyńska et al...... 14 Ethos structures in natural language ...... 14 Cristina Corredor ...... 15 Speaking, inferring, arguing. On the inferential and argumentative character of speech ...... 15 Richard Davies ...... 16 May we recommend fallacious argumentation? ...... 16 Don Dedrick ...... 17 The “appeal to popularity” should not be treated as an informal fallacy of argumentation ...... 17 Kamila Dębowska-Kozłowska ...... 18 Manipulating variables for a persuasive change in an experimental setting ...... 18 Martin Hinton ...... 19 Philosophical fallacies of language ...... 19 Miklós Könczöl ...... 20 Rhetorical issues (staseis) in ...... 20 Patrycja Kupś ...... 21 Description Logics based as a tool in argument evaluation ...... 21 Tomáš Ondráček ...... 22 Forms of denial strategy in organization’s reactions to crises ...... 22 Brian Plüss et al...... 23 Implicit logos, implicit ethos: inference anchoring theory with conventional implicatures ...... 23

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Mariusz Urbański & Paweł Łupkowski ...... 24 Cooperative multi-agent problem solving from an interrogative perspective: questioning agendas and informant’s credibility ...... 24 Jean H.M. Wagemans ...... 25 A theoretical rationale for distinguishing four basic argument forms ...... 25 General Session ...... 26 Edgar Andrade-Lotero & Julián Ortiz-Duque ...... 26 There is a division of linguistic labor ...... 26 Filippo Batisti ...... 27 Linguistic relativity and non-standard accounts of cognition ...... 27 André Bazzoni ...... 28 Naive rigidity ...... 28 Marcin Będkowski ...... 29 Twardowski and Ajdukiewicz on content and ...... 29 Krystian Bogucki ...... 30 Was the context the basis of Frege’s philosophy after 1891? ...... 30 Annie Bosse ...... 31 Denying generics ...... 31 Tadeusz Ciecierski & Paweł Grabarczyk ...... 32 Utterances ...... 32 Jonas Dagys ...... 33 Could anyone have been identical with Holmes? Rigidity and fiction once again ...... 33 Matej Drobnak ...... 34 Context, content, and inferentialism ...... 34 Marta Dynel ...... 35 On bald-faced lies and bullshit ...... 35 Juliana Faccio Lima ...... 36 Frege’s Puzzle and multiple iterations of attitude verbs ...... 36 Sarah Fisher ...... 37 Reframing implicatures ...... 37 Grzegorz Gaszczyk ...... 38 The norm and aim of the speech act of explanation ...... 38 Christopher Genovesi & Eros Corazza ...... 39 On anaphora and the fictional use of metaphors in argument position ...... 39 Joan Gimeno-Simó ...... 40 Monsters and the two versions of compositionality ...... 40 Daniela Glavaničová ...... 41 Fictional names are not proper names ...... 41

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Berta Grimau...... 42 Fuzzy semantics for graded adjectives ...... 42 Maria Grzelikowska ...... 43 Critique of elementary proposition ...... 43 Andrea Guardo ...... 44 The privilege problem for semantic dispositionalism ...... 44 Leopold Hess ...... 45 “I never knew no godfather.” Bald-faced lies, regular lies and assertions ...... 45 Amir Horowitz ...... 46 Derived content, original content, and the practice of content ascription ...... 46 Antonina Jamrozik ...... 47 How many compositionalities? The analysis of responses to Fodor and Lepore’s argument against Inferential Role Semantics ...... 47 Bartosz Kaluziński ...... 48 Constitutive rules and normativity of meaning ...... 48 Natalia Karczewska ...... 49 Assertion and denial in ...... 49 David Kashtan ...... 50 without paradox: On a neglected argument by Tarski ...... 50 Filip Kawczyński ...... 51 The explanatory of metasemantics ...... 51 Joanna Klimczyk ...... 52 A new account of the problem of disagreement about epistemic and deontic modality ...... 52 Markus Kortesmäki ...... 53 On the relation between semantic contextualism and semantic normativism ...... 53 Alexander Kremling ...... 54 Why philosophy of language matters – even in medical ethics ...... 54 Adam Królikowski ...... 55 Henryk Hiż – the last representative of the Lvov-Warsaw School ...... 55 Richmond Kwesi ...... 56 Metaphor and disagreement ...... 56 Kamil Lemanek ...... 57 The flow of meaning: complex expressions and recursion ...... 57 Palle Leth ...... 58 Are implicatures deniable? ...... 58 Janusz Maciaszek ...... 59 Paratactic analysis in Kotarbiński and Davidson ...... 59

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Maria Matuszkiewicz ...... 60 Towards a deflationary view of singular ...... 60 Francesco Montesi ...... 61 The problem of rejective phase: Denial versus retraction ...... 61 Lucy McDonald ...... 62 Online speech ...... 62 Crister Nyberg ...... 63 Proper names in fiction. Philosophy meets psychology ...... 63 Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska ...... 64 Is modulation really local? ...... 64 Sebastian Petzolt ...... 65 Synonymy and token-reflexivity ...... 65 Krzysztof Posłajko ...... 66 Minimalist sceptical solution as a revisionary account of meaning ...... 66 Andrea Raimondi ...... 67 On meaning ascriptions ...... Błąd! Nie zdefiniowano zakładki. Martina Rosola ...... 68 The implicature of generics ...... 68 Wojciech Rostworowski, Katarzyna Kuś and Bartosz Maćkiewicz ...... 69 Demonstrative reference in the experimental perspective ...... 69 Louis Rouillé ...... 70 Fictional and metafictional uses of names: an analogy with games ...... 70 Beatriz Santos ...... 71 On the meta-semantics of context-sensitivity ...... 71 Giorgio Sbardolini ...... 72 Meanings as social norms ...... 72 Merel Semeijn ...... 73 The problem of the wrong kind of : parafictional statements in abstract object theory ...... 73 Maciej Sendłak ...... 74 Counterpossibles and a fiction operator ...... 74 Giovanni Sommazzi ...... 75 Revising the of rule (in light of Kripke-Wittgenstein’s skeptical argument) ...... 75 Fredrik Stjernberg ...... 76 There’s something about “Sherlock” – fictional names and bivalence ...... 76 Vanja Subotić ...... 77 Reconsidering linguistic intuitions in experimental semantics ...... 77 Mieszko Tałasiewicz ...... 78 Categorial grammar as a key to Peter F. Strawson’s philosophy of language ...... 78

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Maciej Tarnowski & Maciej Głowacki ...... 79 What are words? ...... 79 Tomoo Ueda ...... 80 Externalist pragmatic of truth ...... 80 Piotr Wilkin ...... 81 Formalizing token-reflexivity and utterance-reflexivity ...... 81 Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka ...... 82 J.L. Austin’s speech acts and the notions of and convention ...... 82 Maciej Witek ...... 83 A performative solution to the triggering problem ...... 83 Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska ...... 84 On notions of sense in logic of language ...... 84 Nadja-Mira Yolcu...... 85 Is there expressive denegation? ...... 85 Adrian Ziółkowski ...... 86 Survey pragmatics: the role of contextual factors in experimental philosophy ...... 86

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Anna Brożek (Plenary Speaker) University of Warsaw, Poland

The relations between logic and linguistics in the Lvov-Warsaw School

The methodological program of , the founder of the Lvov-Warsaw School (LWS), was interdisciplinary. For instance, his famous work “On Actions and Products” had the subtitle: “Remarks from the Borderline of Psychology, Grammar and Logic” (Twardowski 1912). Maria van der Schaar comments on this fact in such a way:

Twardowski’s philosophical method may be characterized as involving all three disciplines. Logical analysis has to combine psychological analysis with grammatical distinctions (Schaar 2015, 24).

Twardowski examined problems situated on the borders between physiology, psychology, grammar, logic, and philosophy in many others studies as well as during his university classes. Given that, it is obvious that the interrelations between linguistics, logic and philosophy became the object of investigation in Twardowski’s school. My paper sketches out the main problems of the borders of logic and linguistics as they were presented by members of the LWS, such as Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Izydora Dąmbska, Tadeusz Kotarbiński and Maria Ossowska. These problems concern the borders set out due to differences, among others, in:

- the object of research (natural versus artificial, formal versus informal, idealized versus real languages); - the aspects of inquiry (syntax, semantic and pragmatics; logical versus linguistic defects); - the aim of studies (description versus explication, construction, intervention).

It will be demonstrated that some insights into the relations between logic and linguistics formulated by members of the LWS may shed essential light on the contemporary discussion between the disciplines in question.

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Stacie Friend (Plenary Speaker) Birkbeck College, UK

Co-identification again

I have argued elsewhere that we can account for intuitions about co-identification -- the sense in which empty names such as 'Santa Claus' and 'Father Christmas' are "about" the same thing even though there is no such thing -- by appeal to the communication networks that underpin reference for non-empty names. In this paper I revise and elaborate my account of co- identification. I also criticise attempts to understand co-identification by appeal to the counterfactual formulation that two names co-identify just in case they would have referred to the same thing, a version of which has recently been defended by Manuel García-Carpintero.

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Ulrike Hahn (Plenary Speaker) Birkbeck College, UK

Norms for real world argument

The talk provides a brief overview of attempts to expand the normative “coverage” for everyday informal argument. This will identify both successes and challenges that remain. The talk then draws on the example of recent work on a web-based outreach project to identify directions for future work that may, one day, provide adequate formal treatment for most, if not all, of everyday informal argument.

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Kasia M. Jaszczolt (Plenary Speaker) University of Cambridge, UK.

Rethinking being Gricean: New challenges for metapragmatics

Paul Grice’s foundational influence on contemporary pragmatic theory has its roots in the combination of focus on (i) in their role of explanantia for meaning in discourse with (ii) the rigidity of the truth-conditional approach upon which his theory of communication is built. However, forty years on, it has become necessary to ask how much, and on what identifiable dimensions, one can depart from his original program and still remain ‘post- Gricean’. The program has been subjected to critical scrutiny on several dimensions. First, communication has since been envisaged as mostly direct and non-inferential (e.g. Recanati 2004, 2016). Next, the grammatical origin of some implicatures has been proposed (e.g. Chierchia 2004; Chierchia et al. 2012), associated with the proposal to reinstate semantic ambiguities in lieu of meaning-underdetermination (e.g. Lepore & Stone 2015). The focus on cooperative interaction has been weakened through the attention to strategic communication (e.g. Asher & Lascarides 2013). Perhaps most importantly, the Gricean cline of meaning construction (sometimes called ‘the pipeline picture of meaning’) has been questioned, originally in game-theoretic approaches (e.g. Lewis 1979, and recently e.g. in Equilibrium Semantics, Parikh 2010), but also in post-Gricean Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2005, 2016) where discourse meaning is not constructed following the steps from the output of syntactic processing, through modulation, to implicatures, but rather follows the of situated interaction independently of the relation of the meaning to the structure of the uttered sentence. Finally, the modular approach to meaning has been questioned and replaced with general cognitive mechanisms that are allegedly responsible for implicatures (Goodman & Stuhlmüller 2013; Goodman & Lassiter 2015).

This meta-theoretic inquiry begins by introducing the main novel dimensions on which the Gricean program has recently been challenged and proceeds to arguing that none of the challenges constitutes a real threat to it. I develop two strands of argumentation showing how the approaches either (a) can be incorporated as its extensions or (b) are in pursuit of different goals and as such are not in competition with it. Argument (a) applies to automatic meaning assignment, the rejection of the ‘pipeline picture of meaning’, emphasis on conventions, strategic conversation and generalized cognition. Argument (b) applies to the revival of semantic ambiguity and the grammatical foundation of implicatures. It is concluded that the Gricean program can be relaxed on the dimensions covered by (a) and co-exist with the approaches subscribing to (b).

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Stephen Mumford (Plenary Speaker) Durham University, UK

Negation and denial

Is a denial of P just the same as an assertion of not-P? Many have so, most notably Frege and Quine. Frege thought that there was only one form of judgment and one didn’t need a separate force indicator other than assertion. A lot could hang on this. If we assert not-P, then we have to give an account of how negative statements could be true, which has proven difficult to do. Perhaps we could instead deny P, where this gives us no obligation to provide a truthmaker for a negative. The key question is whether denying P and asserting not-P are really equivalents and I argue that they are not. There are a number of differences between the roles of assertion and denial which, taken together, show that one can never assume that a denial of P is just an assertion of not-P. There are a number of objections to explaining negation in terms of denial, however, and some of these shall be addressed and answered also.

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Tadeusz Szubka (Plenary Speaker) University of Szczecin, Poland [email protected]

Contemporary philosophy of language and its transformations

Philosophy of language is one of key disciplines within contemporary analytic tradition broadly construed. Although its problems were widely discussed from the beginning of that tradition, it was formed as a separate and self-standing philosophical discipline in the 1960s and 1970s when the distinction between linguistic philosophy and philosophy of language was clearly drawn. It did not take much then for philosophy of language to establish itself, in the writings of Donald Davidson, , Saul A. Kripke and their followers, as a foundational discipline. Whether it took the form of a systematic theory of meaning, or was advertised as the new theory of reference, it was supposed to have wide-ranging epistemological and metaphysical consequences. At the turn of the 21th century when all those (over)ambitious and inflated research programs collapsed or were gradually eroding, philosophy of language has been deflated and transformed into a modest and special discipline, tied up more with current linguistics than with the rest of philosophy.

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Special Session: The Philosophy of Argumentation Convenor: Martin Hinton

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Katarzyna Budzyńska Rory Duthie University of Dundee, UK University of Dundee, UK Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland Marcin Koszowy Annette Hautli-Janisz Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland University of Konstanz, Germany Martín Pereira-Fariña Brian Plüss Institute of Heritage Sciences (Incipit) University of Dundee, UK Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) [email protected]

Ethos structures in natural language

Ethos, the character of the speaker, is a powerful tool used to influence others through communication. Together with logos (argumentation) and pathos (emotions of the audience), they constitute one of the key elements of Aristotle's Rhetoric. This paper introduces Computational Ethos, a model of ethotic structures, derived from and verified on real-life argument data, which is applied to several domains with the ultimate goal of implementing technologies such as ethos mining and ethos analytics.

In our work, ethos structures are studied as being potentially independent of the speech acts speakers perform: e.g. a politician could be supported because of her general knowledge (Ex. 1), or attacked because of negative behaviour (Ex. 2).

Example 1 Mr. Moore said, I bow to my hon. Friend's (Miss Widdecombe's) distinguished past and detailed knowledge of these matters.

Example 2 Mr. Forsyth said, when the hon. Gentleman (Mr Canavan) was the Member for part of my constituency, he fled the field because he was scared that he would lose.

Structures of ethos support and ethos attacks were annotated (Duthie & Budzynska 2018; Duthie, Budzynska & Reed 2016) and studied (Koszowy & Budzynska 2016), resulting in the largest publicly available corpus of ethotic structures (arg. tech/Ethos_Hansard1). This corpus has since been re-annotated to distinguish between different grounds (Aristotle 1991) on which politicians can be supported or attacked: practical wisdom, moral virtue, or goodwill (Duthie & Budzynska 2018; Koszowy, Duthie & Budzynska 2018).

Applying ethos to different domains allows for the study of a variety of ethotic structures and their use in natural communication. Currently, we investigate: Hansard, the UK parliamentary debates record, where politicians mainly support or attack each other's ethos (Duthie, Budzynska & Reed 2018; Duthie & Budzynska 2018; Koszowy, Duthie & Budzynska 2018); Cultural Heritage, where we discovered a new type of ethos: historical ethos (Pereira Fariña, Koszowy & Budzynska 2018); and Deliberative Democracy, where speakers aim to establish their own ethos at public consultation meetings.

Key words: ethos, argumentation, inference anchoring theory, practical wisdom, moral virtue, goodwill

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Cristina Corredor University of Valladolid [email protected]

Speaking, inferring, arguing. On the inferential and argumentative character of speech

Some influential theoretical approaches to the study of argumentation have set forth an account of the practice of arguing (or its product, the arguments) taking as a point of departure the notion of speech act. Complementarily, some linguistic and philosophical views have articulated their study of communication taking into account its inferential or argumentative character, i.e. the way in which our utterances are based on either an inferential process or a pre-theoretic grasp of the practice of arguing.

My interest lies in this second perspective. I will take a point of departure on speech act theory as originally presented by Austin (1962/1975). In particular, verdictive speech acts consist in the issuing of a finding or judgement, upon evidence or reasons, as to facts or value. In my view, this characterization presupposes a complex articulation between the performance of a verdictive and the justificatory ground that gives (or might give) support to it. Nevertheless, the view does not need to presuppose that speech is, in its very nature, inferential or argumentative.

My hypothesis is twofold. Firstly, what makes of communication an inferential activity is given with its calculability, i.e. with the possibility to recover the pragmatic meaning of utterances by reconstructing a series of inferences or an explicit reasoning. In this light, arguing is a practice of giving and evaluating the reasons that justify (or could justify) what is communicated. Secondly, the normative stances that we recognise and assign each other with our speech acts include obligations and rights of a dialectical character. This dialectical character of speech, however, does not presuppose nor entail an inferential or argumentative nature in speech. My aim is to give support to these views.

Key words: arguing, inferring, speech acts, Austin, Grice

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Richard Davies Università di Bergamo [email protected]

May we recommend fallacious argumentation?

In the West until the middle of the nineteenth century, almost all primers of logic with pretensions to completeness contained discussion of insecure inferences (“fallacies”). In this, they followed the traditional placing of the Sophistical Confutations at the end of Aristotle’s Organon. Beginning with Boole’s Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847), many more recent introductory logic texts do not attempt what Mill called a “theory of bad as well as of good reasoning” (System (1843), V, 1, i). Though the formalisms that have been developed over the last 150 years have gone a long way to modelling many of the more secure inferences, both deductive and inductive, to which we are inclined, we are still far from having anything like the sort of complete theory of good reasoning that would make a theory of the bad superfluous.

No account of bad reasoning could ever be complete, if only because no account of human folly and wickedness could ever be complete. But there are at least three sorts of motivations for making an effort to survey the field. The most traditional is to have some, albeit approximate, account of the most common sorts of mistakes that people (ourselves included) are apt to make and to have an, albeit arbitrary and rhapsodic, set of labels for naming and shaming occurrences of them. A second, slightly more theoretical, is to understand more clearly that an invalid argument can be of any form, except a valid one. And a third, suggested by Schopenhauer in his posthumously published Dialektik (c. 1830), is to have at our disposal an arsenal of stratagems (“Kunstgriffe”) to deploy when faced with unscrupulous or unwary debating partners. We illustrate just a few of these tricks in light of their aptness to shut one’s opponent up. Which can be a blessing.

Key words: the scope of logic, lists of “fallacies”, validity-invalidity, eristic dialectic,

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Don Dedrick University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada [email protected]

The “appeal to popularity” should not be treated as an informal fallacy of argumentation

It is common to view appeals to popularity (P is believed by everyone, So P is likely to be true) as fallacious. We argue that this is a mistake and that Condorcet’s jury theorem can be used to justify at least some appeals to popularity as legitimate inferences. More importantly, the conditions for the successful application of Condorcet’s theorem (binary claim, competent judge, epistemic independence) can be used as critical tools when evaluating appeals to popularity. We argue that the application of these three to appeals to popularity not only provide a more fine-grained critical strategy for argument evaluation but, also, allow us to see problems that often arise with such appeals more clearly.

Key words: critical thinking, argumentation theory, informal fallacies, Condorcet’s jury theorem, Kenneth Arrow, ad populum appeal to popularity

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Kamila Dębowska-Kozłowska UAM Poznań, Poland [email protected]

Manipulating variables for a persuasive change in an experimental setting

Research on bilingual processing has found that the language is not a strategic variable that facilitates persuasion (e.g. Noriega 2006). The current study investigates the persuasive outcomes of the processing of messages in L2 by non-native of the Faculty of English students. Persuasion research has primarily focused on modifying explicit attitudes (De Houwer 2009, Clark et al. 2012.) This presentation discusses modulation of implicit and explicit evaluations by affect, source, argument strength and discrepancy effects. 445 participants took part in the study. Each person participated in one of twelve experimental conditions. A modified version of the Implicit Association Test and the Single-Item Evaluation Technique (SIET) programmed in E-Prime software were used to measure implicit and explicit attitudes respectively. Previous studies prove that high expertise of the source is not a decisive variable in the explicit evaluation of the persuasiveness of a message (e.g. Bohner et al. 2002). For example, the use of the weak argument condition (vs. the strong argument condition) is more effective when paired with the low expertise condition (vs. the high expertise condition). Our results suggest that implicit evaluations might be modulated in the same way as explicit evaluations by source and argument strength effects. However, the study shows that message discrepancy might be a key variable that completely changes the effects of expertise and message strength in explicit evaluations. The study also offers direct evidence based on the reaction time paradigm that affect has the highest significance in implicit persuasion processing.

Key words: persuasion, argument strength, expertise, affect, message discrepancy, explicit attitude, implicit attitude

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Martin Hinton University of Łódź, Poland [email protected]

Philosophical fallacies of language

In the recently-translated work A Theory of Philosophical Fallacies (2016), the German philosopher Leonard Nelson puts forward in a series of lectures the proposal that most, if not all, philosophical error is attributable to one fallacy affecting technical attempts at definition. Although he does not refer to this as a linguistic fallacy, it comes about as a result of the confusion between the newly defined concept and the prior concept referred to by the same name. This is related to, though not quite the same as, Moore’s Naturalistic Fallacy, which is also the result of attempts at redefining one thing in terms of another.

In this presentation, I compare Nelson’s fallacy with Moore’s and make the case for them to be considered fallacies of language. I also consider how they are related to the of ‘persuasive definition’ (Stevenson 1944) and the fallacy commonly known as ‘no true Scotsman’.

In the second half of the talk, I present some other well-known complaints of philosophers about their fellows, drawing primarily on the work of Berkeley and Wittgenstein, in order to argue, firstly, that errors of language in philosophical reasoning are endemic; and, secondly, that this makes a thorough and properly supported treatment of linguistic fallacies a of priority for argumentation scholars and philosophers alike.

Key words: fallacies of language, philosophical fallacy, Leonard Nelson, naturalistic fallacy, persuasive definition

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Miklós Könczöl Pázmány Péter Catholic University & Hungarian Academy of Sciences [email protected]

Rhetorical issues (staseis) in Aristotle

The system of issues (staseis) was used in ancient school rhetoric to identify the core of a (legal) debate, i.e. to determine the basic issue where the claims of two opposing parties contradict each other, according to which the whole of the argument should be organised. While the fully developed doctrine of issues was a product of later Hellenistic rhetoric, it is a recurrent question of modern scholarship how far it was anticipated by earlier authors, most eminently by Aristotle.

In this paper I shall try to tackle two problems. First, I am going to take a look at the relevant passages of the Rhetoric, in order to see to what extent and in which ways Aristotle makes use of issues similar to the staseis. Then I turn to the question of what function they have within his theory of rhetoric.

If we look at the Rhetoric from the perspective of the history of stasis theories, we may list the occurrences of the staseis we know from later treatises (as it is usually done since Cope’s 1867 commentary) or compare our reconstruction of Aristotle’s on the issues to later systems (which was done by Braet 1999). Yet what seems much more important for a historical investigation is trying to find the reasons for the differences. It needs to be examined – as much as the scarcity of sources allows – how and why the staseis were pulled together into a system within rhetoric, and what are the theoretical considerations underlying to the different systems. I hope that by scrutinising the function of and the links between at least some of the issues as they appear in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, this paper can contribute to making a firm ground for this kind of research.

Key words: rhetoric, legal interpretation, issues, stasis, Aristotle

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Patrycja Kupś University of Łódź [email protected]

Description Logics based ontologies as a tool in argument evaluation

The aim of this paper is to investigate if knowledge representation systems, such as Description Logics can be a useful tool in natural language argument assessment, focusing especially on equivocation fallacy treatments. To achieve this goal two issues need to be addressed:

First, what parts of the DL system are beyond the scope of argumentation? DLs are systems devised for Artificial , in order to create terminological knowledge bases (named ontologies) in which a given AI can operate. Exact and concise, these ontologies can be constructed upon practical reasoning occurrences to expose their flaws. To establish this, a model of Argument-Based (ABO) needs to be developed, with all its key features and parts.

Secondly, a way of transferring a real-life argument into the ABO must be formulated. One of the main vulnerabilities of formal approaches to practical reasoning is the fact that they rely on the form of the argument, therefore plenty of information is lost in the process of translation. Though DLs are formal systems, this problem can be avoided. Argumentation consist of not only logical moves, but also of rhetorical devices, wordplays, and underlying interlocutor beliefs (or preferred values) and all given information of these types can be (and preferably should be) reflected in the given ABO.

Finally, some examples of arguments will be put into ABO to check the potential of this tool. This last part is aimed to verify how the ontology consistency reacts accordingly to the strength of the argument given. This shows flexibility (or its lack) of the ABO system towards vagueness or ambiguity of the natural language argumentation.

Key words: description logic, argumentation, knowledge representation system, practical reasoning, argument evaluation

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Tomáš Ondráček Masaryk University, Czech Republic [email protected]

Forms of denial strategy in organization’s reactions to crises

Denial is one of the possible strategies how organizations might react to crises. It is usually seen as lying at the end of a continuum of possible reactions to crises and opposite to an apology. Therefore, if an apology is defined by acknowledgment of guilt, denial is defined as an explicit declaration of rejection of guilt or responsibility (Kim et al. 2004). If an apology is seen as accommodative, denial is taken as a defensive response strategy (Coombs 1998).

Although some differentiation of denials strategy had been already made (cf. Bennoit 1997), it seems that more precise criteria are needed to provide a better understanding of possible forms of denial. Denial can be in a direct form if there is a direct connection between support for and statement of denial, or in an indirect form, if there is a middle link between support for and statement of denial. Denial can also be general if the denial concerns the entire crises, or partial if denial concerns only parts of crises, personal if a denial is connected to a concrete member of organizations, or impersonal, if a denial is connected to an organization as an actor, and possibly some others. Thus, the goal of this paper is to provide a way to distinguish better different forms of denial.

The Speech Act Theory and Toulmin (2003) approach will be used to achieve this goal. Especially Toulmin’s notion of logical types. Logical type, although not well-defined in Toulmin work itself (van Eemeren et al. 2014), is the set of ways in which it is legitimate to operate with it in the given context (cf. Ryle 2009: s. x) or simply logical types defines what process should be used to established proper use of the object of language.

Key words: denial, Toulmin theory, Speech Act Theory, crises management, apologia, logical types

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Brian Plüss Katarzyna Budzyńska University of Dundee, UK University of Dundee, UK [email protected] Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland Annette Hautli-Janisz Chris Reed University of Konstanz, Germany University of Dundee, UK

Implicit logos, implicit ethos: inference anchoring theory with conventional implicatures

Argumentation in naturally-occurring communication is often implicit, without speakers necessarily asserting all relevant information explicitly. Conventional implicatures (CIs) allow us to open up the analysis of dialogue to implicated information, uncovering enthymematic supports and attacks.

Example (1) showcases logos and ethos structures triggered by CIs. In (1a), through the adverb ‘luckily’ Alice conventionally implicates that Willie winning the tournament is positive. Bob, in (1b), attacks this aspect: not that Willie won the tournament, but that his winning is positive. Also, with ‘realistically’ in (1b), Bob conventionally implicates that Alice is not looking at the situation realistically. This is an implicated attack on Alice’s ethos.

We analyse these structures by incorporating CIs in Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT), a theoretical scaffolding to systematically identify inferential and ethos structures in natural dialogue. The logical structure is “anchored” in the dialogical structure via illocutionary connections. The first enthymematic structure is exposed by unpacking the contribution of ‘luckily’: in (1a), that Willie’s winning is positive, which is attacked by the proposition of (1b). The enthymematic ethos attack is between the implicated content and Alice’s positive ethos to conventionally implicate that winning is positive, which in turn is linked (and affects negatively) her implication that Willie’s winning the tournament is positive.

In this talk, we will present further examples from public debates in which participants’ supports and attacks on ethos and logos happen via conventional implicatures. We will also discuss how CIs equip IAT with an empirically-motivated means to process enthymematic supports and attacks in natural language argumentation.

Key words: ethos, logos, argumentation, conventional implicatures, inference anchoring theory

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Mariusz Urbański & Paweł Łupkowski Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland {Mariusz.Urbanski, Pawel.Lupkowski}@amu.edu.pl

Cooperative multi-agent problem solving from an interrogative perspective: questioning agendas and informant’s credibility

In this talk we address the issue of how to model the influence of informant’s credibility on the obtained questioning results in a cooperative multi-agent environment. We are interested in this problem in the context of problem solving based on information retrieval from distributed sources with different levels of credibility, or informational trust. We address intuitions similar to the ones presented by Pardo and Godo (2018) , that is, how a problem solving may be planned and executed in a multiagent environment with the clear distinction of common knowledge needed for achieving common goal and private knowledge of agents which need not to be revealed.

Our formal framework is Inferential Erotetic Logic of Wiśniewski (1995, 2013), with its epistemic interpretation presented by Peliš (2016). This logic focuses on inferences whose premises and/or conclusion are questions (erotetic inferences). The epistemic component allows for defining such concepts as individual and group question as well as group and common knowledge. In particular, we employ the concept of erotetic search scenario for modelling questioning agendas, extended with the blackboard architecture ?, in order to account for multi- agent interaction.

In the proposed framework we are able to model a situation where a group of agents solves a complex problem, expressed by a certain initial question, in the cooperative manner. The question is decomposed into simpler auxiliary ones, which in turn are distributed among the group members. Answers delivered are then assembled into an answer to the initial question, taking into account different informants’ credibilities, allowing for stratification of of information, obtained from different sources.

Key words: problem-solving, logic of questions, informant’s credibility, questioning agenda

24

Jean H.M. Wagemans University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands [email protected]

A theoretical rationale for distinguishing four basic argument forms

The Periodic Table of Arguments is a recently developed classification of arguments aimed at integrating the dialectical accounts of ‘argument schemes’ and ‘fallacies’ as well as the rhetorical accounts of ‘logical’, ‘ethotic’, and ‘pathetic’ means of persuasion into a comprehensive whole. Its theoretical framework consists of three independent partial characterizations of arguments, namely as (1) a first-order or second-order argument, (2) a predicate or argument, and (3) a specific combination of types of statements (Wagemans, 2016).

When taken together, these partial characterizations constitute a factorial typology of arguments that is used as a tool for reformulating the traditional accounts of argument as well as for systematically comparing their methods of classification. While the effectiveness of the Periodic Table of Arguments for these purposes gives some prima facie plausibility to the relevance of the three partial characterizations that constitute its framework, a theoretical rationale for making the distinctions involved is still lacking.

This paper is aimed at providing such a rationale for the distinctions involved in the first two characterizations of arguments, i.e., the distinction between first-order and second-order arguments and that between predicate and subject arguments. The paper starts with a survey of philosophical definitions of argument. What follows is a formulation of a requirement regarding the linguistic structure of the conclusion and the premise of an argument – the ‘law of the common term’ – and of a pragmatic insight about the way in which statements are expressed in language – as ‘propositions’ or ‘assertions’. It is then shown how these philosophical, linguistic, and pragmatic assumptions yield four basic argument forms, and it is elucidated how arguments that instantiate these forms are visually represented in the Periodic Table of Arguments.

Key words: argument classification, argument form, assertion, law of the common term, Periodic Table of Arguments, proposition, types of argument

25

General Session

Edgar Andrade-Lotero Universidad del Rosario, Colombia [email protected] Julián Ortiz-Duque Universidad Nacional, Colombia [email protected]

There is a division of linguistic labor

Hilary Putnam, in his “The meaning of ‘Meaning’,” characterizes the division of linguistic labor (DLL) as a division between experts and laymen with respect to their ability to reliably recognize a term’s extension. Some critics claim that this division is not, properly speaking, a linguistic one. Using the very ideas that Putnam presupposes in his Twin Earth argument, they argue that every speaker that acquires a term already possesses something that allows them to fix its reference, and thus conclude that the division between experts and laymen is but a mundane division of the task of reliably recognizing the term’s extension.

Even though we believe that this criticism holds water when it comes to DLL so characterized, we believe that both Putnam’s characterization and this criticism rest on a concept of linguistic understanding that makes it unrecognizable as what one would expect it to be: speakers who understand a term should have an idea of what they are talking about. We argue that, since the world cannot do the work that these views assume from it, their concept is an inert binary relation between a term and a class of objects, and not anything that resembles a human ability. Thus, the linguistic labor and its division must be characterized in a different way.

To this effect, we offer a rough presentation of an alternative characterization, in which the linguistic labor consists in effectively communicating in a concrete situation. The gist of the division consists in a layman’s, a speaker who incompletely understands a term, bring able to successfully use it by borrowing an expert’s comprehension thereof. We bring our exposition to a close with a presentation of four schematic situations in which the relationship between layman and expert is more and more indirect.

Key words: semantic externalism, linguistic understanding, communication, language use, object understanding, natural kind, division of labor

26

Filippo Batisti Ca' Foscari University, Venice, Italy [email protected]

Linguistic relativity and non-standard accounts of cognition

To quote Zlatev and Blomberg (2015), it is now widely acknowledged that language may indeed influence thought – but do different languages exert their influence in diverse ways? This question is usually dubbed ‘linguistic relativity’. In the last 25 years, Lucy’s (1992) methodological revolution has given new life to the study of the correlation of linguistic diversity with cognitive diversity, and since then empirical research has sprouted, testing many domains, and giving results that mostly encouraged the relativistic hypothesis.

However, this paradigm is ‘based squarely on the cognitivist interpretation’ of the , (Bohnemeyer 2002). In fact, while the Whorfian Renaissance took place, new models of how human cognition works appeared: even if their claims do not coincide, the label ‘4E (Embodied, Embedded, Extended, Enactive) Cognition’ gathers some recent trends in psychology and which all share criticism towards the disembodied, computationalist, representationalist account of the mind in cognitivism.

But what happens to the study of the influence of languages on cognition if the model of cognition (quite radically) changes? Is it possible to construe an ‘embodied relativity’, for instance, and operationalize it? Take the case of enactivism, as proposed by Hutto and colleagues. Their ‘radical’ theory strongly claims that human cognition lacks internal mental representations, which are the keystone of the traditional account of linguistic relativity. However, it must be said that enactivism has been historically inadequate in its treatment of the linguistic phenomena, losing its radicality about representationalism when it comes to language (Harvey 2015). Thus, many challenges are raised when trying to update the terms of the relativity problem: the very term ‘representation’ has many meanings in different contexts, so caution is recommended when comparing the usage of the notion in different fields.

Key words: language and thought, linguistic relativity, enactivism, 4E cognition, representationalism

27

André Bazzoni LOGOS, University of Barcelona, Spain [email protected]

Naive rigidity

In this talk I will revisit some of the main topics in Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1980), with special emphasis on the rigidity thesis about the semantics of proper names, and its connections (or disconnections) with counterfactual thinking, as well as with metaphysical issues such as and the necessity of . Two notions of rigidity will be distinguished, one which I call ‘naive rigidity’ which is intuitive and neutral enough with respect to metaphysical commitments; and another which will be labelled ‘K-rigidity’, and which is (I will argue) the one that is actually operative in Kripke’s work—at the very least, it is the one (and not naive rigidity) that gives room to all the topics that follow the rationale surrounding the rigidity thesis and the criticisms to descriptivist theories—and the one that is metaphysically loaded. In the discussion, I will suggest that what makes Kripke depart from naive rigidity is the violation of an important methodological principle that he himself literally states in his rejection of a certain way of dealing with the philosophical notion of possible worlds—he thus writes: “That is not the way we ordinarily think of counterfactual situations” (op.cit.; p. 44). I will turn this statement on him, and argue that the type of restrictions that K-rigidity imposes on our cognitive mechanism of ‘transposing’ objects across worlds and, relatedly, on the use of proper names, is actually in fundamental conflict with “the way we ordinarily think of counterfactual situations”.

Key words: proper names; rigid designation; necessity; counterfactual reasoning; essentialism; identity

28

Marcin Będkowski University of Warsaw [email protected]

Twardowski and Ajdukiewicz on content and meaning

One of the key achievements of Kazimierz Twardowski was the introduction of the division into content and object of presentation (1894). This division was important not only within Twardowski’s theory of the mind but also formed the basis of his semiotic and methodological views (1901). Twardowski described the relation between the content of a presentation and the meaning of a linguistic expression but his approach to this issue – consisting in the simple identification of contents of presentations with meanings – was criticized by Jan Łukasiewicz (1906, 1907).

Twardowski, as he admitted, modified his views under the influence of anti-psychological criticism of Łukasiewicz (he took into account „the ideal of Bedeutung”) but he did not completely renounce his original psychological convictions. It seems, however, that it was Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz who reconciled Twardowski’s psychological approach with Łukasiewicz’s antipsychological approach.

Ajdukiewicz (1934) introduced a number of terminological distinctions, including: psychological meaning, linguistic meaning, connotation, the content of a name, the content of a concept, full content, characteristic content, constitutive content, pleonastic content etc. He resigned from many of these categories in his later papers (e.g. textbooks of logic). It seems that in (1934) he wanted to present an account of the relationship between content and meaning which could be treated as a fully grounded and precise development of Twardowski’s own views.

In my talk I intend to present Twardowski’s concept and its shortcomings in the light of Łukasiewicz’s criticism. Then I would like to reconstruct Ajdukiewicz’s conceptual apparatus and indicate how it reconciles Twardowski’s psychological approach and Łukasiewicz’s antipsychological one. Finally, I will present the implications of Ajdukiewicz’s ideas for the method of analysis of concepts developed in the Lvov-Warsaw School.

Key words: content, meaning, semiotics, analysis, anti-psychologism

29

Krystian Bogucki University of Warsaw, Poland [email protected]

Was the context principle the basis of Frege’s philosophy after 1891?

Gottlob Frege in The Foundation of Arithmetic claimed that we should ‘never never (...) ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition’. He saw this formula as one of the three fundamental principles of his logico-mathematical endeavour and he reiterated it at least three in later parts of The Foundation … Frege published Function and Object in 1891 and On Sense and Reference in 1892. In these essays he introduced the distinction between the reference of a proper names (i.e. the object it denotes (bedeuten)) and its sense (i.e. the mode of presentation of the object). Introduction of the distinction gave rise to a puzzle concerning the context principle. Does the context principle pertain to the reference or the sense of an expression? In "On Concept and Object" Frege says that what he called 'possible content of judgment' in Begriffsschrift combined what he now designates as 'thought' (sense of a sentence) and truth-value (its reference or meaning). Furthermore, the context principle was never reformulated by Frege in his later works. Did he still hold it?

It seems that the main place where we can find Frege's later version of the context principle are §§10, 29 and 31 of The Basic Laws of Arithemtic (Volume I) (Dummett 1991, Heck 1997, Linnebo 2004, 2008). Frege proves there that every expression of his language has a unique reference. In particular, the reference of terms for value-ranges can be determined by determining the values of the more primitive expressions for their referents as arguments, and thus, in effect, by determining the reference of more complex terms of which they are part. The aim of my talk is to evaluate the claim that Frege’s proof of referentiality (aforementioned above) can be regarded as a form of the context principle.

Key words: Frege, the context principle, proof of referentiality, meaning, Basic Law V

30

Annie Bosse University of Cambridge, UK [email protected]

Denying generics

I’m going to argue that denials of generics are ambiguous. If I assert “Bus drivers are grumpy” and you deny this, your denial might be taken to mean one of two things: First, that you believe that it is not the case that bus drivers are grumpy, or, second, that you believe that bus drivers are not grumpy. The first belief can be true without the second being true. The ambiguity arises because the negation operator can take narrow or wide scope. I’ll discuss whether the ambiguity I describe is a case of semantic or pragmatic ambiguity, and argue in favour of the latter. My argument will be that contexts frequently underdetermine whether denials of generics take wide or narrow scope. I want to take this point further, and argue that this underdetermination of the operative meaning of the denial of a generic infects the assertibility conditions of generics. Because speakers don’t know when it would be appropriate to deny a generic, there is flexibility in when it is appropriate to assert it. I’m going to end by suggesting that this phenomenon can make generics uniquely useful, because they allow speakers to assert generalisations that they know not to be false, even though they may not know exactly in virtue of what they are true.

Key words: generics, denial, ambiguity, negation, context, assertability

31

Tadeusz Ciecierski University of Warsaw, Poland [email protected] Paweł Grabarczyk IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Utterances

In a recent paper Mark McCullagh has introduced the idea of a distributed utterance, that is utterances that are:

“(…) more than usually spread out in time, location or other contextual features, in such a way that makes a difference to their proper interpretation” (McCullagh, forthcoming).

The main goal of the paper is to analyze the notion of distributed utterance and the related concept of sensitivity to distribution. Firstly, we shall argue that it makes sense to generalize McCullagh’s idea (departing a bit from its original formulation) and treat all utterances as contextually distributed also (and even) if the distribution does not make a difference to their proper interpretation (we may call distributed utterances in the sense of McCullagh utterances sensitive to distribution and all other (distributed in our more general sense) utterances insensitive to distribution). This results in a potentially interesting of utterances that enables the treatment of contextual parameters as dimensions of a complex contextual space and utterances as objects located in that contextual space. Secondly, we shall analyze the notion of sensitivity to distribution in terms of two other concepts: that of a manner of of an utterance and deictic location of an utterance. Manner of existence of an utterance tells us how the particular utterance is distributed with respect to a particular contextual parameter or parameters. Deictic location of an utterance tells us how to relate this distribution to the circumstances of the utterance’s physical production. Roughly speaking, an utterance is sensitive to distribution if and only if either its manner of existence is diffused or its deictic location is remote. We shall close the paper by discussing how the generalized idea of distributed utterance applies to cases of remote utterances, narrative uses and fictional uses.

Key words: distributed utterances, contextual parameters, indexicals, demonstratives, contexts

32

Jonas Dagys Vilnius University, Lithuania [email protected]

Could anyone have been identical with Holmes? Rigidity and fiction once again

Arguments against descriptivist understanding of proper names, mostly due to Kripke’s published work, have turned directly referential theory of names into predominant view on names of actual individuals. However, already at first sight the theory seemed much less intuitive when applied to the names of individuals in fiction. One of the least palpable implications of Kripke’s insistence that names for fictional (i.e. non-actual) individuals are just as rigid designators, and the one that has become the focus of criticism, is captured by his claim that “granted that there is no Sherlock Holmes, one cannot say of any possible person that he would have been Sherlock Holmes, had he existed” (Kripke 1980: 158). First, I would like to discuss the possible interpretations and misinterpretations of the above statement, that rest on how the notion of “possible world” and modalities are understood (e.g. whether it follows that Holmes is an impossible individual, etc.). Having done that, I would like review and discuss two available strategies of arguing in favour of Kripke’s view: One based on available modifications of the modal accessibility relation, attempting to render fictional worlds inaccessible, and thus in some sense impossible. And the other strategy, based on the idea of indeterminacy of reference of fictional names. I would conclude by considering whether the case of fictional names could be generalized to cover all cases of reference to non-actual possibilia.

Key words: , Sherlock Holmes, fictional names, rigidity, non-actual possibilia

33

Matej Drobnak University of Hradec Králové [email protected]

Context, content, and inferentialism

In this presentation, I try to show how the inferential specification of meaning, especially with regard to the distinction between the inferential potential and the inferential significance, can be used to explain several phenomena related to natural languages. According to normative inferentialists, the meaning of a sentence can be explicated as a set of ordered pairs that consist of sets of collateral premises and sentences that can be inferred from the analysed sentence and those sets of collateral premises. The content of an utterance can be specified as the inferential significance of a sentence – understood as a subset of the inferential potential that is relevant within a particular context.

Such a view on meaning opens up the way for a specific inferential view on semantic understanding. To understand the meaning of a sentence requires knowing tacitly the inferential potential, i.e. all the possible contextual values of the sentence. To understand the content of an utterance requires being able to single out an appropriate subset of the inferential potential (i.e. the inferential significance). I argue that the biggest advantage of the inferential view is that it can accommodate and explain cases of partial understanding.

As part of my presentation, I will try to show how the distinction between the inferential potential and the inferential significance could be used to explain cases of ambiguity, free pragmatic enrichment, and conversational implicatures.

34

Marta Dynel University of Łódź, Poland [email protected]

On bald-faced lies and bullshit

In this presentation, I will indicate the dire need to distinguish between academic notions and ordinary language users’ (metapragmatic) labels and understandings of what lying and other types of deception involve. Lay labels and understandings, it will be argued, lie at the heart of two vexing philosophical issues: a) the definitions of bullshit and b) the status of bald-faced lies, and hence the deceptionism vs non-deceptionism (Mahon 2015) divide among the philosophers of lying.

Bullshit (Frankfurt 1986[2002/2005]) is a peculiar and elusive form of deception, predicated on the speaker’s indifference to the (lack of) truth and misrepresentational intent. I will show that the different re-definitions put forward over the past years (e.g. Carson 2009, 2010, 2016; Fallis 2011, 2015; Wreen 2013; Stokke and Fallis 2016) bring bullshit ominously close to the folk understanding of the term in question (i.e. nonsense; cf. Cohen 2006), or conflate bullshit with other communicative phenomena, such as (non)deceptive evasions (Galasiński 2000) or inadvertent misleading.

Bald-faced lies (Sorensen 2007) are based on a belief shared by the speaker and the hearer(s) that the speaker is making a statement which all participants believe to be false so that the rationale for the untruthfulness should be sought. “Non-deceptionists” (Carson 2006, 2010; Fallis 2009, 2010, 2012; Sorensen 2007, 2010; Saul 2012; Stokke 2013a, 2013b) thus claim that bald-faced lies corroborate that the intent to deceive the hearer is not a definitional component of lying, and thus that not all lying qualifies as deception. The deceptionist vs non- deceptionist discussion, as will be argued, seems to have arisen from elevating the folk label “bald-faced lie” to the status of a technical label.

Key words: bald-faced lie, bullshit, deception

35

Juliana Faccio Lima University of Miami, USA [email protected]

Frege’s Puzzle and multiple iterations of attitude verbs

“Clark Kent: *sets glasses on kitchen table* Lois Lane: Where did our table go?” Source: Twitter

Millians, notoriously, have problems in explaining how (1) ‘Lois believes that Superman flies’ seems true and (2) ‘Lois believes that Clark Kent flies’ seems false. A common line of explanation is to argue that (i) because Lois does not know Superman and Clark Kent are the same person, she has different modes of presentation of Superman, and (ii) invoke pragmatic principles to relate different modes of presentation with (1) and (2). Schiffer (1987) argues this line of explanation is incorrect for two reasons: first, no pragmatic principles can play the role Millians want they to; second, even if there are, they would fall short of explaining the following case. Assuming that Jonathan knows about Superman’s secret identity and Lois’s ignorance thereof, (3) ‘Jonathan knows that Lois believes that Superman flies’ seems true and (4) ‘Jonathan knows that Lois believes that Clark Kent flies’ seems false. However, Schiffer argues, Millians have no grounds to say that Jonathan has different modes of presentation because, unlike Lois, he knows Superman is Clark Kent.

Here I offer an alternative Millian account that I believe addresses Schiffer’s objections. First, I argue that Jonathan can think of Superman in different ways, even knowing about his secret identity, because he can adopt Lois’s viewpoint. And given that he knows about her ignorance, it only makes sense for him to think of Superman in different ways when entertaining thoughts about her mental life. Second, I propose a novel Millian account of the truth-conditions of belief sentences, where we incorporate the relevance of modes of presentation as evaluative parameters together with worlds. In this framework, (3) and (4) – and (1) and (2) – not only seem but they are true and false, respectively, but there is no contradiction because they get their truth-value indifferent parameters.

Key words: Frege’s Puzzle, Millianism, proper names, multiple iteration of attitude verbs, Mate’s Problem, belief ascription

36

Sarah Fisher University of Reading, UK [email protected]

Reframing implicatures

Using the case study of linguistic ‘framing effects’, I assess a foundational question concerning the proper scope of pragmatics. Framing effects arise when logically equivalent expressions generate systematically different responses in hearers (even though the wider context is held constant). For example, a basketball player is typically judged more valuable to a team when his performance is described using (1) rather than (2).

(1) The player made 60% of his shots. (2) The player missed 40% of his shots.

The psychological literature contains several competing explanations of such phenomena. Of these, I find the ‘information leakage account’ particularly promising. According to this account, explicit predication (of ‘made…his shots’, or ‘missed…his shots’) signals relative abundance or representativeness of the corresponding attribute (making or missing shots, respectively).

I propose that utterances of (1) and (2) conversationally implicate the ‘leaked’ information, and do so wherever that information is not cancelled (either explicitly or implicitly). However, I argue that the contents of the implicatures cannot be calculated on the basis of Grice’s Cooperative Principle and conversational maxims. The evidence from framing thus provides further support to Levinson, Davis and Lepore and Stone, who deny that all implicatures are calculable in Grice’s sense. However, I depart from these philosophers in arguing that the information conveyed remains distinctively pragmatic. Although the contents themselves may not be calculable, their presence and strength on any given occasion do depend on Grice’s conversational principles. This fundamentally distinguishes them from the non-cancellable semantic meanings linguistically encoded by the sentences.

Key words: framing effects, semantics, pragmatics, conversational implicature, calculability, cancellability

37

Grzegorz Gaszczyk University of Groningen, The Netherlands [email protected]

The norm and aim of the speech act of explanation

The practice of explanation is an important part of our communication yet it has not received proper recognition. Available accounts of explanation state that a speaker must know that p to explain something (Turri 2015) or that an explanation must generate knowledge in the audience (Achinstein 1983). Such accounts, I argue, incorrectly exclude many cases of bona fide explanations. According to my proposal, one explains something when one understands it, but one does not need to believe it or say something true (see Elgin 2017).

I follow the normative account of speech acts (see Williamson 1996, Goldberg 2015, García- Carpintero 2018, Kelp 2018). I propose a clear distinction between the norm and aim of explanation which provides a delineation into illocutionary and perlocutionary levels, respectively (see Kissine 2013).

I will defend the following norm of explanation (UN): (UN) One performs a felicitous act of explanation p only if one: 1. understands p, 2. transfers relevant understanding in the context at hand in a way comprehensible to one's audience, 3. does (2) by means of an act or acts of presenting.

The aim of explanation, I argue, is to transfer understanding. In normal conditions, this is satisfied when a speaker performs an adequate presentation of the relevant information which can be comprehended.

UN captures all cases of our linguistic practice of explanation: simple and complex explanations (like simplifications and models used in sciences). Further, UN allows for a felicitous explanation of something which we know is false (like conspiracy theories, or fictional stories). It also differentiates proper explanations from lies.

Key words: assertion, explanation, understanding, speech acts

38

Christopher Genovesi & Eros Corazza Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada [email protected] [email protected]

On anaphora and the fictional use of metaphors in argument position

In their paper On the metaphoric use of (fictional) proper names, Corazza and Genovesi (2018) explored what speakers do when they utter a fictional name to refer to actual persons. The example given is “Odysseus returned home” referring to their friend Bill, who had returned after a long journey. In so doing, speakers produce a metaphorical utterance where properties of Odysseus are mapped onto the person to which the speaker means to refer. That is to say, the name “Odysseus” ceases to be a proper name, and instead becomes something akin to a referential use of descriptions à la Donnellan. In the following paper, we connect the previous work with uses of anaphora. With fictional proper names in mind, we are interested in cases where speakers anaphorically refer to the actual referent as well as in those cases where speakers can anaphorically extend their metaphors. For example, we are interested in utterances of the sort “Odysseus1 returned home…he1 was hungry/the/that brave soldier1 was hungry” (where “Odysseus” refers to our friend Bill). Such sentences leave us wondering how the anaphoric pronoun or description simultaneously carries the content from the fictional subject, and refers to Bill. On a cursory analysis, anaphora forces the properties attributed to the actual referent (e.g., Bill) into the background, like pragmatic presuppositions. In the cases of anaphoric demonstratives and definite descriptions, the speaker emphasizes, or makes salient the further implications shared between the fictional character (e.g., Odysseus) and the actual referent (e.g., Bill; and that Bill, like Odysseus, is brave) via transfer.

Key words: metaphor, fictional names, attributive anaphora, demonstrative anaphora, presupposition, property transfer, Donnellan

39

Joan Gimeno-Simó University of Valencia, Spain [email protected]

Monsters and the two versions of compositionality

David Kaplan (1989) famously argued that hyperintensional operators – and, more concretely, operators on context, which he dubbed ‘monsters’ – could not be added to English. A main reason for this prohibition is that such operators would prevent sentences from being compositional at the level of assertoric content, since they operate on character (hyperintension), i.e., their semantic value is not a function of content (intension) (Westerståhl 2012, Rabern 2012, Rabern & Ball 2017, McCullagh 2017).

But there are actually two versions of compositionality: the functional and the substitutional versions of the principle (Carnap 1947, Pagin & Westerståhl 2010). Under the assumption that all subexpressions of meaningful expressions are in turn meaningful, these two are equivalent. I shall argue that it is possible to develop a syntactic argument to show that, under certain assumptions about natural language, certain monsters are actually compatible with content- compositionality in the substitutional version. As a paradigmatic case, I shall use Rabern’s (2012, 2013) argument that lambda abstractors, and indeed all variable binders, are monsters. I intend to show that adding variable binders to our language does not entail a failure of compositionality in the substitutional version. This is so because, in natural language, bound and free pronouns (variables) are not the same lexical item: besides several restrictions on movement, there is also an important principle of semantics, Feature Transmission Under Binding (Heim 2001; renamed Feature Deletion Under Binding by von Stechow 2003), which states that bound pronouns, at the semantic level, do not retain the φ-features of the operators that bind them, even if they are phonologically realized as if they had them. So syntax prevents sentences containing lambda binders from ever undergoing a failure of compositionality in the substitutional version, simply because it will in fact never happen that two things with the same content embed differently.

Key words: compositionality, variables, pronouns, monsters, binding, syntax

40

Daniela Glavaničová Comenius University in Bratislava & Slovak Academy of Sciences [email protected]

Fictional names are not proper names

This talk focuses on Predelliʼs ʻNo-Name hypothesisʼ presented in the last chapter of his 2017 book ʻProper Names: A Millian Accountʼ. This hypothesis suggests that fictional names are not proper names. The view echoes Currieʼs earlier suggestion not to start by assuming that fictional names are genuine proper names. Yet Predelliʼs hypothesis seems to be stronger than Currieʼs in two aspects, and weaker in one aspect. First, Currie argues against taking ʻfictional names are proper namesʼ as a default position; Predelli takes a stance that fictional names are not proper names. In this respect, Predelliʼs position is stronger. Secondly, it seems that Currie would prefer the view that not all fictional names are proper names; Predelli seems to prefer the view that no fictional name is a proper name, comparing fictional names and fictional coins in his pocket. Again, Predelliʼs position is stronger in this respect. Finally, Predelli makes stronger presuppositions about proper names and about fictional names, thereby making his hypothesis less general in comparison to Currieʼs. In the present talk, I will defend the claim that at least some fictional names are not proper names. Currieʼs and Predelliʼs motivations are summarized and strengthened. The thesis that no fictional name is a proper name can be defended as soon as the option that some fictional names name real people is not left open.

Key words: Currie, fictional names, Millianism, Predelli, proper names, role realism

41

Berta Grimau Czech Academy of Sciences [email protected]

Fuzzy semantics for graded adjectives

After decades of being considered unsuitable, the fuzzy approach to vagueness was reexamined and vindicated in Smith (2009) in the form of fuzzy plurivaluationism. Roughly speaking, this approach takes, instead of a single fuzzy model, a set of various fuzzy models for the fuzzy semantics of a vague predicate. While this appears to have revived the interest in fuzzy logic as a tool for vagueness to some extent, its potential in formal semantics remains virtually unexplored. My aim in this talk is to argue for and develop in some detail the application of fuzzy plurivaluationism in the semantics of graded adjectives.

Firstly, by way of a rationale, I briefly argue that the fuzzy approach offers a desirable treatment of the Sorites Paradox. Secondly, I respond to some general objections typically raised against it – the artificial precision objection and that of the counterintuitive results of a degree- functional approach to the logical connectives. If successful, my answers show, against common belief, that the prospects of fuzzy accounts of vagueness are not doomed from the start. Finally, I argue that fuzzy logics give us the means to analyse various kinds of graded adjectives and the constructions where they appear. First, with them we can give models not only for vague adjectives, but also for absolute graded adjectives (those which display degrees of applicability, but have sharp boundaries). Second, fuzzy semantics avoids some of the problems of the mainstream approach to graded adjectives – the degree-based approach stemming from Cresswell (1977) and developed in Kennedy (1999). For instance, it makes the analysis of the positive unmarked form simpler. Finally, fuzzy semantics can be used to analyse comparative statements successfully. In particular, I argue that two alleged problems for fuzzy semantics in relation to these (i.e. the problem of comparative trichotomy and that of non- borderline comparatives) pose no real threat.

Key words: fuzzy logic, graded adjectives, Sorites Paradox, fuzzy plurivaluationism, vagueness, absolute graded adjectives

42

Maria Grzelikowska Independent scholar [email protected]

Critique of elementary proposition

The main theme of the talk is `s conception of elementary proposition. Elementary proposition is one of central concepts of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus - his first, most recognizable and probably most important work. Not only is elementary proposition according to Tractatus the simplest element of language, but from the reader`s perspective it is also the key to interpretation of the whole Tractatus. Despite the fact that elementary proposition is such a crucial part of Tractatus` content it was not precisely if ever defined on the book`s pages. Additionally the idea of elementary proposition was years after the publication of Tractatus, called into question by Ludwig Wittgenstein himself. The purpose of my talk is to show that if we try to actually grasp the conception of elementary proposition relying solely on the information provided by Tractatus’ theses, while making an assumption that they actually hold, we find out that the conditions elementary proposition is supposed to fulfill seem to make its actual existence impossible in the world emerging from Tractatus`. In order to do that I will point out inconsistencies in the theses that concern concepts of logical possibility and probability. I will also apply Michel Heidelberger`s view on an actual meaning of elementary proposition concept and its origins, which he finds in early theories of probability. Probabilistic interpretation of Tractatus will be used in the discussion in opposition to, for example, an interpretation made by Bogusław Wolniewicz. I will accent especially his definition of independence, which is crucial to both - the concept of elementary proposition and Tractatus as a whole – and I will explain why that definition does not seem right.

Key words: analytic philosophy, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, elementary proposition, Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosophy of language, logical possibility, Wittgenstein on probability

43

Andrea Guardo University of Milan, Italy [email protected]

The privilege problem for semantic dispositionalism

Semantic dispositionalism is the view that meaning can be analyzed in dispositional terms. Following Kripke (1981), its enemies focus on three arguments: the finitude argument (F), the mistake argument (M), and the normativity argument. I describe a fourth anti-dispositionalist argument, which I dub "the privilege problem" (P).

The best way to introduce P is on the background of F and M, since while F says that dispositionalism fails because we don't have enough dispositions and M says that it fails because we have the wrong dispositions, P claims that dispositionalism fails because we have too many dispositions. In particular, my strategy will be to first describe a careful implementation, due to Warren (forthcoming), of the standard way to deal with M and then show how P naturally arises from a gap in that answer. For simplicity's sake, I'll focus on the case of "+".

The dispositionalists' standard approach to M has two steps. Dispositionalists start by arguing that there's a kind of dispositions k such that our dispositionsk track addition; then, they put forward a dispositional analysis according to which the meaning of "+" depends only on our dispositionsk. Warren develops this strategy by arguing that the right dispositionsk are our "general dispositions to stably give a certain response in normal conditions".

However, dispositionalists themselves grant that there are kinds of dispositions j such that our dispositionsj don't track addition. Of course, they also assure us that this doesn't matter, since the meaning of "+" depends only on our dispositionsk. But why should we privilege our dispositionsk over all the other dispositions of ours? P is the problem of answering this question.

I discuss four strategies to deal with P: the answer I'm disposedk to give is privileged because of something we do, the answer I'm disposedk to give is privileged because it's the right answer, the answer I'm disposedk to give is privileged because it's the answer I'd give in ideal conditions, and the answer I'm disposedk to give is privileged because it's the answer I'd give in standard conditions.

Key words: Kripkenstein, rule-following, meaning, dispositions, mistake argument

44

Leopold Hess Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands [email protected]

“I never knew no godfather.” Bald-faced lies, regular lies and assertions

A contested issue in the debate over the definition of lying is the status of so-called “bald-faced lies” (BFL), i.e. deliberately false statements made in a context in which everyone knows they are false. Most authors accept that BFLs are lies, which would entail that a definition of lying should not include an “intent to deceive” clause. Some however, e.g. Meibauer 2014, Dynel 2011 and Keiser 2015 have argued that BFLs are not lies in a relevant sense. Furthermore, Meibauer and Keiser argue that BFLs are not assertions. Recently the topic was addressed by Stokke 2018, who suggests three arguments to the effect that BFLs are assertions (and therefore proper lies): they involve no deliberate signals of falsity or non-seriousness, they do involve commitment to the statement made and they may make the speaker liable to demands for evidence.

I will refute Stokke’s arguments, and develop Keiser’s account to show that BFLs are not assertions, but a different kind of speech act (or a move in a different kind of language game). I will proceed by showing that none of the main accounts of assertion (based on the taxonomy in MacFarlane 2012) can fully account for BFLs. Moreover, it appears that best examples of BFLs come from contexts in which the speaker is under duress – if the condition of duress is removed, BFLs are not easily distinguishable from “bullshit”, which is typically considered to be different than lying. However, the conclusion drawn from the fact that BFLs are not assertions by Meibauer or Keiser – that BFLs are therefore not lies – seems too hasty, as pre- theoretical intuitions support very strongly their classification as proper lies. Accordingly, in conclusion I will discuss the possibilities of revising a definition of lying so that it captures whatever lying assertions and BFLs have in common.

Key words: lying, assertion, bald-faced lies, commitment, deception

45

Amir Horowitz The Open University of Israel [email protected]

Derived content, original content, and the practice of content ascription

There is a common and quite natural story about the intentionality of language (and of other non-mental things) and that of the mind. It consists of two parts. First, it is assumed that language does not have its intentionality (or meaning) by its own right, but rather, linguistic entities inherit, or derive, their intentionality from the intentionality of mental entities by virtue of some relation between them. The mind animates the (otherwise) dead letters of language. Most philosophers who believe in this part of the story maintain (following Grice) that it is some kind of intention on the speaker's part – e.g., an intention to produce in the hearer a belief with a certain content – that is supposed to do the trick and endow our words with content

In order to be a complete story of linguistic intentionality, this must be supplemented with a sub-story regarding the way in which the mind acquires its intentionality. On one approach, the intentionality of the mental (or some aspects thereof) is intrinsic – its having it does not depend on anything else; on another approach, the intentionality of the mental is acquired by virtue of some external (environmental) naturalistic relation. At any rate, on the common story, the mind's intentionality is, first, a real property of mental states; second, it is original intentionality, that is, non-derived intentionality. The of mental content enables it to bestow real meaning upon linguistic entities, that is, to (metaphysically) determine it.

In this talk, I will first argue that the very idea of the derivation of "real" content is untenable. My intention that the utterance I produce have some content cannot endow this utterance with this content any more than my intention that the table I produce have some content can. What cannot be transferred when unassisted by intention cannot be transferred when the subject thus intends it, or badly wants it to be transferred. To assume that content in itself can be transferred from entity to entity, as if it were a commodity or energy, is to assume mysterious emanation. So derived content can only be merely ascribed (unreal) content.

Second, in an intentional irrealistic framework, a sense can be given to the ideas of content derivation and of the mind as the source of all intentionality. Derived contents are ascribed in accordance with a scheme of ascriptions that systematically matches them to the contents of the "endowing" entities, so entities need not have real intentionality to play the "endowing" role. Further, the practice of content ascription may make the ascribed intentionality of entities of one kind depend upon the ascribed intentionality of entities of another kind while leaving the ascribed intentionality of this other kind independent of the ascribed intentionality of anything. So the mere practice of content ascription enables content derivation, semantic priority, and the mind's being the source of all intentionality, thus intentional irrealism makes room for all these. So endorsing these ideas need not tempt one to intentional realism.

Key words: real content, merely ascribed content, original content, derived content, content ascription, intentional realism, intentional irrealism

46

Antonina Jamrozik University of Warsaw [email protected]

How many compositionalities? The analysis of responses to Fodor and Lepore’s argument against Inferential Role Semantics.

In their paper “Why Meaning (Probably) Isn’t Inferential Role” (1991) Fodor and Lepore launched an attack on a branch of semantics called Inferential Role Semantics (hereafter IRS). Their claim is that it is impossible to reconcile the main tenant of IRS, namely that meanings of the expressions supervene on (or can be equalled with) the roles they can play in the inferences, with the principle of compositionality, which they take to be independently motivated. The proponent of IRS can only defend the compatibility of the two by appealing to the analytic/synthetic distinction, which is undesirable by all who find Quine’s arguments against such a distinction compelling.

Their paper has provoked a range of responses. In my paper I analyse three of them, put forward by Block (1993), Pagin (1997) and McCullagh (2003). I argue that despite the differences in their approaches to the topic, it is possible to draw a parallel between the ways in which they analyse the notion of compositionality. I claim that the distinctions they draw between different understandings of compositionality can be traced back to the distinction of the two levels of the description of the language. One level of description has to do with the formalisation of the semantic theory and the constraints that such an enterprise imposes on it; the other with the relevance of semantic theory to the psychological reality of language users and to the ontology that one wants to accept while creating such a theory.

By taking a closer look at how those two kinds of understanding of compositionality and the relations between them I mean to elucidate the distinction between the two levels of description of the language.

Key words: inferential role semantics, compositionality, semantic holism, inferences, learnability, systematicity

47

Bartosz Kaluziński Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland [email protected]

Constitutive rules and normativity of meaning

The thesis that “meaning is a normative notion” became influential due to the famous book Wittgenstein on rules and private language (1982) by Saul A. Kripke. Although that thesis is catchy and many philosophers support it (Boghossian 1989; Buleandra 2008; Brandom 1994; Ebbs 1997; McDowell 1984; Millar 2004; Peregrin 2012; Whiting 2007), it is not clear how it should be understood.

Usually, normativists about meaning assume that the meaning of a given linguistic expression produces pragmatic obligations as to how we ought to use that expression. They claim that following semantic norm:

(SN) t means F → ∀x (t applies correctly to x → x is f) produces pragmatic obligation:

(PN) S means F by t → ∀x (S ought to apply t to x → x is f) where t is a term, F is the phrase stating its meaning, x is a variable and f is a feature by virtue of which t relates to x and S is a speaker.

The abovementioned interpretation of the normativity of meaning thesis brought serious criticism (Bilgrami 1993; Glüer 1999; Hattiangadi 2007; Wikforss 2001; Boghossian 2005):

A. It has counterintuitive consequences when it comes to lying or using irony (we always ought to speak the truth; when we apply the term “horse” to cow in order to make an ironic statement we to not ascribe to that term its standard meaning). B. It is doubtful whether (SN) can produce (PN) “just like that”. Usually, anti-normativists claim that “correct” in (SN) can be used in both a normative and non-normative way, and they ask for an argument supporting the claim that in (SN) it is indeed used in a normative way.

In my presentation I intend to outline an alternative reading of the normativity of meaning thesis along the lines of constitutive normativity that will prevent these difficulties from arising.

Key words: normativity of meaning, constitutive normativity, pragmatic obligations, Kripke

48

Natalia Karczewska University of Warsaw [email protected]

Assertion and denial in relativism

Relativists (e.g. Lasersohn (2005), Kölbel (2004)) have argued that contextualism is unable to account for disagreement in dialogues like (1): (1) A: Rollercoasters are fun. B: No, rollercoasters are not fun.

According to the Contextualist, “fun” being a predicate of personal taste, has to have its content relativized to an individual (judge). In consequence, A and B are not in disagreement, because it is not the case that B rejects the content that A accepts.

The Relativist offers an account according to which, the perspective of a judge does not affect the semantic content. Instead, it is incorporated to the parameters of evaluation – there is one content, which A accepts (and asserts) and B rejects (and denies), (or: which is true for A and false for B) and consequently, A and B disagree.

The problem, however, is that the solution which makes it possible to account for disagreement in dialogues as (1) overgenerates. Consider (1), this time in a situation in which A implicitly means “fun for my daughter” and B: “fun for people with acrophobia”. Here, contextualism gives the right prediction: A and B do not disagree – they are talking past each other. Relativism, however, at first sight, is committed to saying that there is a certain content, viz. that rollercoasters are fun, such that A accepts (asserts) it and B rejects (denies), which means that (1) is a disagreement in the relativist sense. In his 2005 paper Lasersohn deals with the problem of asserting taste claims from an exocentric perspective and suggests that believing (and other propositional attitudes of this sort) is a 3-place relation holding between individuals, contents and contexts. In my talk, I argue that this solution is problematic and its implications may actually tip the scale in contextualism’s favor.

Key words: disagreement, contextualism, relativism, assertion, denial, acceptance, rejection

49

David Kashtan Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel [email protected]

Truth without paradox: On a neglected argument by Tarski

Tarski’s account of truth in his classic (1933) is perceived as a technically workable but philosophically inadequate reaction to the liar paradox. The main problem is its stratification of language into levels, which seems to many unintuitive. Alternative approaches seek to solve the paradox without stratification by revising the logic. However, no such revision has been shown to be satisfactory.

But Tarski’s stratification of language was not a reaction to the paradox. The argument usually attributed to Tarski is a diagonal paradox-based one (in §5 of (1933)). But the diagonal argument was only inserted after the text had gone to press. Tarski had other reasons for accepting stratification, which can be made into an explicit argument. This argument relies on Tarski’s particular method of defining satisfaction, which employs Frege’s device for converting inductive into explicit definitions. The device implies that the metalanguage must quantify over objects that are of a strictly higher order than what the object-language can quantify over. Stratification follows.

I present three versions of the neglected argument – the historical one, a modernized set- theoretic version, and a version adapted to modern natural language semantic theories. I compare them with the standard diagonal argument, and show that the standard argument is more general but less informative (being a reductio argument). The neglected argument yields deeper insight into the notion of expressive richness and the philosophical commitments of the concept of truth.

I conclude that the identification of the (formal) problem of truth with the problem of the liar paradox is mistaken, both historically and methodically. I also suggest some consequences for our conception of natural language.

Key words: Lvov-Warsaw school, Tarski, truth, semantics, liar paradox, logic, metaphilosophy

50

Filip Kawczyński University of Warsaw, Poland [email protected]

The explanatory value of metasemantics

In my paper, I argue against the view that meta-metasemantics diminishes the explanatory value of metasemantics.

In (2011) Sider develops the account according to which all metasemantic theories are vulnerable to indeterminacy of reference. Therefore, what is required to avoid indeterminacy is some superior instance — which Sider dubs meta-metasemantics — determining which interpretation of language is the right one.

In his recent book (2017) Simchen criticises Sider and argues that accepting meta- metasemantics leads to metasemantic theories being ‘incorporated into’ meta-metasemantics with the result that that their explanatory powers are diminished. Simchen justifies his view by analysing the explanatory value of sentences within pairs of the form: ’S’ and ’S is true’. He examines two cases: [1]when ’S’ is an empirical statement; [2] when ’S’ belongs to metasemantics. The conclusion he draws is that in [2] (contrary to [1]), sentences in the pair differ with respect to their explanatory value and thus metasemantics should not be incorporated into meta-metasemantics.

My argument against Simchen amounts to demonstrating that Simchen does not distinguish between two uncontroversial interpretations of the predicate ‘is true’ — the one we may call material or deflationary, and the other: formal or inflationary. Simchen commits a kind of fallacy of equivocation, since he uses the predicate as if the two above interpretations did not exist. As I argue, when these interpretations are taken into account, and in turn ‘is true’ is used in a consistent way, Simchen’s reasonings fail, and the result is that meta-metasemantics does not diminish the explanatory value of metasemantic theories.

Key words: explanatory value, indeterminacy, interpretationism, metametsemantics, metasemantics

51

Joanna Klimczyk IFiS PAN Warsaw, Poland [email protected]

A new account of the problem of disagreement about epistemic and deontic modality

On the standard interpretation, canonical (Kratzerian) contextualism about modals faces a challenge widely called ‘lost disagreement’ (LD).

A popular illustration of LD is given by BET (MacFarlane). When A in c1 utters ‘I ought to bet on Blue Blazer’, she affirms the proposition that in view of the evidence she has BB is more likely to win than any other horse. And when B in c1 denies what A says ‘No, you ought to bet on Exploder’, he affirms the proposition that in view of the evidence B has in c1, it is not the case that A ought to bet on BB because Exploder is more likely to win the race. But if A and B in c1 are justified in putting credence in the very proposition that is compatible with the evidence that each of them has, how can they be in a genuine disagreement?

My argumentative strategy is as follows: I admit that the canon is helpless about LD cases, but that is not a genuine problem for it. This is so because cases like BET are not interpreted by ordinary language users as we are told that they are. Ordinary language users think that BET does make room for a genuine disagreement, but finally the context invalidates it by selecting a single body of information that matters. Genuine disagreement, I stipulate, is a situation in which the right kind of context settles all that should be known in order to figure out what to do, yet speakers are justified in putting credence in incompatible epistemic or deontic propositions.

Contrary to the dominant view, I argue that the Kratzerian framework has theoretical resources to accommodate cases of genuine disagreement. To see this, what we need to do is to change the approach to the analysis of discourse modality. What went wrong in BET (MacFarlane), I suggest, was that the modality of the modals in the question expressed was qualified as either epistemic or deontic, whereas in fact it would be more accurately seen as expressing a particular type of discourse modality – epistemic in the service of practical reasoning. I sketch philosophical rudiments of semantics for this type of discourse modality, which I call context- framework contextualism.

Key words: Kratzer, modality, semantics, disagreement, contextualism

52

Markus Kortesmäki Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland [email protected]

On the relation between semantic contextualism and semantic normativism

Anandi Hattiangadi has claimed that the central arguments for semantic contextualism also provide good reasons for rejecting semantic normativism. Identifying an interesting logical relation between these two hotly debated topics could potentially reshape our understanding of the philosophical foundations of semantics and pragmatics. I argue, however, that Hattiangadi’s argument turns out have rather uninformative implications: either contextualism is incompatible with both normativism and anti-normativism or both contextualism and minimalism are incompatible with normativism.

Semantic normativists claim that the notion of semantic correctness is an intrinsically normative notion. Hattiangadi aims to show that any normativist interpretation of that notion is incompatible with the contextualist arguments. First, she discusses a suggestion that the normative notion of semantic correctness of an utterance of a sentence could be identified with the truth of the uttered sentence. I argue that this suggestion is incompatible with the contextualist arguments because Hattiangadi spells it out in terms of a minimalist notion of propositional content and that, for this reason, a corresponding anti-normativist suggestion is equally incompatible with the contextualist arguments.

Second, Hattiangadi discusses a normativist suggestion that the semantic correctness of an utterance of a sentence amounts to the truth of the expressed proposition. This suggestion, that she spells out in terms of a contextualist notion of propositional content, cannot, according to her, be a genuinely normativist suggestion: the contextualist claim that speakers’ communicative intentions partly determine the propositional content of at least some expressions implies that the propositional content of those expressions is only extrinsically normative, as it expresses a means to the end of fulfilling the communicative intention. I argue that if Hattiangadi’s argument is correct, then minimalism is also incompatible with normativism, insofar as communicative intentions partly determine the propositional content of at least some expressions according to minimalism as well.

Key words: normativity of meaning, semantic contextualism, semantic minimalism, propositional content, communicative intentions

53

Alexander Kremling Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany [email protected]

Why philosophy of language matters – even in medical ethics

Distinctions from philosophy of language and analytical action theory can play a crucial role for clarifying the meaning of key terms in medical ethics. I will show this by focussing on a topic from end-of-life care, the practice of palliative sedation.

Palliative sedation is a common medical measure in end-of-life care, legal in most countries, but still controversial. Part of the empirical and ethical dispute concerning palliative sedation is the problem of inconsistent data from empirical surveys (Schildmann et al. 2018, Schur et al. 2016) and heterogeneous definitions.

Philosophy comes into play because a uniform concept of palliative sedation, though necessary for guidance and research, couldn’t be established successfully. For this explanation and systematic solutions are required. Distinctions and procedures developed in philosophy of language seem necessary. Besides logical means of concept construction like definition or explication (Cordes and Siegwart 2018, Carnap 1928), confusion concerning the term “sedation” especially can be solved. Practitioners seem to confuse various possible meanings such as action, successful action, result of an action, process and result of a process (brought about by a medical action or not). Describing the differences between the various possible (mis)understandings requires sensitivity to speech that only philosophy of ordinary language can provide (Siegwart 1997). Clarifying the key term will contribute to applicable definitions and useful concepts and thus in the end better empirical research on an ethically controversial practice and better implementation of guidelines.

Key words: philosophy of language, action theory, medical ethics, end-of-life care, palliative sedation

54

Adam Królikowski Częstochowa, Poland [email protected]

Henryk Hiż – the last representative of the Lvov-Warsaw School

The following paper presents a biographical profile and the scientific research of Henryk Hiż (1917-2006) in philosophy of language and linguistics, particularly his investigations on transformational grammar and semantic theory of truth, called by him the aletheic semantic theory. In 1937-1939 he studied philosophy under the major philosophers of the Lvov-Warsaw School like Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Stanisław Leśniewski, Jan Łukasiewicz, Alfred Tarski, and Władysław Tatarkiewicz. After his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard University, defended under in 1948, he taught philosophy, logic and mathematics at Harvard University, New York University, Brooklyn College, University of Utah, Pennsylvania State University, and as a visiting lecturer at University of Pennsylvania. From 1959 he co-directed a research project with Zellig Harris in transformational grammar and into the first computer program for analysis of human language grammar. Separately from Harris, he developed his own ideas in philosophy of language and linguistics. Based on Leśniewski's theory of semantic categories, he outlined his first own version of transformational grammar, however not yet satisfying him, because that grammar – although "logically elegant" – was still too much "generative", "dry", "restrictive", and "reducing". Therefore, coming back to Bloomfield's behavioural linguistics, he formulated his second own version of transformational grammar, now more "behaviourally enlightened", "anti-generative", and "anti-reducing". So Hiż's second transformational grammar represents consequently "pure transformationalism" and modern or new behaviourism. Finally, exploring colloquial speech and watching individual reasonings of many observed speakers, he came to the aletheic theory of propositions being an extension of his second grammar to the logic of common parlance, and requiring an acertainment of veracity/falsity from every regular and transformed sentence. As a result of his research, he expanded and deepened logical and linguistic knowledge of non-standard and irregular elements of syntax that previous generative and transformational grammars couldn't mark. Henryk Hiż seems to be not only the last representative and the direct successor of the Lvov-Warsaw School, but also the first American linguistic neobehaviourist.

Key words: Henryk Hiż, Lvov-Warsaw School, philosophy of language, transformational grammar, aletheic semantic theory, behaviourism, neobehaviourism

55

Richmond Kwesi University of Ghana [email protected]

Metaphor and disagreement

It has been suggested that a genuine disagreement between two parties involves two necessary conditions: (a) there is a certain intuition of conflict, and (b) there is ‘something’ they disagree on (Kompa, 2014). One can think of the conflict or tension as an incompatibility or inconsistency between the beliefs (Feldman, 2007), attitudes (Goldman, 2009; Huvenes, 2012, 2014), or acceptances (MacFarlane, 2007; Elgin, 2009; Belleri, 2014) of the disagreeing parties. That ‘something’ on which the parties disagree is the content – a proposition – the truth of which one party believes, accepts, endorses, while the other disbelieves or rejects. The essential question in this paper is this: Can there be genuine cases of disagreements involving metaphors? I discuss this question with three (sets of) cases of (apparent) disagreements between two interlocutors, A and B:

Case I A: Yes! in the sea of life enisled, / With echoing straits between us thrown, / Dotting the shoreless watery wild, / We mortal millions live alone. (Matthew Arnold) B: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. (John Donne)

Case II A: Art is a jealous mistress (Ralph Waldo Emerson) B: Art is a prudent steward (Alexander Pope) Case III A: Mary is a pussycat B: No, she’s not! She is a tiger

I intend to show that if there can be genuine cases of disagreements involving metaphors, that is, disagreements to do with the truth of the propositional content asserted in one utterance and denied in the other, then, contrary to a popular view of metaphor held by Davidson (1978), Cooper (1986), Rorty (1987, 1989), Reimer (2001), Lepore & Stone (2010, 2015), metaphors are truth-apt. This has implications for our understanding of argumentation and discursive practices involving metaphors.

Key words: metaphor, disagreement, proposition, argumentation, truth

56

Kamil Lemanek University of Warsaw [email protected]

The flow of meaning: complex expressions and recursion

There appears to be a worrying phenomenon that follows from the role that complex expressions (e.g., sentences, propositions) play in determining the meaning of simple expressions (e.g., words, signs). This arrangement features centrally in theories that endorse semantic holism (Brandom 2000, 2007; Davidson 2001) or molecularism (Dummett 1991; Devitt 1993, 1996), though the particular issue being aimed at appears to have largely gone unnoticed.

Rather than opting for the well-known compositional or communicative line of argumentation (Fodor and Lepore 1992; 2002), one can confront these theories with an uncontroversial form of grammatical recursion wherein complex expressions can be trivially compounded (Harris 1957; Pullum and Scholz 2010). This compounding introduces non-trivial semantic effects at the level of complex expressions—something that is in itself not problematic. However, holistic and molecular theories suggest that these higher-level semantic effects are passed along to their constituent simple expressions. Hence, a sentence that iterates over ‘the leaf is very … very green’ is trivial at the level of complex expressions, but insofar as it has a bearing on the simple expressions it is composed of, each iterative step has a non-trivial effect at the level of simple expressions. Seeing that the compounding is infinite (or at least unlimited), the process should render the semantic content of a given simple expression measureless. That is, if the input for the meaning of a simple expression is subject to an unbounded recursive process, then the corresponding meaning of that simple expression is made formally, maximally indeterminate.

The argument itself relies on a weak interpretation of the role complex expressions have in determining the meaning of simple expressions, and the recursive mechanism it uses is uncontroversial. Its simplicity makes it easy to situate within various semantic frameworks, ranging beyond holism and molecularism. All told, it appears to pose a robust problem for semantic paradigms.

Key words: semantic content, lexical meaning, holism, molecularism, recursion

57

Palle Leth Stockholm University [email protected]

Are implicatures deniable?

Implicatures are generally thought to be deniable in the sense that the speaker S can deny having meant by her utterance whatever she didn’t explicitly state, thereby avoiding commitment and shifting responsibility onto the hearer H (Soames 2008, Camp 2008). Though it’s been pointed out that many implicatures can hardly be denied (Pinker et al. 2008, Sternau et al. 2016), the conviction persists that S is committed to literal meaning only (Dummett 1986) and that it’s in the nature of implicatures to be deniable (Camp 2018). The argument is that whereas literal meaning, determined by the lexicon and public contextual parameters, is factual and objective, implicatures depend on H’s assumptions about S’s intention which S may always rebut (Fricker 2012, Stokke 2013 & 2018). Against this view, I observe that when H holds S responsible for her utterance, H’s claim is that she had the best reasons to understand S’s utterance the way she did. The fact that utterance responsibility depends on the most reasonable interpretation of the utterance shows two things. First, S’s denial of having meant what H took her to say is irrelevant, since S’s actual intention isn’t at issue, but epistemic evaluation of H’s interpretation. Second, there’s no a priori reason why the most reasonable interpretation shouldn’t include pragmatic aspects of meaning, since H can have good reasons to understand something beyond semantic meaning. An additional argument comes from the fact that S’s commitment to the literal meaning of her utterance also involves an assumption, namely that S is speaking seriously. I conclude that though many implicatures are deniable, it’s not in their nature to be so; whether they are depends on the circumstances at hand. This conception of implicature deniability is also in accordance with legal practice (Burger 1973, Robertson & Nicol 2002, Quinn 2015).

Key words: implicature, deniability, cancellability, utterance meaning, semantics, pragmatics, accountability

58

Janusz Maciaszek University of Łódź, Poland [email protected]

Paratactic analysis in Kotarbiński and Davidson

Paratactic analysis of utterances of non-extensional sentences is usually connected with Donald Davidson’s semantic program. In the canonical form, a non-extensional utterance is presented as a parallel utterance of two logically independent extensional sentences. Though applied by Davidson in detail to three particular cases only (quotations, grammatical modes and “said that” clauses), paratactic analysis has been defended by him in many papers as an indispensable condition of the application of his truth-conditional, recursive and extensional semantics of natural language.

It is a less known fact that the very idea of paratactic analysis can be traced to Tadeusz Kotarbiński, a distinguished representative of the Lvov-Warsaw School, who tried to apply it to psychological sentences. In The Problem of Existence of Ideal Objects (Sprawa istnienia przedmiotów idealnych) [1920] Kotarbiński applied a version of paratactic analysis to reduce sentences about ideal objects (in a rather wide sense of this term) to sentences about existing things. In particular he analyses “said that” clauses, e.g. “John said that p”, as pairs of utterances: the announcing one: “The next utterance mimics the course of events in John’s nervous system: p”, indicating the utterance of a performative sentence p. Some of Kotarbiński’s remarks enable an understanding of “to mimic” as “to interpret in the same way”. In consequence, Kotarbiński’s solution is equivalent to Davidson’s in On Saying That [1968]. In his subsequent papers Kotarbiński intended to extend his mimic version of paratactic analysis to other psychological sentences.

The aim of the presentation is twofold. In the first place I indicate the overwhelming resemblances and slight differences between Kotarbiński’s and Davidson’s metaphysical assumptions underlying their versions of paratactic analysis. I also present the main difficulties of the application of paratactic analysis to psychological sentences (other than “said that” clauses) and a possible way of avoiding them.

Key words: interpretation, meaning, nominalism, paratactic analysis, propositional attitudes, reism

59

Maria Matuszkiewicz University of Warsaw, Poland [email protected]

Towards a deflationary view of singular thoughts

According to a strong realist approach to singular thoughts there is a metaphysical difference between two kinds of thoughts: singular and general ones. For every belief state of the thinker there is a fact of the matter whether the thinker is thinking singularly about an object, or not. The ability to entertain a singular thought is grounded in an epistemic state of the thinker (acquaintance-based theories), or alternatively in her mental state (narrowly defined in terms of mental syntax and other internal conditions).

An alternative, instrumentalist approach to singular thoughts takes the contrast between singular and general thoughts to be overdrawn. There are two related claims, one metaphysical, and the other linguistic: (C1) There is nothing like genuine de re thoughts: having a de dicto thought implies having a de re thought. (C2) Every de dicto belief ascription implies a de re belief ascription. Proponents of the view explain our intuitions concerning singular beliefs ascriptions by appealing to pragmatic phenomena.

In my presentation I will argue for the deflationary view. First, I will discuss the main motivation behind (C1) and (C2): there is no satisfactory conception of acquaintance. I will argue that these arguments from intuitions point to the role that singular thoughts ascriptions play in coordinating our beliefs about the world and in communication. For different purposes different degrees of knowing-which object one thinks and talks about suffice. Finally, I will defend the instrumentalist approach against some objections (Kripke 2011). I will argue that these arguments are inconclusive: they are only as good as our reasons to believe in the metaphysical distinction between the two kinds of thoughts.

Key words: singular thoughts, acquaintance, intentionality, instrumentalism, common ground

60

Francesco Montesi Sapienza University of Rome, Italy [email protected]

The problem of rejective phase: Denial versus retraction

Reconsidering his bilateral proposal, in his article “’Not’ Again” Huw Price points out how a supporter of a rejectivistic analysis has to face, as a preliminary step, what he calls the problem of rejective phase; a problem, he adds, which pertains not only to rejectivists but also to anyone who recognizes that judgement has a natural bipolarity.

In order to characterize the particular kind of rejection supposed to ground the notion of negation, the first step is to ask why we have this speech act and where the second pole of the bipolarity comes from. Since there seem to be many ways to reject an assertoric speech act, different interpretations of what it is to reject a positive judgement will provide different accounts of negation and, consequently, of meaning.

In my talk, I would like to take the issue seriously. I’ll try to defend the idea that retraction is a more suitable notion to focus on than denial.

On the one hand, the act of retraction appears as a more primitive notion than the act of denial. While Price sees the origin of denial in the linguistic phenomenon of disagreement – which seems to require a good deal of semantic theorizing in order to be understood – the act of retraction appears as a primitive normative movement constitutive of any normative practice such as the one of asserting a sentence.

On the other hand, the act of retraction turns out to be an important conceptual tool to account for the linguistic behaviour of a competent speaker dealing with empirical sentences which admit only defeasible justification.

I would like, then, to conclude by suggesting that in this linguistic context a verificationistic theory of meaning which employs assertibility conditions as the key notion has to be supplemented with retraction conditions, instead of denial conditions, to explain the meaning of those sentences.

Key words: assertion, denial, retraction, verificationistic theory of meaning, defeasible justification, bilateralism

61

Lucy McDonald University of Cambridge, UK [email protected]

Online speech

In this paper, I show how contemporary philosophy of language can make sense of online communicative practices like tweets, statuses and likes on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. I do this by drawing from several strands of philosophy of language, including the classical speech act theory of Austin and Searle; the more normatively-minded pragmatics of Brandom and Lance and Kukla; relevance theory; and the growing literature applying speech act theory to political and ethical phenomena.

Online communication methods push philosophy of language to its limits in three ways. Firstly, they are more public than the spoken utterances and written messages typically analysed by philosophers and linguists, and also more permanent - even when tweets and statuses are deleted, screenshots can survive on the internet forever. I explore how such publicity and permanence make it more difficult, but not impossible, to treat online communicative events as discrete ‘acts’.

Secondly, online communication puts pressure on the traditional analysandum of a dyadic exchange between one speaker and one hearer. Many online speech acts seem to involve three players; a speaker, a target, and an audience. If I publicly tweet another person, the message is directed to her, but I may also be indirectly speaking to the internet public more generally. I explore how this can be accommodated within contemporary pragmatics.

Finally, online communicative acts sometimes seem to be performed by collectives (‘the online mob’) and not by singular agents – they therefore provide an interesting focal point for thinking about group speech. I tackle questions concerning the nature of a group, the nature of a group intention and the possibility of a group performing a discrete utterance. I suggest that online hashtags can serve as helpful indicators of groups and group intentions.

Key words: speech act theory, illocutionary act, pragmatics, online communication, the internet, joint action

62

Crister Nyberg University of Jyväskylä, Finland [email protected]

Proper names in fiction. Philosophy meets psychology

Our capability to express ourselves through language is dependent on our language skills and our psychological processes, which are unconscious in many ways. In order to get a deeper and wider conception of meaning constituting processes in different contexts we should combine philosophical theories of language with psychological theories. I will show how our psychological processes restrict our understanding, despite education and fluent language skills. On the other hand, they may give wider horizons in the use of language despite limited skills and minor background knowledge. I introduce some examples of meaning constituting practices where our psychological processes are essentially involved. The examples are proper names referring to real life persons occurring in fiction like movies, drama, novels etc. Fictional stories have had an enormous effect on our understanding of those characters. The psychological theory of Integrative Complexity refers to our less than conscious thinking. Our thinking style becomes apparent e.g. in our information processing, decision-making, problem solving and when we face difference or disagreement. An empirically validated measurement frame shows how ‘low IC’ indicates thinking style that restricts alternative meanings and produces biased viewpoints. In turn, ‘high IC’ means capability to see the wider picture, which means differentiating, and integrating different perspectives. These are crucial processes when adapting, recognizing and building different language games, or so I argue. The theory of Integrative Complexity is combined with Minimalist Theory of Fiction (MTF), a theory for analyzing not only fiction but also all kinds of communication. The basis of MTF lies in the use theory of meaning, deflationary conception of truth and language games. My presentation shows how these theories together explain our meaning constituting practices when we are using proper names like Cleopatra, Winston Churchill and Antonio Salieri in fiction.

Key words: proper names, fiction, language games, truth, integrative complexity

63

Joanna Odrowąż-Sypniewska University of Warsaw, Poland [email protected]

Is modulation really local?

According to Recanati, Gricean implicatures and modulation are similar in that they make use of extralinguistic information, are top-down and optional, but differ crucially in that while the former are global and the literal content from which they are derived is available to the hearer, the latter are local and the unmodulated content is not available to the hearer. I shall focus here mainly on the question of globality vs. locality of modulation.

In many places, Recanati stresses that the hearer can arrive at the enriched content of an utterance without ever computing the literal interpretation of that utterance. In his recent exchange with Simons he admits that what is said (i.e. the pragmatically unenriched content) is taken into account at the first (triggering) stage of interpretation (i.e. the inference at this stage is global), but insists that it plays no role at the second (generating) stage (i.e. this stage is local). I find this last version of Recanati’s view puzzling. I’ll try to argue that (i) positing the triggering stage goes against his earlier claim that literal content is never computed and not available to the hearer; (ii) the way Recanati describes what goes on in the generating stage also suggests that modulation is a global rather than local process. In particular his claim that the hearer must “go through the process of semantic composition once again” (2017, 505) clearly presupposes that the literal content has earlier been computed by the hearer. Thus, claiming that at the generating stage the (global) premise that the speaker said what she said is of no use, seems unjustified.

Key words: availability principle, global, implicature, local, modulation

64

Sebastian Petzolt Christ Church, Oxford UK [email protected]

Synonymy and token-reflexivity

Reichenbachian theories analyse indexicals using token-reflexive rules:

R.1: For all utterances u of I, the referent of u is the person who uttered u. R.2: For all utterances u of I run, u is true iff s runs, where s is the referent of the utterance of I in u.

These rules assign semantic properties to expression-tokens. Yet Reichenbachians also regards them as the linguistic meanings of the types they apply to.

I argue that token-reflexive rules couldn’t be linguistic meanings, as sameness of meaning (synonymy) doesn’t imply sameness of token-reflexive rule: there are pairs of synonymous indexical expressions that share no rule. E.g., (1a) is plausibly synonymous with FRA (1b). 1a: I run. 1b: Je cours.

However, as R.2 speaks of ‘the sub-utterance of I in u ’, it doesn’t apply to the French sentence (1b), whose utterances don’t contain a sub-utterance of the English indexical I. Thus, although (1a) and (1b) share their meaning, they don’t share R.2.

More sophisticated versions of R.2 exist which apply to both sentences; but I provide linguistic evidence that these rules don’t apply to all translations of (1a), either.

The Reichenbachian approach thus fails. Whether a token-reflexive rule applies to a sentence, depends not only on the sentence’s syntactic structure and the meanings of it parts – features that are usually thought to determine type meanings. For the rule to apply, the sentence’s utterances must contain the right sub-utterances. Hence, although token-reflexive rules are intended as type meanings, they don’t apply unless the type’s tokens have the right properties. Yet that two types have the same meaning, leaves open what properties their tokens share. Sameness of type-meaning thus does imply sameness of token-reflexive rule, whence token- reflexive rules couldn’t be linguistic meanings.

Key words: meaning, synonymy, translation, indexicals, token-reflexivity

65

Krzysztof Posłajko Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland [email protected]

Minimalist sceptical solution as a revisionary account of meaning

The aim of my talk is to present a modified version of the minimalist reading of the Kripkenstein’s sceptical solution, according to which it should be seen as a revision of the folk concept of meaning.

The minimalist reading of Kripkenstein’s sceptical solution is best seen as a conjunction of three theses. First, that there are semantic facts. Second, that those semantic facts are facts in minimal/deflationary sense. Third, that when Kripkenstein agrees with the sceptic that there are no facts about meaning, he is rejecting a substantialist account of semantic facts.

This reading has important exegetical and theoretical advantages, as it explains the seemingly incoherent Kripkensteinian remarks about there being and, at the same time, not being semantic facts. Secondly, it avoids the dangers of semantic . Third, it allows to embrace the normativity of meaning claim.

Most proponents of this reading see it as an analysis of the folk concept of meaning; they see Kripkenstein as defending common-sense against mistaken substantialist view of meaning. Contrary to that view, I will argue that the minimalist solution is best seen as a revision of the folk concept. In my opinion, the sceptical solution differs from the commonsense notion because it denies the explanatory character of semantic facts, while this explanatory character is implicit in our ordinary practice.

The claim that minimalist solution is a revision is not meant as a criticism; rather, adopting it has several advantages. On the exegetical level it allows us to retain the notion that Kripkensteinian sceptical solution is a sceptical one: Kripkenstein really denies something which we all naively believe. Second, the proposed revision forces us to acknowledge that there is a tension between two folk intuitions: the intuition of normativity of meaning and the intuition that meaning is a substantial, explanatory factor.

Key words: conceptual revision, meaning scepticism, normativitiy od meaning, semantic deflationism, Kripkenstein

66

Andrea Raimondi Northwestern Italian Philosophy Consortium University of Nottingham [email protected]

On Meaning Ascriptions

We can ascribe meanings to linguistic expressions. In ordinary communication, we do this by displaying expressions of our own language: for instance, we say that the French word ‘neige’ means snow, and the English phrase ‘little by little’ means gradually. What is the best analysis of meaning ascriptions? Consider (1):

(1) ‘Neige’ means snow.

Firstly, I argue that an analysis treating the accusative term (i.e., ‘snow’) as used with its conventional meaning (or character, see Kaplan 1989) provides ungrammatical results. The notion of ungrammaticality will be cashed out within the framework of Chomsky’s (1965) generative grammar, in terms of the violation of subcategorization rules. Secondly, I argue against the Linguistic Analysis defended by Harman (1999) and Field (2001, 2016). This analysis holds that ‘means’ expresses a relation between two linguistic expressions; thus, (1) is to be analysed as (2):

(2) ‘Neige’ means the same as ‘snow’.

After explaining two crucial features of pure quotation marks, i.e., the kind of quotation marks occurring in the analysis at issue, I raise four objections against it. Here I mention two of them: the objection from belief, and the objection from translation. According to the former, the Linguistic Analysis is in conflict with our intuitions concerning the truth-value of certain belief ascriptions. According to the latter, the Linguistic Analysis provides incorrect results when translations of (1) come at issue. Finally, I contend that a natural alternative is an analysis according to which the accusative term has a non-conventional meaning (or character): roughly, the accusative term of (1) is displayed to refer to the meaning of ‘snow’. In this view, ‘means’ expresses a relation between an expression and a meaning (i.e., a Kaplanian content, a Fregean sense, or what have you). I sketch the general lines of a framework within which this analysis can be accommodated, and I briefly point out two minor problems that its supporters should address.

Key words: meaning ascriptions, quotation, use/mention distinction, ungrammaticality, translation

67

Martina Rosola FINO consortium-University of Genoa, Italy [email protected]

The implicature of generics

Generics are sentences that express generalizations about a kind or about its members. They attribute a property F to a kind K or to its members Ks without explicitly stating how many Ks have F. Examples of generics are the following:

(1) The duck lays eggs. (2) Ducks are female. (3) A tiger is striped.

The semantics of generics is tricky: for example, (1) is true and (2) is false, and yet there are less egg-laying ducks than female ones. Many authors attempted to provide a semantics for generics, and despite that, we still lack a satisfying account.

I will argue that generics possess a feature that has been overlooked and that can shed light on their semantics. That is, generics convey that Ks are F by virtue of being K. This was hypothesized by Haslanger (2011), who claims that this implicit content can be either an implicature or a presupposition.

To clarify this point, I apply the tests for implicature and presupposition. First, I apply the tests for presupposition projection. I also apply the Hey, wait a minute test for pragmatic presupposition. The implicit content of generics, though, passes none of these tests. I conclude that it is not a presupposition, and I go on testing for the other hypothesis. It seems that the implicit content of generics possess the features of implicatures: it is cancelable, calculable, non-detachable, and indeterminate. I conclude that generics implicate that Ks are F by virtue of being K.

This also fits well with another feature of generics, namely that they express non-accidental connections.

This discovery has implications on the research in the semantics of generics. For instance, accounts of generics as generalizations over normal individuals seem to treat this implicature as part of the semantics of generics, and this seems inadequate.

Key words: generics, implicature, presupposition, semantics, linguistic tests

68

Wojciech Rostworowski, Katarzyna Kuś and Bartosz Maćkiewicz University of Warsaw, Poland [email protected]

Demonstrative reference in the experimental perspective

Reference is one of the central issues in the philosophy of language. In particular, philosophers are interested in the phenomenon of singular reference which is a relation that holds between an expression of a grammatically singular form and one particular object in the world. The question is how exactly a given singular term can designate a certain object. For example, is it because this object satisfies certain descriptions determined by the meaning of the term, or in virtue of the fact that the object is causally linked to the expression use in an appropriate way? Furthermore, the question is whether one particular class of singular terms exhibits a uniform referential , or it allows for different mechanisms of reference, thus introducing a referential ambiguity.

The aim of the talk is to propose a novel approach to reference of complex demonstrative expressions ("this man", "that black table" etc.) The underlying idea of our proposal is that — contrary to the main competing views — demonstrative reference is not uniform in the sense that it is always the speaker’s intention (appropriately restricted), or it is always an act of demonstration which secures the set of possible candidates for a referent of a demonstrative used in a context (cf. Braun 2016). Some other factors may be reference-determing, too, and we present a piece of experimental evidence for that claim. In light of the presented data, we argue for a pluralistic account of how complex demonstratives refer, following Gauker’s (2008) and Mount’s (2008) accounts of simple demonstratives. In short, x can be taken as the referent of "this F" used in context c iff (a) x is an F, (b) x satisfies best certain accessibility criteria presented in c, and these accessibility criteria may appeal to very different features of the object in different contexts.

Key words: complex demonstratives, experimental semantics, reference, salience, singular terms

69

Louis Rouillé Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, France [email protected]

Fictional and metafictional uses of names: an analogy with games

There are two distinct uses of fictional names. Within a fiction (the fictional use) a name is typically used to pseudo-refer to a flesh and blood individual. For instance, the opening line of Moby Dick: “Call me Ishmael”, in which “Ishmael” is used to designate the only surviving crew member of the Pequod – Ishmael-the-protagonist does not actually exist, so one can only pseudo-refer to him. By contrast when we talk about the fiction (the metafictional use) a name typically refers to an abstract thing we usually call a “fictional character”. For instance, the true statement: “Ishmael is a fictional character created by Herman Melville”. Ishmael-the- protagonist and Ishmael-the-character are distinct things, since distinct predicates are true of them.

Obviously, some pretence is essential to the fictional uses: we make as if the name really referred to the flesh and blood protagonist. In the metafictional uses, though, it seems that no pretence is going on, since metafictional statements can be true simpliciter.

There are two opposite lines of analysis when it comes to metafictional statemments. Either one says that metafictional uses are actually complex cases of pretence: fictional uses are primary uses, metafictional are derived uses, and fictional names never really refer to anything; this is the anti-realist line. Or one says that metafictional uses are cases of reference to a real abstract artefact: metafictional uses are not derived from fictional uses, hence fictional names do refer in some contexts and do not refer in other contexts; this is the realist line.

I offer an argument in favour of realism, drawing an analogy with games. One can play chess, or work on an algorithm which “plays” chess. Arguably, fictional characters do exist independently of their associated protagonist, just like chess-playing algorithms are somewhat independent from the moves they make in their “playing”.

Key words: fiction, fictional names, pseudo-reference, realism vs anti-realism, fictional and metafictional, games, pretence semantics

70

Beatriz Santos University of Oxford [email protected]

On the meta-semantics of context-sensitivity

It is widely held that sentences containing context-sensitive expressions say different things, or have different truth-conditions, when uttered in different contexts. Truth-conditional semantic theories try to capture this phenomenon by providing interpretations of sentences relative to a context assignment. Context is thus responsible for determining what is said by context- sensitive sentences.

Even though this is standard practice in both linguistics and philosophy of language, it is rarely asked what nature contexts must have if they are to determine what is said by a sentence-in- context. However, it isn't clear whether the meta-semantic frameworks most often appealed to as foundations of the relevant semantic theories identify context with a kind of object suited for the job. I will argue that the two most prominent accounts of the nature of context, the Kaplan- Lewis and the Stalnakerian accounts, both identify context with metaphysical abstract objects unsuitable to play the role of context in determining what is said, given the epistemological demands of that role.

The Lewis-Kaplan framework represents context as a sequence of parameters which uniquely picks out a centred possible world. Being a metaphysical abstract object, this centred possible world includes large amounts of contextual information to which conversational partners have no epistemic access. Conversational partners therefore cannot use that information to interpret context-sensitive sentences, failing to know what is said by a sentence-in-context. I will show that the Stalnakerian framework, which identifies context with a set of centred possible worlds, falls prey to the same objection.

I conclude that semantic theories must be supported by a meta-semantic framework which identifies context with an object whose nature isn't such that conversational partners cannot have epistemic access to the information which constitutes it. My argument thus results in a plea for integration of the metaphysics and of context-sensitivity.

Key words: meta-semantics, context, Lewis-Kaplan, Stalnaker, integration challenge

71

Giorgio Sbardolini University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands [email protected]

Meanings as social norms

The phenomenon of semantic change, whereby a word changes its meaning in time, is familiar. On Lewis’s (1969) game-theoretic account, communication is like a game in which speakers and listeners cooperate to find the optimal solution to the task of getting their message across. The equilibrium found by speakers through repeated interactions (word W systematically signals meaning M) then becomes the conventional way to use a word.

The purpose of this paper is to make Lewis's model of meaning less idealized: linguistic agents need not be full cooperators, and may have, at least sometimes, conflicting interests. Indeed, semantic change may be driven by such conflict: as when a group of speakers with a distinctive social identity spontaneously innovates on the use of certain words, creating local conventions that, at least initially, only group members participate in. For example, gay began its life to mean, roughly, ‘happy’; it was then used as a slur against a certain group of people, and was later adopted by members of the target category to designate themselves in a mark of pride; finally, that use has been extended to the larger population as the conventional way to talk about gay people. Speakers are constantly changing the rules of the game, and Lewisian conventions are too restricted to account for this.

An interest in mutual understanding drives agents to conformity with an existing convention; but an interest in innovation may arise from the speakers’ social identity. This is the mechanism of social dilemmas. In this case, a conflict of interests among speakers is the driving factor for semantic change. This dynamic can be analyzed by modeling meanings as social norms (Bicchieri 2004). Social norms are solutions to games that represent social dilemmas, and generalize Lewisian conventions to cases in which the agents’ interests are not aligned. On this account, semantic change is an instance of social change, providing a better understanding of linguistic innovation. The resulting account comes a step closer to bridging the gap between the theory of communication and sociolinguistics.

Key words: diachronic semantics, conventions, social norms, semantic change, semantic innovation

72

Merel Semeijn University of Groningen, The Netherlands [email protected]

The problem of the wrong kind of object: parafictional statements in abstract object theory

Consider the following statements featuring the fictional name ‘Frodo’: (1) Frodo lives in the Shire (2) Frodo was invented by Tolkien

If we assume ‘Frodo’ refers uniformly to an abstract object across these statements (e.g. Zalta, 1983; 1988) we run into what Klauk (2014) has dubbed ’the problem of the wrong kind of object’; Abstract objects are not the kind of things that live in certain regions.

To solve this problem Zalta distinguishes two modes of predication; The abstract object Frodo ‘encodes’ being born in the Shire and ‘exemplifies’ being invented by Tolkien. Klauk (2014) argues that the problem of the wrong kind of object reoccurs for ‘explicit parafictional statements’ such as (3):

(3) In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo lives in the Shire

(3) expresses that The Lord of the Rings encodes that Frodo exemplifies living in the Shire. However, Tolkien’s narrative is a story about actual individuals rather than abstract objects.

I explore to what extent we can counter this objection. Zalta (P.C.) suggests that the encoding prefix should be understood as creating an opaque environment similar to attitude descriptions. Suppose John misread The Lord of the Rings and thinks Frodo actually exists. Statement (4):

(4) John believes that Frodo lives in the Shire should be read de re where John believes something about the abstract object Frodo under a mode of presentation that makes him consider Frodo to be actual. Similarly, (3) should be read as expressing that The Lord of the Rings encodes de re about the abstract object Frodo (under a mode of representation in which Frodo is actual) that he lives in the Shire. However, it is unclear how to make sense of ‘de re encoding’. Instead I explore an alternative solution that incorporates ambiguity of fictional names (Cf. Recanati, 2018).

Key words: abstract object theory, parafictional statements, metafictional statements, the problem of the wrong kind of object, encoding, opaque context

73

Maciej Sendłak University of Warsaw, Poland [email protected]

Counterpossibles and a fiction operator

Counterpossibles are subjunctive conditionals of the form ‘If it had been the case that A, then it would be the case that C,’ where ‘A’ expresses impossibility (necessary falseness). For instance:

(1) If Kate had squared the circle, mathematicians would be impressed. (2) If Kate had squared the circle, mathematicians would not be impressed.

The problem of counterpossibles revolves around the question of whether an adequate theory of counterfactuals should consider every counterpossible to have the same truth-value. Advocates of what has been called in the literature the orthodox view give a positive answer to this question and argue that despite pre-theoretical intuitions, every counterpossible is vacuously true (Stalnaker 1968; Lewis 1973; Williamson 2016).

The unorthodox opposition argues in favor of a modified account, according to which some counterpossibles are true and others are false (e.g., Yagisawa 1988; Nolan 1997; Brogaard & Salerno 2013; Berto et al. 2018). This is meant to be partly motivated by the observation that in some contexts the modal status of the antecedents does not have to play a role when it comes to evaluating counterfactuals. Accordingly, while we tend to consider (1) to be true, (2) seem to be false.

The aim of my paper is to argue in favor of the unorthodoxy. This is done indirectly by showing that the acceptance of the opposite view, i.e., the one that ascribes the truth to each and every counterpossible, results in the claim that every necessarily false theory has exactly the same, trivial consequences. Accordingly, it is shown that the truth of every counterpossible does not only undermine the value of debates over various alternative theories and their consequences, but also puts into question the very possibility of such debates. In order to explicate this thesis, the close bond between counterpossibles and the so-called story prefix (i.e., sentential operator ‘According to fiction F, P’) is indicated.

Key words: counterfactuals, counterpossibles, possible worlds, impossible worlds, fiction

74

Giovanni Sommazzi Università degli studi di Milano, Italy [email protected]

Revising the concept of rule (in light of Kripke-Wittgenstein’s skeptical argument)

In this paper, I will argue that Kripke-Wittgenstein’s skeptical conclusion about rule-following can be interpreted as a lesson about how not to understand the notion of a rule.

Firstly, I will rapidly present the skeptical argument as formulated in Kripke (1982), stressing its conclusion that there is no fact of the matter about whether I am following the rule of addition rather than some other, deviant rule.

Then, I will turn my attention to the implicit notion of rule at stake in the argument, arguing that it is this very notion that leads to skepticism. That notion has two ingredients: (i) to follow a rule, an infinite correctness-condition must be in force (i.e., the rule of addition applies to an infinite number of cases); (ii) following a rule is a normative matter (i.e., if you are following the rule of addition, the point is not that you answer “125” to the query “68+57”, but that you ought to answer “125”).

Afterwards, I will outline a different notion of rule, also defining what it means to follow it. Such a notion will be informed by the skeptical conclusion, taken not as an uncomfortable quandary, but as an illuminating property-constraint on the concepts of rule and rule-following. According to this view, a rule consists of two informational items: (1) a “must-hold” condition or situation, and (2) a consequence of such a condition being the case (where (2) may be modal in its nature, e.g. a possibility of choice). I will exemplify some applications of the proposed notion, analyzing them with the tools of Turing machines and basic model theory. Finally, I will face some objections.

In the conclusion, I will show how my notion of rule encourages novel reflections in logic and computer science, for instance on the notion of algorithm and its context-dependent nature.

Key words: concept of rule, rule-following, Kripke-Wittgenstein's paradox, context-sensitivity, model theory

75

Fredrik Stjernberg Linkoping University, Sweden [email protected]

There’s something about “Sherlock” – fictional names and bivalence

Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock was a human being, although a human being with some peculiar habits and talents. Sherlock is also a fictional human. This is almost a common-sense view of this case. The view also has adherents among philosophers (Fine 1982, Schiffer 1996, 2003; Searle 1979; Thomasson 1999). Fine likens the author’s creation of a fictional character with the carpenter’s creating a physical table.

There has been opposition to this view, however, such as Brock 2010 and Yagisawa 2001. Brock argues that the creationist explanation “is more mysterious than the data it seeks to explain” (338). The difficulties raised by Brock and Yagisawa are real enough, and creationism is not seen as an uncontroversial position anymore.

I will be talking about another problem for creationism. Assume that the author creates fictional characters. A difficulty with this idea is that creationism is hard to square with ideas about bivalence. If I create a physical table, this table will either have or not have a given property – it will either weigh an even or odd number of grammes. And it will do this even if I had never thought about the table’s precise weight. Things are different with fictional objects. No matter how hard the author tries, there will be areas where the created character neither has nor lacks a property. It is left open whether Sherlock had a mole on his left shoulder.

This puts limits on an author’s ability to create objects. Perhaps Conan Doyle, by making Sherlock human, in the process created a fictional character with knees, even if it is nowhere stated that Sherlock had knees. Conan Doyle can’t create a fictional character without leaving some things open. Not even setting out to create an object without gaps works.

Fictional names will work in ways that are different from the ways in which names for ordinary objects work. Some ideas from Predelli (2017) will be used to account for the special character of fictional names.

Key words: names, fiction, fictional names, fictional objects, bivalence, creationism

76

Vanja Subotić University of Belgrade, Serbia [email protected]

Reconsidering linguistic intuitions in experimental semantics

Since 2004 there has been a heated debate between proponents of the new wave of doing philosophy of language, i.e. experimental philosophers like Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols and Steven Stich, and old-school philosophers of language like Michael Devitt. Experimental philosophers claim that they had vindicated lay intuitions about reference by testing referential intuitions with vignettes containing Saul Kripke’s cases with Gӧdel and Jonah. Their findings suggest intracultural and intercultural variation in referential intuitions: Westerners are deemed to being prone to causal intuitions while East Asians are more likely to share descriptivist intuitions. Devitt has rejected their findings by arguing for expertise defense of linguistic intuitions en général. In his view, the intuitions of philosophers of language, semanticists and linguists are more reliable and therefore should be used as the only relevant evidence when assesing theories of reference.

A plethora of responses was induced by Devitt’s expertise defense (2006, 2008, 2011, 2012), and the common denominator of all of them was the aim to counter his claims either empirically or argumentatively (Culbertson & Gross 2009, 2011; Nichols et al. 2009, Dabrowska 2010, Machery 2012, Machery et al. 2013). In my talk, I will offer a reconsideration of linguistic intuitions in order to provide more grounded expertise defense of linguistic intuitions. Namely, I will argue that progress in connectionist models of language processing (Clark 1990, Elman 1991, Karpathy & Fei Fei 2015, Karpathy et al. 2016) which in my view consists out of rejecting linguistic nativism à la Chomsky (i.e. competence/performance distinction), can be inducive to progress in experimental philosophy by rectifying Devitt’s position. To be more precise, I am proposing that if we accept the conception of connectionist cognitive architecture, then we can conceive of linguistic intuitons as being of linguistic activity formed by linguistic usage rather than innate linguistic rules. Thus, the difference between an expert and a layman can be explained as a matter of having more powerful connecionist network given the expert’s with frequent and multifarious linguistic usage due to his education and training.

Key words: connectionism, experimental philosophy, expertise defense, linguistic intuitions, nativism, theories of reference

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Mieszko Tałasiewicz University of Warsaw, Poland [email protected]

Categorial grammar as a key to Peter F. Strawson’s philosophy of language (In the 100th anniversary of his birth)

The central theme of Strawson’s philosophy of language was the dichotomy of subject and predicate in a sentence. Stemming from a seminal distinction of referring use and ascriptive/attributive use in his early work On Referring (1950), this dichotomy was used as explanans in arguments in several semantic controversies, notably with Russell and Donnellan. Simultaneously, it became very important explanandum for Strawson, motivating his deep metaphysical enquiries, undertaken for the sake of grounding subject-predicate distinction in ‘something that conditions our whole way of talking and thinking’ and ‘reflects some fundamental features of our thought about the world’. This theme was given the first full-blown account in a major work Individuals (1959), according to which the dichotomy of subject and predicate must be grounded in a parallel metaphysical dichotomy of object and concept. Elaborated further in a series of papers, it was given even fuller exposition, after near a quarter of a century from the beginning, in Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar (1974), a book of which Strawson wrote: “Of all my books [it] is probably the most ambitious and certainly the one that has received the least attention”.

The aim of my talk is to show that Strawson’s grammatical ideas establish indeed a deep explanatory perspective on many important issues, provided these ideas are augmented with and organized by a different grounding of the central dichotomy. Namely, I will argue that what provides a proper grounding for these ideas and thus a promising interpretative scheme is Ajdukiewicz’s categorial grammar (CG). The other way round, Strawson’s philosophy sheds some light on the foundations of CG by imposing onto CG its own agenda and thus extending the explanatory range of CG.

Key words: Strawson, Russell, Donnellan, referring use, categorial grammar, subject, predicate

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Maciej Tarnowski & Maciej Głowacki University of Warsaw, Poland [email protected]

What are words?

In his groundbreaking ‘Words’ (1990), David Kaplan takes on a widely neglected issue of the metaphysics of words. He argues against ‘ortographic’ criteria of word identity and its ‘token- type’ ontology (implicit, for instance, in the works of Quine (1982), Fiengo and May (2006)). Kaplan proposes instead ‘intentionalist’ criteria of word identity, and sketches naturalistic ontology of words as ‘trees of articulations’. He claims that two articulations are articulations of the same word if and only if the speaker has the intention of using them as articulations of the very same word. Following this criterion, he argues that words are objects composed of concrete articulations joined by such intentions.

In our talk we will present possible interpretations of both stances in the debate on metaphysics of words. We will examine the strength of Kaplan’s arguments against the ‘ortographic’ conception, as well as complementary critique of a widely accepted token-type distinction (cf. Wetzel 1993)). We will argue, that this critique is sufficient for abandoning the ‘ortographic’ account of words. We will also present and critically examine the arguments against Kaplan’s conception. One (Hawthorne, Lepore 2011 and Cappelen 1999) attacks Kaplan’s account for allowing unintelligible articulations to be word articulations in the proper sense simply if they are produced with a certain intention. We will also focus on the Kaplan’s concept of intention and show that there are cases in which it is impossible to establish whether certain intention is correct on Kaplan’s account (e.g. ‘private words’). Therefore, there are many instances which are undecidable under intentionalist criterion. We shall discuss, if Kaplan’s stance can be modified to avoid such consequences. We will also show several philosophical implications of Kaplan’s intentionalism. We will focus especially on the problem of substitutivity in intensional contexts and the issue of drawing boundaries between particular natural languages.

Key words: word, intention, token, type, occurrence,

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Tomoo Ueda Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Japan [email protected]

Externalist pragmatic notion of truth

In this presentation, I will focus on pragmatic accounts of truth. There are roughly three types of accounts of how the notion of truth should be characterized from the pragmatic perspectives. On the one hand, theorists (e.g., Rorty 2000) argue that there is no need for truth conception. On the other hand, there are theorists who define truth in terms of the idealized consensus (e.g., Putnam 1981, Apel 2011, Habermas 1973).

The latter group of theorists utilizes the classic and internalistic notion of knowledge (defined as justified true belief, or JTB). Since pragmatic notions of truth utilize the notion of knowledge, I will argue that there are varieties of pragmatic truth conceptions that can be categorized according to the type of definition of knowledge.

I will focus on a type of pragmatic notion of truth (or as I call it, “externalist and pragmatic notion of truth,” or EPT).

This paper focuses on EPT and discusses two issues. The first topic is consensus theory of truth (or CTT), which Habermas has been defending. In his rather recent paper (Habermas 1996), he defends a version of EPT that does not depend on the idealized consensus. I will argue that this newer version of CTT (or NCTT) utilizes the reliabilist notion of knowledge instead of JTB and hence that the NCTT is externalistic.

Second, I will argue for the holistic nature of EPT. Habermas suggests that the NCTT is holistic. In this section, I will flesh out this idea and discuss the connection between EPT and the conceptual role semantics. In this part, my discussion focuses on the wide-content theories rather than the narrow-content theory (e.g., Brandom 1994).

Key words: truth, pragmatism, CRS, Rorty, Habermas

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Piotr Wilkin University of Warsaw, Poland [email protected]

Formalizing token-reflexivity and utterance-reflexivity

The concept of token-reflexivity, introduced by Reichenbach and later taken up by other researchers, has been used as an alternative to Kaplan’s content-character distinction as an attempt to provide meaning postulates for indexical expressions. Following Perry’s distinction, we want to follow up on this approach and focus on the difference between utterance and token, giving the following semantic account of utterance-reflexive and token-reflexive expressions:

A meaning postulate for a given expression E (noted as [|E|]) is a function of the shape λuλt.F, where u and t might appear as free variables in F. An expression E is token-reflexive iff. [|E|] = λuλt.F and t ∈ FV(F). An expression E is utterance-reflexive iff. [|E|] = λuλt.F and u ∈ FV(F). For example, if we have a standard possible-worlds semantics, [|me|] = λuλtλw.sp(u), where sp(x) is the speaker-of function. Thus, “me” is utterance-reflexive.

Under this approach, we might consider a systematic approach to various indexical phenomena, especially working with the utterance-token distinction, for example, to deal with anaphora in written text. We will also try to tackle some problems with such a solution, for example the uniform formal treatment of personal pronouns (both as anaphorical and as “truly indexical”) in such a framework. Finally, we will also attempt to answer the question whether some of the known controversies regarding contextualism, as usually formulated within a Kaplanian framework, can be reasonably recreated within such an approach.

Key words: formal semantics, token-reflexivity, utterance-reflexivity, context-dependence

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Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka University of Lodz, Poland [email protected]

J.L. Austin’s speech acts and the notions of intention and convention

This paper goes back to J.L. Austin’s original account of speech acts primarily as presented in his lectures “Words and Deeds”, posthumously published as How to Do Things with Words (1962/1975) with focus on the notions of convention and intention seen as fundamental for a felicitous performance of the speech act.

While J.L. Austin puts emphasis on the conventionality of speech acts, their intention-related aspects have been discussed, naturally in the Gricean perspective, and even earlier since Strawson’s 1964 significant contribution which marked the beginning of a kind of divide between sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic speech act-theoretic research.

The paper briefly reviews Austin’s account in an attempt to evaluate its relevance in the context of hate speech-oriented research in linguistics and law. The discussion uses Korta and Perry’s (2007, 2011) notion of the “forensic aspect” of locution, which seems convergent with the current treatment of utterance meaning in legal discussions of hate speech, where what words “do” counts irrespective of their speakers’ intentions.

It is tested whether the category of hate speech can be accommodated within speech act theory, and whether hate speech should be seen as an “act”, a speech “action” framed in a malevolent macro-structure, or possibly a pragmeme (Mey 2006, 2001), saturated with e.g. cultural values or intertextuality.

In summary, it seems that hate speech requires a sociolinguistic approach as there is a spectrum which ranges from private (more psychologistic) to public, on-record acts (more sociologistic, perlocution-based, often politicised acts). Eventually, the discussed problems also serve to show that (as claimed before in Witczak-Plisiecka 2013), there is no one consistent well-defined speech act theory, but rather a collection of different models, which – somewhat paradoxically – seem to bring us even closer to Austin’s original research programme with his collection of bright ideas about language use.

Key words: speech act, hate speech, locution, illocution, pragmeme

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Maciej Witek University of Szczecin [email protected]

A performative solution to the triggering problem

The felicitous performance of a speech act puts certain requirements on the context of its production; if they are not met, the context can be adjusted so as to make the act appropriate. For instance, one can use the sentence “I have to pick up my sister at the airport” to make a felicitous assertion only if the proposition that the speaker has a sister is part of the common ground among the conversing agents. If this requirement is not met, the common ground can be appropriately adjusted or, in other words, the presupposed proposition can be accommodated (Lewis 1979).

My focus in this paper is on the so-called triggering problem (Simons 2001, Domaneschi 2016, Witek 2019) which concerns the source of the contextual requirements the recognition of which triggers accommodation. Some scholars (von Fintel 2008, Domaneschi 2017) take them to be semantically determined properties of certain lexical and grammatical components, whereas other researchers (Simons 2001, Stalnaker 2014) claim that the presuppositional requirements are determined by general pragmatic principles. My aim in this paper is to develop a third approach that results from integrating elements of Thomason, Stona DeVault’s (2006) enlightened update model within the framework of the Austinian theory of speech acts (Sbisà 2019). In particular, I put forth a Performative Hypothesis according to which, first, presupposition-triggering utterances can be grouped into cases A constituting performances of certain actions (e.g., that of promising, ordering, regretting, referring, and so on) and cases B that can be regarded as descriptions cases A (e.g., “X promises that p”, “X regrets that p”, and so on); second, cases A can be directly accounted for along the lines of the Austinian theory of speech acts, whereas cases B should be explained indirectly by reference to cases A they describe.

Key words: triggering problem, presuppositions, accommodation, performativity, speech acts

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Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska University of Opole, Poland [email protected], [email protected]

On notions of sense in logic of language

In the paper, various notions of the semiotic sense, namely: syntactic and semantic, intensional and extensional are considered and formalized on the basis of a formal-logical conception of any language L characterized categorically in the spirit of some Husserl's ideas of pure grammar, Leśniewski-Ajdukiewicz's theory of syntactic/semantic categories and in accordance with Frege's ontological canons, Bocheński's and some Suszko's ideas of language adequacy of expressions of L. The adequacy ensures their unambiguous syntactic and semantic senses and mutual, syntactic and semantic correspondence guaranteed by the acceptance of a postulate of categorial compatibility syntactic and semantic (extensional and intensional) categories of expressions of L. There are three principles of compositionality which follow from this postulate: one syntactic and two semantic ones already known to Frege. They are treated as conditions of homomorphism partial algebra of L into algebraic models of L: syntactic, intensional and extensional. Language adequacy connected with the logical senses described in the logical conception of language L is, of course, an idealization. Syntactic and semantic unambiguity of its expressions is not, of course, a feature of natural languages but every syntactically and semantically ambiguous expression of such languages may be treated as a schema representing all of its interpretations that are unambiguous expressions.

Key words: logic and philosophy of language, categorial language, syntactic and semantic senses, categorization, meaning, denotation, syntactic and semantic compatibility, model, truth, structural compatibility, compositionality, language communication

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Nadja-Mira Yolcu University of Mannheim, Germany [email protected]

Is there expressive denegation?

According to avowal expressivism (Wittgenstein 1953; Finkelstein 2003; Bar-On 2004, 2015; Brandl 2014; Freitag 2018), avowals – first-person present tense self-ascriptions of mental states (e.g. “I hope that it is raining”) – are typically explicit expressive acts. In uttering a propositional avowal of the form “I ψ that p”, the speaker expresses her mental state ψ that p instead of reporting on her mental state (descriptivism), i.e. expressing her belief that she ψs that p.

Self-ascriptions of mental states can be negated. Disavowals, such as “I don’t believe that it is raining” and “I don’t love you”, are often used in combination with avowals as in “I don’t want chocolate. I want cotton candy.” Nevertheless, disavowals are rarely discussed. And even those avowal expressivists who have briefly commented on disavowals (Bar-On 2004) claim that in uttering a disavowal a speaker reports on not being in the mental state named. Here, we will make the case for what we call expressive denegation (in due deference to the syntactically parallel case of illocutionary denegation): We claim that in uttering a disavowal, a speaker expresses, in some sense, the absence of the mental state named. We will also consider the main objection to expressive denegation: While it seems easy to make sense of expressing a mental state, it is difficult to make sense of expressing the absence of a mental state. In response to this problem, we propose that in uttering a disavowal of the form “I don’t ψ that p” a speaker expresses the proposition that she does not ψ [that p]. The paper explores consequences of such a theory.

Key words: expressivism, negation, negated avowals, disavowals, expressive denegation

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Adrian Ziółkowski University of Warsaw, Poland [email protected]

Survey pragmatics: the role of contextual factors in experimental philosophy

Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a young movement within the analytic tradition that introduces novel, empirical methods to the philosophers’ toolbox. X-phi studies philosophical intuitions of the folk and tries to draw philosophically significant conclusions from the collected data. The most popular method of data gathering is known as “the method of cases”, which consists in presenting laypersons with hypothetical scenarios based on famous philosophical thought experiments.

Experimental philosophers have collected various data suggesting that intuitions expressed by non-philosophers are often unstable and sensitive to insignificant factors, such as cultural background, the order of scenario presentation, or subtle differences in phrasing of crucial questions. Basing on such results, many philosophers concluded that folk philosophical intuitions are unreliable and cannot be trusted. In my talk, I will present a theoretical account that aims at providing a systematic explanation of such phenomena by referring to pragmatics and context-dependence.

Survey Pragmatics is a theoretical approach according to which taking a survey is a situation of bilateral communication between the researcher(s) and the participant(s), and as such, is constrained by the pragmatic rules we impose on other kinds of conversations. In this vein, one might explain many apparently problematic results as instances of pragmatic interactions, such as adherence to conversational maxims or seeking for conversational implicatures.

In my talk, I will present various data on folk intuitions in the fields of epistemology and philosophy of language (collected by me and other researchers) that seem to show the instability and unreliability of folk intuitions. I will argue that in many cases the data is only apparently problematic, since it can be explained by referring to systematic, pragmatic phenomena in the researcher-participant communication. I will also argue that neglecting the context-dependence of survey materials is often the source of misinterpreting the data collected by experimental philosophers.

Key words: experimental philosophy, folk intuitions, pragmatics, context-dependence, conversational maxims

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