How to Do Things With Words

Naming and necessity

Convention: a philosophical study

1. Introducing the Puzzle 2. Contextualism and the Puzzle 3. Invariantist Treatments 4. Sensitive Moderate Invariantism Bibliography

Knowledge and lotteries

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the space of possible analyses of the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction, together with a set of considerations which militate against all but our own proposal. Among the many accounts we consider and reject are the 'explicit' approach to quantifier domain restric- tion discussed, for example, by Stephen Neale, and the pragmatic approach to quantifier domain restriction proposed by Kent Bach. Our hope is that the exhaustive discussion of this special case of context-dependence will provide guidelines for how to decide, for an arbitrary case of context-dependent discourse, whether it should be treated syn- tactically, semantically, or pragmatically.

On Quantifier Domain Restriction

Dans le cadre du debat sur la reference directe opposant les partisans de Frege a ceux de Mill, l'A. examine les criteres descriptivistes et fondationnalistes, conventionnels et constructivistes, de la valeur semantique et metasemantique des termes singuliers. Definissant le sens des noms propres et des indexicaux en termes de presuppositions de connaissance (presuppositions of acquaintance), l'A. defend une approche presuppositionnelle de la fixation de la reference qui rend compte de la nature reflechie des occurrences (token-reflexive) et revisite le principe de Russell etabli par G. Evans.

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A Presuppositional Account of Reference Fixing

import and truth-conditions. Kaplan has criticized these approaches on different counts, the most damaging of which is that they make impossible a "logic of demonstratives". The reason for this is that the token-reflexive approach entails that not two tokens of the same sentential type including indexicals are guaranteed to have the same truth-conditions. In this paper I rebut this and other criticisms of the Reichenbachian approach. Additionally, I point out that Kaplan's original theory of "true demonstratives" is empirically inadequate, and claim that any modification capable of accurately handling the linguistic data would have similar problems to those attributed to the Reichenbachian approach. This is intended to show that the difficulties, no matter how real, are not caused by idiosincracies of the "token-reflexive" view, but by deep facts about indexicality.

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Indexicals as token-reflexives

This paper confronts the disagreement argument for relativism about matters of taste, defending a specific form of contextualism. It is first considered whether the disagreement data might manifest an invariantist attitude that speakers have pre-reflectively. Semantic and ontological enlightenment should then make the impressions of disagreement vanish, or at least leave them as lingering ineffectual Muller-Lyer-like illusions; but it is granted to relativists that this does not fully happen. Lopez de Sa's appeal to presuppositions of commonality and Sundell's appeal to metalinguistic disagreement are discussed, and it is argued that, although they help to clarify the issues, they do not fully explain why such impressions remain under enlightenment. To explain it, the paper develops a suggestion that other writers have made, that the lingering impression of disagreement is a consequence of a practical conflict, appealing to dispositions to practical coordination that come together with presuppositions of ...

/pdf/disagreement-about-taste-commonality-presuppositions-and-10dz0aj1z3.pdf

Disagreement about Taste: Commonality Presuppositions and Coordination

This paper discusses the proper taxonomy of thesemantics-pragmatics divide. Debates about taxonomyare not always pointless. In interesting casestaxonomic proposals involvetheoretical assumptions about thestudied field, which might be judged correct orincorrect. Here I want to contrast an approach to thesemantics-pragmatics dichotomy, motivated by a broadlyGricean perspective I take to be correct, with acontemporary version of an opposing ``Wittgensteinian''view. I will focus mostly on a well-known example: thetreatment of referential uses of descriptions anddescriptive uses of indexicals. The paper isstructured as follows. I will start by characterizingin the first section the version of the Griceanapproach I favor; in the second section, I willillustrate the differences between the two views byfocussing on the example, and in the third section I willobject to what I take to be the main Wittgensteinianconsideration.

/pdf/gricean-rational-reconstructions-and-the-semantics-23u1wmc432.pdf

Manuel García-Carpintero

Papers

A Presuppositional Account of Reference Fixing

Indexicals as token-reflexives

Disagreement about Taste: Commonality Presuppositions and Coordination

Gricean Rational Reconstructions And The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction

Assertion and the semantics of force-markers