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Mar 5th 2019 GMT

1. Deceiving Without Answering.Peter van Elswyk - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-17.
   Lying is standardly distinguished from misleading according to how a disbelieved proposition is conveyed. To lie, a speaker uses a sentence to say a proposition she does not believe. A speaker merely misleads by using a sentence to somehow convey but not say a disbelieved proposition. Front-and-center to the lying/misleading distinction is a conception of what-is-said by a sentence in a context. Stokke (2016, 2018) has recently argued that the standard account of lying/misleading is explanatorily inadequate unless paired with a theory where what-is-said by a sentence is determined by the question under discussion or QUD. I present two objections to his theory, and conclude that no extant theory of what-is-said enables the standard account of the lying/misleading distinction to be explanatorily adequate.
2. A Unified Theory of Truth and Paradox.Lorenzo Rossi - forthcoming - Review of Symbolic Logic:1-49.
   The sentences employed in semantic paradoxes display a wide range of semantic behaviours. However, the main theories of truth currently available either fail to provide a theory of paradox altogether, or can only account for some paradoxical phenomena by resorting to multiple interpretations of the language. In this paper, I explore the wide range of semantic behaviours displayed by paradoxical sentences, and I develop a unified theory of truth and paradox, that is a theory of truth that also provides a unified account of paradoxical sentences. The theory I propose here yields a threefold classification of paradoxical sentences – liar-like sentences, truth-teller-like sentences, and revenge sentences. Unlike existing treatments of semantic paradox, the theory put forward in this paper yields a way of interpreting all three kinds of paradoxical sentences, as well as unparadoxical sentences, within a single model.
3. Ontic Explanation Is Either Ontic or Explanatory, but Not Both.Cory Wright & Dingmar van Eck - 2018 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5 (38):997–1029.
   What features will something have if it counts as an explanation? And will something count as an explanation if it has those features? In the second half of the 20th century, philosophers of science set for themselves the task of answering such questions, just as a priori conceptual analysis was generally falling out of favor. And as it did, most philosophers of science just moved on to more manageable questions about the varieties of explanation and discipline-specific scientific explanation. Often, such shifts are sound strategies for problem-solving. But leaving fallow certain basic conceptual issues can also result in foundational debates.

Mar 4th 2019 GMT

1. Inference Rules and the Meaning of the Logical Constants.Hermógenes Oliveira - 2019 - Dissertation, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
   The dissertation provides an analysis and elaboration of Michael Dummett's proof-theoretic notions of validity. Dummett's notions of validity are contrasted with standard proof-theoretic notions and formally evaluated with respect to their adequacy to propositional intuitionistic logic.

Mar 1st 2019 GMT

1. Death on the Freeway: Imaginative Resistance as Narrator Accommodation.Daniel Altshuler & Emar Maier - forthcoming - In Ilaria Frana, Paula Menendez Benito & Rajesh Bhatt (eds.), Making Worlds Accessible: Festschrift for Angelika Kratzer. Amherst: UMass ScholarWorks.
   We propose to analyze well-known cases of "imaginative resistance" from the philosophical literature (Gendler, Walton, Weatherson) as involving the inference that particular content should be attributed to either: (i) a character rather than the narrator or, (ii) an unreliable, irrational, opinionated, and/or morally deviant "first person" narrator who was originally perceived to be a typical impersonal, omniscient, "effaced" narrator. We model the latter type of attribution in terms of two independently motivated linguistic mechanisms: accommodation of a discourse referent (Lewis, Stalnaker, Kamp) and 'cautious' updating as a model of non-cooperative information exchange (Eckardt).
2. Shifting Perspectives in Pictorial Narratives.Emar Maier & Sofia Bimpikou - forthcoming - In Uli Sauerland & Stephanie Solt (eds.), Proceeding of Sinn und Bedeutung 23. Barcelona: Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS).
   We propose an extension of Discourse Respresentation Theory (DRT) for analyzing pictorial narratives. We test drive our PicDRT framework by analyzing the way authors represent characters’ mental states and perception in comics. Our investigation goes beyond Abusch and Rooth (2017) in handling not just free perception sequences, but also a form of apparent perspective blending somewhat reminiscent of free indirect discourse.
3. Two Kinds of Logical Impossibility.Alexander Sandgren & Koji Tanaka - forthcoming - Noûs.
   In this paper, we argue that a distinction ought to be drawn between two ways in which a given world might be logically impossible. First, a world w might be impossible because the laws that hold at w are different from those that hold at some other world (say the actual world). Second, a world w might be impossible because the laws of logic that hold in some world (say the actual world) are violated at w. We develop a novel way of modelling logical possibility that makes room for both kinds of logical impossibility. Doing so has interesting implications for the relationship between logical possibility and other kinds of possibility (for example, metaphysical possibility) and implications for the necessity or contingency of the laws of logic.
4. Modelling Deep Indeterminacy.George Darby & Martin Pickup - forthcoming - Synthese:1-26.
   This paper constructs a model of metaphysical indeterminacy that can accommodate a kind of ‘deep’ worldly indeterminacy that arguably arises in quantum mechanics via the Kochen-Specker theorem, and that is incompatible with prominent theories of metaphysical indeterminacy such as that in Barnes and Williams (2011). We construct a variant of Barnes and Williams's theory that avoids this problem. Our version builds on situation semantics and uses incomplete, local situations rather than possible worlds to build a model. We evaluate the resulting theory and contrast it with similar alternatives, concluding that our model successfully captures deep indeterminacy.

Feb 28th 2019 GMT

1. What the Future 'Might' Brings.David Boylan - forthcoming - Mind.
   This paper is about a puzzle about the interaction of epistemic modals and future tense. In cases of predictable forgetfulness, speakers cannot describe their future states of mind with epistemic modals under future tense, but promising theories of epistemic modals do not predict this. In section 1, I outline the puzzle. In section 2, I argue it undermines a very general approach to epistemic modals that draws a tight connection between epistemic modality and evidence. In section 3, I defend the assumption that tense can indeed scope over epistemic modals. In section 4, I outline a new way of determining the domain of quantification of epistemic modals: epistemic modals quantify over the worlds compatible with the information accumulated within a certain interval. Information loss can change which interval is relevant for determining the domain. In section 5, I defend the view from some objections. In section 6, I explore the connections between my view of epistemic modality and circumstantial modality.