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Speranza

GMT

1. Indeterminate Identities, Supervaluationism, and Quantifiers.Achille C. Varzi - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
   I am a friend of supervaluationism. A statement lacks a definite truth value if, and only if, it comes out true on some admissible ways of precisifying the semantics of the relevant vocabulary and false on others. In this paper, I focus on the special case of identity statements. I take it that such statements, too, may occasionally suffer a truth-value gap, including philosophically significant instances. Yet there is a potentially devastating objection that can be raised against the supervaluationist treatment of such cases—in fact two objections. Luckily, both can be resisted. But seeing how requires that we take a closer look at the ontological presuppositions of supervaluationism, allowing for more leeway than is usually supposed.

Mar 18th 2019 GMT

1. No Surprises.Ian Wells - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-18.
   The surprise exam paradox is an apparently sound argument to the apparently absurd conclusion that a surprise exam cannot be given within a finite exam period. A closer look at the logic of the paradox shows the argument breaking down immediately. So why do the beginning stages of the argument appear sound in the first place? This paper presents an account of the paradox on which its allure is rooted in a common probabilistic mistake: the base rate fallacy. The account predicts that the paradoxical argument should get less and less convincing as it goes along—a prediction I take to be welcome. On a bleaker note, the account suggests that the base rate fallacy may be more widespread than previously thought.
2. Picky Predicates: Why Believe Doesn’T Like Interrogative Complements, and Other Puzzles.Nadine Theiler, Floris Roelofsen & Maria Aloni - forthcoming - Natural Language Semantics:1-40.
   It is a long-standing puzzle why predicates like believe embed declarative but not interrogative complements and why predicates like wonder embed interrogative but not declarative complements. This paper shows how the selectional restrictions of a range of predicates can be derived from semantic assumptions that can be independently motivated.
3. Correction To: Subjunctive Conditionals’ Local Contexts.John Mackay - forthcoming - Linguistics and Philosophy:1-1.
   In the original publication of an article, the citation of section 3 was missing in the published version. Now the same has been published in this correction.

Mar 17th 2019 GMT

1. On Dummett’s Pragmatist Justification Procedure.Hermógenes Oliveira - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-27.
   I show that propositional intuitionistic logic is complete with respect to an adaptation of Dummett’s pragmatist justification procedure. In particular, given a pragmatist justification of an argument, I show how to obtain a natural deduction derivation of the conclusion of the argument from, at most, the same assumptions.
2. To Finish in German and Mainland Scandinavian: Telicity and Incrementality.Alexandra Anna Spalek & Kjell Johan Sæbø - forthcoming - Journal of Semantics.
   
   
3. Semantic Dispositionalism Without Exceptions.Arvid Båve - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
   Semantic dispositionalism is roughly the view that meaning a certain thing by a word, or possessing a certain concept, consists in being disposed to do something, e.g., infer a certain way. Its main problem is that it seems to have so many and disparate exceptions. People can fail to infer as required due to lack of logical acumen, intoxication, confusion, deviant theories, neural malfunctioning, and so on. I present a theory stating possession conditions of concepts that are counterfactuals, rather than disposition attributions, but which is otherwise similar to inferentialist versions of dispositionalism. I argue that it can handle all the exceptions discussed in the literature without recourse to ceteris paribus clauses. Psychological exceptions are handled by suitably undemanding requirements (unlike that of giving the sum of any two numbers) and by setting the following two preconditions upon someone’s making the inference: that she considers the inference and has no motivating reason against it. The non-psychological exceptions, i.e., cases of neural malfunctioning, are handled by requiring that the counterfactuals be true sufficiently often during the relevant interval. I argue that this accommodates some important intuitions about concept possession, in particular, the intuition that concept possession is vague along a certain dimension.

Mar 16th 2019 GMT

1. Talk and Thought.Sarah Sawyer - forthcoming - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
   This paper provides an externalist account of talk and thought that clearly distinguishes the two. It is argued that linguistic meanings and concepts track different phenomena and have different explanatory roles. The distinction, understood along the lines proposed, brings theoretical gains in a cluster of related areas. It provides an account of meaning change which accommodates the phenomenon of contested meanings and the possibility of substantive disagreement across theoretical divides, and it explains the nature and value of conceptual engineering in a way that addresses recent prominent concerns.
2. Counterpossible Non-Vacuity in Scientific Practice.Peter Tan - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy116 (1):32-60.
   The longstanding philosophical orthodoxy on counterfactuals holds, in part, that counterfactuals with metaphysically impossible antecedents are indiscriminately vacuously true. Drawing on a number of examples from across scientific practice, I argue that science routinely treats counterpossibles as non-vacuously true and also routinely treats other counterpossibles as false. In fact, the success of many central scientific endeavors requires that counterpossibles can be non-vacuously true or false. So the philosophical orthodoxy that counterpossibles are indiscriminately vacuously true is inconsistent with scientific practice. I argue that this provides a conclusive reason to reject the orthodoxy.

Mar 15th 2019 GMT

1. Signalling Games, Sociolinguistic Variation and the Construction of Style.Heather Burnett - forthcoming - Linguistics and Philosophy:1-32.
   This paper develops a formal model of the subtle meaning differences that exist between grammatical alternatives in socially conditioned variation and how these variants can be used by speakers as resources for constructing personal linguistic styles. More specifically, this paper introduces a new formal system, called social meaning games, which allows for the unification of variationist sociolinguistics and game-theoretic pragmatics, two fields that have had very little interaction in the past. Although remarks have been made concerning the possible usefulness of game-theoretic tools in the analysis of certain kinds of socially conditioned linguistic phenomena :645–668, 1977; Dror et al. in Lang Linguist Compass 7:561–579, 2013; in Lang Linguist Compass 8:230–242, 2014; Clark in Meaningful games: Exploring language with game theory, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014, among others), a general framework uniting game-theoretic pragmatics and quantitative sociolinguistics has yet to be developed. This paper constructs such a framework through giving a formalization of the Third Wave approach to the meaning of variation using signalling games and a probabilistic approach to speaker/listener beliefs of the kind commonly used in the Bayesian game-theoretic pragmatics framework :3–44, 2016, for recent overviews).

Mar 14th 2019 GMT

1. Occasion-Sensitive Semantics for Objective Predicates.Tamara Dobler - forthcoming - Linguistics and Philosophy:1-24.
   In this paper I propose a partition semantics for sentences containing objective predicates that takes into account the phenomenon of occasion-sensitivity associated with so-called Travis cases. The key idea is that the set of worlds in which a sentence is true has a more complex structure as a result of different ways in which it is made true. Different ways may have different capacities to support the attainment of a contextually salient domain goal. I suggest that goal-conduciveness decides whether some utterance of a sentence is accepted as true on a particular occasion at a given world. The utterance will not be accepted as true at a world which belongs to a truth-maker which is less conducive to a contextually salient goal than other truth-makers. Finally, the proposed occasion-sensitive semantics is applied to some cases of disagreement and cancellability.

Mar 13th 2019 GMT

1. Fähigkeiten Und Dispositionen (Draft).Romy Jaster - manuscript
   In diesem Aufsatz argumentiere ich für eine teleologische Fähigkeitstheorie, derzufolge Fähigkeiten Dispositionen zu zweckmäßigem Handeln sind.
2. The Labyrinth of Mind and World: Beyond Internalism-Externalism.Sanjit Chakraborty - forthcoming - Routledge.
   
   

Mar 12th 2019 GMT

1. Static and Dynamic Vector Semantics for Lambda Calculus Models of Natural Language.Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh & Reinhard Muskens - 2018 - Journal of Language Modelling 6 (2):319-351.
   Vector models of language are based on the contextual aspects of language, the distributions of words and how they co-occur in text. Truth conditional models focus on the logical aspects of language, compositional properties of words and how they compose to form sentences. In the truth conditional approach, the denotation of a sentence determines its truth conditions, which can be taken to be a truth value, a set of possible worlds, a context change potential, or similar. In the vector models, the degree of co-occurrence of words in context determines how similar the meanings of words are. In this paper, we put these two models together and develop a vector semantics for language based on the simply typed lambda calculus models of natural language. We provide two types of vector semantics: a static one that uses techniques familiar from the truth conditional tradition and a dynamic one based on a form of dynamic interpretation inspired by Heim’s context change potentials. We show how the dynamic model can be applied to entailment between a corpus and a sentence and provide examples.

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