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Mar 13th 2019 GMT

1. 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.
2. Frege's Conception of Truth: Two Readings.Junyeol Kim - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
   The object reading of Frege's conception of truth holds that, for him, truth is an object---the truth-value the True. Greimann refutes the object reading and suggests an alternative reading. According to his suggested reading, Frege is the proponent of the assertion theory of truth the main thesis of which is that truth is what is expressed by the form of assertoric sentences and truth as such is neither an object nor a property. I argue that Frege cannot accept the assertion theory. I also defend the object reading by elaborating it further and replying to Greimann's criticisms.

Mar 8th 2019 GMT

1. Unstructured Content.Dirk Kindermann, Peter Van Elswyk & Andy Egan (eds.) - forthcoming - Oxford University Press.
   
   

Mar 7th 2019 GMT

1. Practical Moore Sentences.Matthew Mandelkern - forthcoming - Noûs.
   I discuss what I call practical Moore sentences: sentences like ‘You must close your door, but I don’t know whether you will’, which combine an order together with an avowal of agnosticism about whether the order will be obeyed. I show that practical Moore sentences are generally infelicitous. But this infelicity is surprising: it seems like there should be nothing wrong with giving someone an order while acknowledging that you do not know whether it will obeyed. I suggest that this infelicity points to a striking psychological fact, with potentially broad ramifications concerning the structure of norms of speech acts: namely, when giving an order, we must act as if we believe we will be obeyed.
2. Russell’s Eccentricity.J. P. Smit - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-19.
   Russell claims that ordinary proper names are eccentric, i.e. that the semantic referent of a name is determined by the descriptive condition that the individual utterer of the name associates with the name. This is deeply puzzling, for the evidence that names are subject to interpersonal coordination seems irrefutable. One way of making sense of Russell’s view would be to claim that he has been systematically misinterpreted and did not, in fact, offer a semantic theory at all. Such a view is put forward in Sainsbury Departing from Frege, Routledge, London, 2002). Sainsbury claims that Russellian descriptivism is not the theory that the thought in the mind of the speaker determines the semantic reference of a name, but simply a theory about the thought in the mind of the speaker using a name. I argue that the truth is subtly different, and points the way towards an intuitive explanation of Russell’s eccentricity.

Mar 6th 2019 GMT

1. Perspectival Control and Obviation in Directive Clauses.Adrian Stegovec - forthcoming - Natural Language Semantics:1-48.
   The paper proposes a new type of control configuration: perspectival control. This involves control of a non-argument PRO that combines with a directive modal operator in the Mood domain. This PRO encodes the individual to whom the public commitments associated with the modal are anchored, and its presence can be detected in the syntax through a subject obviation effect. The empirical focus of the paper are Slovenian directive clauses, but the analysis is shown to also have implications for analyses of other languages, as well as theories of directive clauses and the representation of discourse-related information in the syntax.
2. Altruistic Deception.Jonathan Birch - forthcoming - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences.
   Altruistic deception (or the telling of “white lies”) is common in humans. Does it also exist in non-human animals? On some definitions of deception, altruistic deception is impossible by definition, whereas others make it too easy by counting useful-but-ambiguous information as deceptive. I argue for a definition that makes altruistic deception possible in principle without trivializing it. On my proposal, deception requires the strategic exploitation of a receiver by a sender, where “exploitation” implies that the sender elicits a behaviour in the receiver that is beneficial in a different type of situation and is expressed only because the signal raises the probability, from the receiver’s standpoint, of that type of situation. I then offer an example of a real signal that is deceptive in this sense, and yet potentially altruistic (and certainly cooperative): the purr call of the pied babbler. Fledglings associate purr calls with food, and adults exploit this learned association, in the absence of food, to lead fledglings away from predators following an alarm call. I conclude by considering why altruistic deception is apparently so rare in non-human animals.

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.