Mary Hay Scrutton Midgley, of Somerville, and Herbert Paul Grice, of Christ Church

Speranza

Mary Midgley, Moral Philosopher 

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Mary Midgley.

The biologist Stephen Rose called her “a philosopher with what many have come to admire, and some to fear, as one of the sharpest critical pens in the West.”

CreditLeon Harris/eyevine, via Redux

Mary Midgley is a leading moral philosopher who became an accessible, persistent and sometimes witty critic of the view that modern science should be the sole arbiter of reality.

Midgley, who taught at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne for years, wrote more than a dozen essays for a general audience.

Her last essay, “What Is Philosophy For?,” was published by Bloomsbury Academic.

The publisher said in a statement: “Its quality and remarkable insights do not fall short of the brilliant mind that penned it.”

The biologist Stephen Rose, writing in The Times Literary Supplement called Midgley “a philosopher with what many have come to admire, and some to fear, as one of the sharpest critical pens in the West.”

Andrew Brown, writing in The Guardian, called her “the foremost scourge of scientific pretension in this country.”

Midgley unhesitatingly challenged scientists like the entomologist Edward O. Wilson and the biologist, and noted atheist, Richard Dawkins. 

By her lights they practiced a rigid “academic imperialism” when they tried to extend scientific findings to the social sciences and the humanities.

In place of what she saw as their constricted, “reductionistic” worldview, she proposed a holistic approach in which “many maps” — that is, varied ways of looking at life — are used to get to the nub of what is real.

One challenge came in her first essay, “Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature,” based on a conference she had organized on that slippery, perennial subject at Cornell.

She was later asked to revise her original manuscript to reflect her critical reaction to Wilson’s best-selling book, “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis” (“a volume the size of a paving stone,” she wrote later in a well-received autobiography, “The Owl of Minerva”). 

She described the field of sociobiology as a kind of reactionary “biological Thatcherism.”

Sociobiology — the application of gene-centered theories of natural selection to the social life of organisms — was not itself overly controversial, especially, as Wilson originally used it, in the study of ants and insects. 

Midgley, given her own interest in emphasizing humans’ animal nature — that “we are not, and do not need to be, disembodied intellects” — praised parts of Wilson’s essay.

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Midgley’s first essay, “Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature,” was well-received. 

What provoked her and others was his hypothesis that the tenets of sociobiology could be applied to humans. 

That idea, according to scholars, threatened to radically revise generally accepted notions of human nature.

“The term ‘human nature’ is suspect because it does suggest cure-all explanations, sweeping theories that man is basically sexual, basically selfish or acquisitive, basically evil or basically good,” Midgley wrote in “Beast and Man.”

In “The Owl of Minerva,” she wrote that the need to address Wilson’s concepts had distracted readers from her crucial topic: 

“the meaning of rationality itself — the fact that reason cannot mean just deductive logic but must cover what makes sense for beings who have a certain sort of emotional nature.”

She adds that “Beast and Man” remains “the trunk out of which all my various ideas branched.”

Midgley took pains to distinguish between the important contributions of science and the philosophy of “scientism,” in which “prophets,” she writes, decree that science is “not just omnicompetent but unchallenged, the sole form of rational thinking.”

“We do not need to esteem science less,” she continued. 

“We need to stop isolating it artificially from the rest of our mental life.”

Midgley did not align herself with any specific school of thought.

She wrote that moral philosophy and plain “common sense” often covered the same ground. 

She targeted what she saw as some of the basic errors of modern scientific orthodoxy, including misplaced objectivity, the exclusion of purpose and motive, and the propensity to depersonalize nature.

The very titles of her essays — among them “Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning” and “Evolution as a Religion” — and even irreverent chapter headings, like “Knowledge Considered as a Weed Killer,” conveyed her stance against what she called the “parsimonious” worldview of science.

In The Journal of Philosophy, she issues a scathing critique of Dawkins’s widely popular essay “The Selfish Gene,” taking issue with what she called his “crude, cheap, blurred genetics.”

In that essay, Dawkins suggests that evolution is a product of an innate drive in genes to perpetuate themselves, “selfishly,” through the vehicle of a given species, and that the behavior of living things is in service to their genes.

Midgley explains her disagreement years later in The Guardian, writing: 

“‘Selfish’ is an odd word because its meaning is almost entirely negative.”

“It does not mean ‘prudent, promoting one’s own interest.’”

“It means ‘not promoting other people’s’ or, as the dictionary puts it, ‘devoted to or concerned with one’s own advantage to the exclusion of regard for others.’”

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Notable Deaths 2018: Books A memorial to those who lost their lives in 2018

She refutes the notion that selfishness underpinned all life.

“Just as there would be no word for white if everything was white, there could surely be no word for selfish if everyone was always selfish,” she writes, adding, “Selfishness cannot, then, be a universal condition.”

In a career as a philosopher, Midgley addressed a great number of subjects. 

Evolution, the importance of animals, the role of science in society, cognitive science, feminism and human nature all came under her scrutiny.

She ranged more widely in “Science and Poetry,” in which she considered the place of the imagination in human life. 

She found excesses of materialism and fatalism in human life, discussed the unusual compatibility of physics and religion, and approved of philosophical and metaphorical aspects of the Gaia hypothesis, which looks at the earth as a living system.

“With this essay,” Brian Appleyard writes in The Sunday Times of London, “Midgley establishes herself as the most cool, coherent and sane critic of contemporary superstition that we have.”

She was born Mary Scrutton in Dulwich, England, to Lesley Hay and Tom Scrutton. 

Her father, a church curate, became a chaplain of King’s, Cambridge, before the family moved to Greenford, where he became vicar and where Mary and her brother, Hugh (later a prominent art gallery director), grew up.

When she was 12 Mary attended Downe, a boarding school that had begun in Charles Darwin’s home, though it later moved to Ash Green, near Newbury.

She began classes at Oxford and quickly found herself in a heady academic environment. 

Her fellow philosophy students included Iris Murdoch, who became a good friend and eventually a Booker Prize-winning novelist; Philippa Foot, who became a leading moral philosopher; and Elizabeth Anscombe, who later went by G. E. M. Anscombe as a published philosopher and was a prominent disciple of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s.

Scrutton married the philosopher Geoffrey Midgley, whom she had met at Oxford. 

The couple had three sons, during which time she reviewed novels for The New Statesman.

In addition to her son Tom Midgley, she is survived by two other sons, David and Martin, and three grandchildren. 

David Midgley edited the book “The Essential Mary Midgley.”

Midgley returned to teaching philosophy as a lecturer at Newcastle.

She later became senior lecturer. 

It was while teaching there that she began publishing the work for which she would be acclaimed.

Not that she envisioned a long career of expounding on her philosophical views in a succession of books. 

She wrote more as a critic, she suggested, responding to what she heard or read.

“I keep thinking that I shall have no more to say,” she told The Guardian, “and then finding some wonderfully idiotic doctrine which I can contradict.”

******

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Mary Scrutton Midgley and Herbert Paul Grice

Disimplicature

Speranza


alerts

Oct 11th 2018 GMT

1. Moore's Paradox and Assertion.Clayton Littlejohn - forthcoming - In Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford University Press.
   If I were to say, “Agnes does not know that it is raining, but it is,” this seems like a perfectly coherent way of describing Agnes’s epistemic position. If I were to add, “And I don’t know if it is, either,” this seems quite strange. In this chapter, we shall look at some statements that seem, in some sense, contradictory, even though it seems that these statements can express propositions that are contingently true or false. Moore thought it was paradoxical that statements that can express true propositions or contingently false propositions should nevertheless seem absurd like this. If we can account for the absurdity, we shall solve Moore’s Paradox. In this chapter, we shall look at Moore’s proposals and more recent discussions of Moorean absurd thought and speech.
2. Abominable KK Failures.Kevin Dorst - forthcoming - Mind.
   KK is the thesis that if you can know p, you can know that you can know p. Though it’s unpopular, a flurry of considerations have recently emerged in its favor. Here we add fuel to the fire: standard resources allow us to show that any failure of KK will lead to the knowability and assertability of abominable indicative conditionals of the form, ‘If I don’t know it, p.’ Such conditionals are manifestly not assertable—a fact that KK defenders can easily explain. I survey a variety of KK-denying responses and find them wanting. Those who object to the knowability of such conditionals must either (i) deny the possibility of harmony between knowledge and belief, or (ii) deny well-supported connections between conditional and unconditional attitudes. Meanwhile, those who grant knowability owe us an explanation of such conditionals’ unassertability—yet no successful explanations are on offer. Upshot: we have new evidence for KK.
3. Assertions of Clarity & Raising Awareness.Phil Crone - forthcoming - Journal of Semantics.
   
   
4. Empty-Set Effects in Quantifier Interpretation.Oliver Bott, Fabian Schlotterbeck & Udo Klein - forthcoming - Journal of Semantics.
   
   

Oct 10th 2018 GMT

1. Shared Modes of Presentation.Simon Prosser - forthcoming - Mind and Language.
   What is it for two people to think of an object, natural kind or other entity under the same mode of presentation (MOP)? This has seemed a particularly difficult question for advocates of the Mental Files approach, the Language of Thought, or other ‘atomistic’ theories. In this paper I propose a simple answer. I first argue that, by parallel with the synchronic intrapersonal case, the sharing of a MOP should involve a certain kind of epistemic transparency between the token thoughts of the two thinkers. I then explain how shared words help bring about this transparency. Finally, I show how this account can be extended for thoughts expressed using demonstratives or indexicals.
2. Subjunctive Conditionals’ Local Contexts.John Mackay - forthcoming - Linguistics and Philosophy:1-15.
   Philippe Schlenker gives a method of deriving local contexts from an expression’s classical semantics. In this paper I show that this method, when applied to the traditional variably strict semantics for subjunctive conditionals of Robert Stalnaker, David Lewis, and Angelika Kratzer, delivers an empirically incorrect prediction. The prediction is that the antecedent of a conditional should have the whole domain of possible worlds as its local context and therefore should be allowed to have only necessary presuppositions. In the later part of the paper, I suggest the outlines of a solution to the problem. The solution involves adding a shifting contextual restriction on the domain of possible worlds.

Oct 9th 2018 GMT

1. The Hierarchy of Fregean Senses.Ori Simchen - forthcoming - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy.
   The question whether Frege’s theory of indirect reference enforces an infinite hierarchy of senses has been hotly debated in the secondary literature. Perhaps the most influential treatment of the issue is that of Burge (1979), who offers an argument for the hierarchy from rather minimal Fregean assumptions. I argue that this argument, endorsed by many, does not itself enforce an infinite hierarchy of senses. I conclude that whether or not the theory of indirect reference can avail itself of only finitely many senses is pending further theoretical development.
2. Proof and Falsity: A Logical Investigation.Nils Kürbis - 2019 - Cambridge University Press.
   This book argues that the meaning of negation, perhaps the most important logical constant, cannot be defined within the framework of the most comprehensive theory of proof-theoretic semantics, as formulated in the influential work of Michael Dummett and Dag Prawitz. Nils Kürbis examines three approaches that have attempted to solve the problem – defining negation in terms of metaphysical incompatibility; treating negation as an undefinable primitive; and defining negation in terms of a speech act of denial – and concludes that they cannot adequately do so. He argues that whereas proof-theoretic semantics usually only appeals to a notion of truth, it also needs to appeal to a notion of falsity, and proposes a system of natural deduction in which both are incorporated. Offering new perspectives on negation, denial and falsity, his book will be important for readers working on logic, metaphysics and the philosophy of language.

Oct 8th 2018 GMT

1. The First-Person Plural and Immunity to Error.Joel Smith - forthcoming - Disputatio.
   I argue for the view that some we-thoughts are immune to error through misidentification (IEM) relative to the first-person plural pronoun. To prepare the ground for this argument I defend an account of the semantics of ‘we’ and note the variety of different uses of that term. I go on to defend the IEM of a certain range of we-thoughts against a number of objections.

Oct 7th 2018 GMT

1. Russellians Can Solve the Problem of Empty Names with Nonsingular Propositions.Thomas Hodgson - forthcoming - Synthese:1-23.
   Views that treat the contents of sentences as structured, Russellian propositions face a problem with empty names. It seems that those sorts of things cannot be the contents of sentences containing such names. I motivate and defend a solution to the problem according to which a sentence may have a singular proposition as its content at one time, and a nonsingular one at another. When the name is empty the content is a nonsingular Russellian structured proposition; when the name is not empty the content is a singular Russellian structured proposition.

Oct 6th 2018 GMT

1. Assessing Relevance.Fabrizio Macagno - 2018 - Lingua210:42-64.
   
   

Oct 5th 2018 GMT

1. Linguistic Bodies. The Continuity Between Life and Language.Ezequiel Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari & Hanne De Jaegher - forthcoming - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
   A novel theoretical framework for an embodied, non-representational approach to language that extends and deepens enactive theory, bridging the gap between sensorimotor skills and language.Linguistic Bodies offers a fully embodied and fully social treatment of human language without positing mental representations. The authors present the first coherent, overarching theory that connects dynamical explanations of action and perception with language. Arguing from the assumption of a deep continuity between life and mind, they show that this continuity extends to language. Expanding and deepening enactive theory, they offer a constitutive account of language and the co-emergent phenomena of personhood, reflexivity, social normativity, and ideality. Language, they argue, is not something we add to a range of existing cognitive capacities but a new way of being embodied. Each of us is a linguistic body in a community of other linguistic bodies. The book describes three distinct yet entangled kinds of human embodiment, organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective; it traces the emergence of linguistic sensitivities and introduces the novel concept of linguistic bodies; and it explores the implications of living as linguistic bodies in perpetual becoming, applying the concept of linguistic bodies to questions of language acquisition, parenting, autism, grammar, symbol, narrative, and gesture, and to such ethical concerns as microaggression, institutional speech, and pedagogy.

Oct 4th 2018 GMT

1. Demonstratives, Definite Descriptions and Non-Redundancy.Kyle H. Blumberg - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
   In some sentences, demonstratives can be substituted with definite descriptions without any change in meaning. In light of this, many have maintained that demonstratives are just a type of definite description. However, several theorists have drawn attention to a range of cases where definite descriptions are acceptable, but their demonstrative counterparts are not. Some have tried to account for this data by appealing to presupposition. I argue that such presuppositional approaches are problematic, and present a pragmatic account of the target contrasts. On this approach, demonstratives take two arguments and generally require that the first, covert argument is non-redundant with respect to the second, overt argument. I derive this condition through an economy principle discussed by Schlenker (2005).
2. We Belong Together? A Plea for Modesty in Modal Plural Logic.Simon Hewitt - manuscript
   
   
3. Silencing and Assertion.Alessandra Tanesini - 2019 - In Sanford Goldberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
   Theories of assertion must explain how silencing is possible. This chapter defends an account of assertion in terms of normative commitments on the grounds that it provides the most plausible analysis of how individuals might be silenced when attempting to make assertions. The chapter first offers an account of the nature of silencing and defends the view that it can occur even in contexts where speakers’ communicative intentions are understood by their audience. Second, it outlines some of the normative commitments characteristic of assertion when used in the speech act of telling;. This commitment view of assertion is then used to explain silencing as a matter of being deprived of the ability to make some of the commitments one is trying to acquire. Finally, the main rivals of the commitment view of assertion endorsed here are shown to be unable to account for silencing, at least when they are considered in their purest form.

   
   

Disimplicature

Speranza

alerts

Oct 4th 2018 GMT

1. Demonstratives, Definite Descriptions and Non-Redundancy.Kyle H. Blumberg - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
   In some sentences, demonstratives can be substituted with definite descriptions without any change in meaning. In light of this, many have maintained that demonstratives are just a type of definite description. However, several theorists have drawn attention to a range of cases where definite descriptions are acceptable, but their demonstrative counterparts are not. Some have tried to account for this data by appealing to presupposition. I argue that such presuppositional approaches are problematic, and present a pragmatic account of the target contrasts. On this approach, demonstratives take two arguments and generally require that the first, covert argument is non-redundant with respect to the second, overt argument. I derive this condition through an economy principle discussed by Schlenker (2005).
2. We Belong Together? A Plea for Modesty in Modal Plural Logic.Simon Hewitt - manuscript
   
   
3. Silencing and Assertion.Alessandra Tanesini - forthcoming - In Sanford Goldberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
   Theories of assertion must explain how silencing is possible. This chapter defends an account of assertion in terms of normative commitments on the grounds that it provides the most plausible analysis of how individuals might be silenced when attempting to make assertions. The chapter first offers an account of the nature of silencing and defends the view that it can occur even in contexts where speakers’ communicative intentions are understood by their audience. Second, it outlines some of the normative commitments characteristic of assertion when used in the speech act of telling;. This commitment view of assertion is then used to explain silencing as a matter of being deprived of the ability to make some of the commitments one is trying to acquire. Finally, the main rivals of the commitment view of assertion endorsed here are shown to be unable to account for silencing, at least when they are considered in their purest form.

Oct 3rd 2018 GMT

1. Common Nouns as Variables: Evidence From Conservativity and the Temperature Paradox.Peter Nathan Lasersohn - 2018 - In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21. pp. 731-746.
   Common nouns and noun phrases have usually been analyzed semantically as predicates. In quantified sentences, these predicates take variables as arguments. This paper develops and defends an analysis in which common nouns and noun phrases themselves are treated as variables, rather than as predicates taking variables as arguments. Several apparent challenges for this view will be addressed, including the modal non-rigidity of common nouns. Two major advantages to treating common nouns as variables will be presented: Such an analysis predicts that all nominal quantification is conservative, rather than requiring conservativity to be stipulated as a constraint on determiner denotations; and it makes possible some improvements to the analysis of the temperature paradox, allowing for quantificational examples without adding a spurious layer of modal variability. 

Sep 30th 2018 GMT

1. Sticky Situations: 'Force' and Quantifier Domains.Matthew Mandelkern & Jonathan Phillips- forthcoming - Semantics and Linguistic Theory 28.
   When do we judge that someone was forced to do what they did? One relatively well-established finding is that subjects tend to judge that agents were not forced to do actions when those actions violate norms. A surprising discovery of Young & Phillips 2011 is that this effect seems to disappear when we frame the relevant ‘force’-claim in the active rather than passive voice ('X forced Y to φ ' vs. 'Y was forced to φ by X'). Young and Phillips found a similar contrast when the scenario itself shifts attention from Y (the forcee) to X (the forcer). We propose that these effects can be (at least partly) explained by way of the role of attention in the setting of quantifier domains which in turn play a role in the evaluation of ‘force’- claims. We argue for this hypothesis by way of an experiment which shows that sequences of active vs. passive ‘force’-claims display the characteristic “stickiness” of quantifier domain expansion, using a paradigm which we argue provides a useful general paradigm for testing quantifier domain hypotheses. Finally, we sketch a semantics for ‘force’ which we argue is suitable for capturing these effects.

Sep 28th 2018 GMT

1. Why We Need Corpus Linguistics in Intuition-Based Semantics.Leonid Tarasov - forthcoming - Grazer Philosophische Studien 95.
   The following method is popular in some areas of philosophy and linguistics when trying to describe the semantics of a given sentence Φ. Present ordinary speakers with scenarios that involve an utterance of Φ, ask them whether these utterances are felicitous or infelicitous and then construct a semantics that assigns the truth-value True to felicitous utterances of Φ and the truth-value False to infelicitous utterances of Φ. The author makes five observations about this intuition-based approach to semantics; their upshot is that it should be revised in favour of a more nuanced method. The author suggests that this method should be based on corpus linguistics and makes some tentative remarks about what it might look like and which questions we need to address in order to develop it.
2. Embedded Attitudes.Kyle H. Blumberg & Ben Holguín - forthcoming - Journal of Semantics.
   This paper presents a puzzle involving embedded attitude reports. We resolve the puzzle by arguing that attitude verbs take restricted readings: in some environments the denotation of attitude verbs can be restricted by a given proposition. For example, when these verbs are embedded in the consequent of a conditional, they can be restricted by the proposition expressed by the conditional’s antecedent. We formulate and motivate two conditions on the availability of verb restrictions: (i) a constraint that ties the content of restrictions to the “dynamic effects” of sentential connectives and (ii) a constraint that limits the availability of restriction effects to present tense verbs with first-person subjects. However, we also present some cases that make trouble for these conditions, and outline some possible ways of modifying the view to account for the recalcitrant data. We conclude with a brief discussion of some of the connections between our semantics for attitude verbs and issues concerning epistemic modals and theories of knowledge.

Sep 27th 2018 GMT

1. What 'Must' Adds.Matthew Mandelkern - forthcoming - Linguistics and Philosophy.
   There is a difference between the conditions in which one can felicitously use a ‘must’- claim like (1-a) and those in which one can use the corresponding claim without the ‘must’, as in (1-b):(1) a. It must be raining out. b. It is raining out.
   It is difficult to pin down just what this difference amounts to. And it is difficult to account for this difference, since assertions of 'Must p' and assertions of p alone seem to have the same basic goal: namely, communicating that p is true. In this paper I give a new account of the conversational role of ‘must’. I begin by arguing that a ‘must’-claim is felicitous only if there is a shared argument for the proposition it embeds. I then argue that this generalization, which I call Support, can explain the more familiar generalization that ‘must’-claims are felicitous only if the speaker’s evidence for them is in some sense indirect. Finally, I propose a pragmatic derivation of Support as a manner implicature.
   

   
   

Disimplicature

Speranza

GMT

1. Demonstratives, Definite Descriptions and Non-Redundancy.Kyle H. Blumberg - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
   In some sentences, demonstratives can be substituted with definite descriptions without any change in meaning. In light of this, many have maintained that demonstratives are just a type of definite description. However, several theorists have drawn attention to a range of cases where definite descriptions are acceptable, but their demonstrative counterparts are not. Some have tried to account for this data by appealing to presupposition. I argue that such presuppositional approaches are problematic, and present a pragmatic account of the target contrasts. On this approach, demonstratives take two arguments and generally require that the first, covert argument is non-redundant with respect to the second, overt argument. I derive this condition through an economy principle discussed by Schlenker (2005).
2. We Belong Together? A Plea for Modesty in Modal Plural Logic.Simon Hewitt - manuscript
   
   
3. Silencing and Assertion.Alessandra Tanesini - forthcoming - In Sanford Goldberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Assertion. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
   Theories of assertion must explain how silencing is possible. This chapter defends an account of assertion in terms of normative commitments on the grounds that it provides the most plausible analysis of how individuals might be silenced when attempting to make assertions. The chapter first offers an account of the nature of silencing and defends the view that it can occur even in contexts where speakers’ communicative intentions are understood by their audience. Second, it outlines some of the normative commitments characteristic of assertion when used in the speech act of telling;. This commitment view of assertion is then used to explain silencing as a matter of being deprived of the ability to make some of the commitments one is trying to acquire. Finally, the main rivals of the commitment view of assertion endorsed here are shown to be unable to account for silencing, at least when they are considered in their purest form.

Oct 3rd 2018 GMT

1. Common Nouns as Variables: Evidence From Conservativity and the Temperature Paradox.Peter Nathan Lasersohn - 2018 - In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21. pp. 731-746.
   Common nouns and noun phrases have usually been analyzed semantically as predicates. In quantified sentences, these predicates take variables as arguments. This paper develops and defends an analysis in which common nouns and noun phrases themselves are treated as variables, rather than as predicates taking variables as arguments. Several apparent challenges for this view will be addressed, including the modal non-rigidity of common nouns. Two major advantages to treating common nouns as variables will be presented: Such an analysis predicts that all nominal quantification is conservative, rather than requiring conservativity to be stipulated as a constraint on determiner denotations; and it makes possible some improvements to the analysis of the temperature paradox, allowing for quantificational examples without adding a spurious layer of modal variability. 

Sep 30th 2018 GMT

1. Sticky Situations: 'Force' and Quantifier Domains.Matthew Mandelkern & Jonathan Phillips- forthcoming - Semantics and Linguistic Theory 28.
   When do we judge that someone was forced to do what they did? One relatively well-established finding is that subjects tend to judge that agents were not forced to do actions when those actions violate norms. A surprising discovery of Young & Phillips 2011 is that this effect seems to disappear when we frame the relevant ‘force’-claim in the active rather than passive voice ('X forced Y to φ ' vs. 'Y was forced to φ by X'). Young and Phillips found a similar contrast when the scenario itself shifts attention from Y (the forcee) to X (the forcer). We propose that these effects can be (at least partly) explained by way of the role of attention in the setting of quantifier domains which in turn play a role in the evaluation of ‘force’- claims. We argue for this hypothesis by way of an experiment which shows that sequences of active vs. passive ‘force’-claims display the characteristic “stickiness” of quantifier domain expansion, using a paradigm which we argue provides a useful general paradigm for testing quantifier domain hypotheses. Finally, we sketch a semantics for ‘force’ which we argue is suitable for capturing these effects.

Sep 28th 2018 GMT

1. Why We Need Corpus Linguistics in Intuition-Based Semantics.Leonid Tarasov - forthcoming - Grazer Philosophische Studien 95.
   The following method is popular in some areas of philosophy and linguistics when trying to describe the semantics of a given sentence Φ. Present ordinary speakers with scenarios that involve an utterance of Φ, ask them whether these utterances are felicitous or infelicitous and then construct a semantics that assigns the truth-value True to felicitous utterances of Φ and the truth-value False to infelicitous utterances of Φ. The author makes five observations about this intuition-based approach to semantics; their upshot is that it should be revised in favour of a more nuanced method. The author suggests that this method should be based on corpus linguistics and makes some tentative remarks about what it might look like and which questions we need to address in order to develop it.
2. Embedded Attitudes.Kyle H. Blumberg & Ben Holguín - forthcoming - Journal of Semantics.
   This paper presents a puzzle involving embedded attitude reports. We resolve the puzzle by arguing that attitude verbs take restricted readings: in some environments the denotation of attitude verbs can be restricted by a given proposition. For example, when these verbs are embedded in the consequent of a conditional, they can be restricted by the proposition expressed by the conditional’s antecedent. We formulate and motivate two conditions on the availability of verb restrictions: (i) a constraint that ties the content of restrictions to the “dynamic effects” of sentential connectives and (ii) a constraint that limits the availability of restriction effects to present tense verbs with first-person subjects. However, we also present some cases that make trouble for these conditions, and outline some possible ways of modifying the view to account for the recalcitrant data. We conclude with a brief discussion of some of the connections between our semantics for attitude verbs and issues concerning epistemic modals and theories of knowledge.

Sep 27th 2018 GMT

1. What 'Must' Adds.Matthew Mandelkern - forthcoming - Linguistics and Philosophy.
   There is a difference between the conditions in which one can felicitously use a ‘must’- claim like (1-a) and those in which one can use the corresponding claim without the ‘must’, as in (1-b):(1) a. It must be raining out. b. It is raining out.
   It is difficult to pin down just what this difference amounts to. And it is difficult to account for this difference, since assertions of 'Must p' and assertions of p alone seem to have the same basic goal: namely, communicating that p is true. In this paper I give a new account of the conversational role of ‘must’. I begin by arguing that a ‘must’-claim is felicitous only if there is a shared argument for the proposition it embeds. I then argue that this generalization, which I call Support, can explain the more familiar generalization that ‘must’-claims are felicitous only if the speaker’s evidence for them is in some sense indirect. Finally, I propose a pragmatic derivation of Support as a manner implicature.
   

   
   

Disimplicature

Speranza

GMT

1. What 'Must' Adds.Matthew Mandelkern - forthcoming - Linguistics and Philosophy.
   There is a difference between the conditions in which one can felicitously use a ‘must’- claim like (1-a) and those in which one can use the corresponding claim without the ‘must’, as in (1-b):(1) a. It must be raining out. b. It is raining out.
   It is difficult to pin down just what this difference amounts to. And it is difficult to account for this difference, since assertions of 'Must p' and assertions of p alone seem to have the same basic goal: namely, communicating that p is true. In this paper I give a new account of the conversational role of ‘must’. I begin by arguing that a ‘must’-claim is felicitous only if there is a shared argument for the proposition it embeds. I then argue that this generalization, which I call Support, can explain the more familiar generalization that ‘must’-claims are felicitous only if the speaker’s evidence for them is in some sense indirect. Finally, I propose a pragmatic derivation of Support as a manner implicature.
2. Embedded Attitudes.Kyle H. Blumberg & Ben Holguín - forthcoming - Journal of Semantics.
   This paper presents a puzzle involving embedded attitude reports. We resolve the puzzle by arguing that attitude verbs take restricted readings: in some environments the denotation of attitude verbs can be restricted by a given proposition. For example, when these verbs are embedded in the consequent of a conditional, they can be restricted by the proposition expressed by the conditional’s antecedent. We formulate and motivate two conditions on the availability of verb restrictions: (i) a constraint that ties the content of restrictions to the “dynamic effects” of sentential connectives and (ii) a constraint that limits the availability of restriction effects to present tense verbs with first-person subjects. However, we also present some cases that make trouble for these conditions, and outline some possible ways of modifying the view to account for the recalcitrant data. We conclude with a brief discussion of some of the connections between our semantics for attitude verbs and issues concerning epistemic modals and theories of knowledge.

Sep 26th 2018 GMT

1. A Category Semantics.Paul Symington - 2018 - In Paul Hackett (ed.), Mereologies, Ontologies, and Facets. New York: Lexington Books. pp. 65-85.
   In this paper, I present a categorial theory of meaning which asserts that the meaning of a sentence is the function from the actualization of some potentiality or the potentiality of some actuality to the truth of the sentence. I argue that it builds on the virtues of David Lewis’s Possible World Semantics but advances beyond problems that Lewis’s theory faces with its distinctly Aristotelian turn toward actuality and potentiality.

Sep 25th 2018 GMT

1. Building Complex Events: The Case of Sicilian Doubly Inflected Construction.Fabio Del Prete & Giuseppina Todaro - forthcoming - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
   We examine the Doubly Inflected Construction of Sicilian (DIC; Cardinaletti and Giusti 2001, 2003, Cruschina 2013), in which a motion verb V1 from a restricted set is followed by an event verb V2 and both verbs are inflected for the same person and tense features. The interpretation of DIC involves a complex event which behaves as a single, integrated event by linguistic tests. Based on data drawn from different sources, we argue that DIC is an asymmetrical serial verb construction (Aikhenvald 2006). We propose an analysis of DIC in which V1 and V2 enter the semantic composition as lexical verbs, with V1 contributing a motion event and projecting a theme and a goal argument which are identified, respectively, with an agent and a location argument projected by V2. A morphosyntactic mechanism of feature-spread requires that the person and tense features be realized both on V1 and on V2, while, semantically, these features are interpreted only once, in a position from which they take scope over the complex predicate resulting from the combination of V1 and V2. The semantic analysis is based on an operation of event concatenation, defined over spatio-temporally contiguous events which share specific participants, and is implemented in a neo-Davidsonian framework (Parsons 1990).

Sep 24th 2018 GMT

1. Knowledge-Yielding Communication.Andrew Peet - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
   A satisfactory theory of linguistic communication must explain how it is that, through the interpersonal exchange of auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli, the communicative preconditions for the acquisition of testimonial knowledge regularly come to be satisfied. Without an account of knowledge-yielding communication this success condition for linguistic theorizing is left opaque, and we are left with an incomplete understanding of testimony, and communication more generally, as a source of knowledge. This paper argues that knowledge-yielding communication should be modelled on knowledge itself. It is argued that knowledge-yielding communication occurs iff interlocutors coordinate on truth values in a non-lucky and non-deviant way. This account is able to do significant explanatory work: it sheds light on the nature of referential communication, and it allows us to capture, in an informative way, the sense in which interlocutors must entertain similar propositions in order to communicate successfully.
2. Gricean Communication, Language Development, and Animal Minds.Richard Moore - forthcoming - Philosophy Compass.
   Humans alone acquire language. According to one influen- tial school of thought, we do this because we possess a uniquely human ability to act with and attribute “Gricean” communicative intentions. A challenge for this view is that attributing communicative intent seems to require cognitive abilities that infant language learners lack. After considering a range of responses to this challenge, I argue that infant language development can be explained, because Gricean communication is cognitively less demanding than many suppose. However, a consequence of this is that abilities for Gricean communication are unlikely to be uniquely human.

Sep 23rd 2018 GMT

1. The Importance of Being Erroneous.Nils Kürbis - forthcoming - Australasian Philosophical Review 2 (3).
   This is a commentary on MM McCabe's "First Chop your logos... Socrates and the sophists on language, logic, and development". In her paper MM analyses Plato's Euthydemos, in which Plato tackles the problem of falsity in a way that takes into account the speaker and complements the Sophist's discussion of what is said. The dialogue looks as if it is merely a demonstration of the silly consequences of eristic combat. And so it is. But a main point of MM's paper is that there is serious philosophy in the Euthydemos, too. MM argues that to counter the sophist brothers Euthydemos and Dionysodoros, Socrates points out that that there are different aspects to the verb 'to say' that run in parallel to the different aspects of the very 'to learn'. So just as there is continuity rather than ambiguity between 'to learn' and 'to understand', so there is continuity between the different aspects of saying. Thus Socrates puts forward a teleological account of both learning and meaning. Following up on some of MM's thoughts, I argue that the sophists subscribe, despite appearance, to a theory of meaning that respects serious and widely accepted philosophical theses on meaning. Forthcoming in the Australasian Philosophical Review. The curator of the volume is Fiona Leigh, and the committee also has Hugh Benson and Tim Clarke. You can find MM's paper as well as the commentaries by Nicholas Denyer and Russell E. Jones and Ravi Sharma (and myself) by registering.

Sep 22nd 2018 GMT

1. Cross-World Comparatives for Modal Realists.Robert Michels - 2018 - Organon F 25 (3):368-391.
   Divers (2014) argues that a Lewisian theory of modality which includes both counterpart theory and modal realism cannot account for the truth of certain intuitively true modal sentences involving cross-world comparatives. The main purpose of this paper is to defend the Lewisian theory against Divers’s challenge by developing a response strategy based on a degree-theoretic treatment of comparatives and by showing that this treatment is compatible with the theory.

Sep 21st 2018 GMT

1. Might Do Better: Flexible Relativism and the QUD.Bob Beddor & Andy Egan - 2018 - Semantics and Pragmatics 11.
   The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group’s information. Relativists often object that contextualism fails to do justice to the way we assess utterances containing epistemic modals for truth or falsity. However, recent empirical work seems to cast doubt on the relativist’s claim, suggesting that ordinary speakers’ judgments about epistemic modals are more closely in line with contextualism than relativism (Knobe & Yalcin 2014; Khoo 2015). This paper furthers the debate by reporting new empirical research revealing a previously overlooked dimension of speakers’ truth-value judgments concerning epistemic modals. Our results show that these judgments vary systematically with the question under discussion in the conversational context in which the utterance is being assessed. We argue that this ‘QUD effect’ is difficult to explain if contextualism is true, but is readily explained by a suitably flexible form of relativism.
2. Semantic Variance.Martín Abreu Zavaleta - 2018 - Dissertation, New York University
   This dissertation argues for Semantic Variance, the thesis that nearly every utterance is such that there is no proposition that more than one languge user takes to be that utterance's truth-conditional content. I argue that Semantic Variance is problematic for standard theories concerning the nature of communication, the epistemic significance of ordinary disputes, the semantics of speech reports, and the nature of linguistic competence. In response to the problems arising from the truth of Semantic Variance, I develop new accounts of the transmission of relevant information, ordinary disputes, and the semantics of speech reports. Towards the end of the dissertation I outline a pluralistic account about the nature of communication and linguistic competence.
3. The Adverbial Theory of Numbers: Some Clarifications.Joongol Kim - forthcoming - Synthese:1-20.
   In a forthcoming paper in this journal, entitled “Bad company objection to Joongol Kim’s adverbial theory of numbers”, Namjoong Kim presents an ingenious Russell-style paradox based on an analogue of Kim’s definition of the number 1, and argues that Kim’s theory needs to provide a criterion of demarcation between acceptable and unacceptable definitions of adverbial entities. This paper addresses this ‘bad company’ objection and some other related issues concerning Kim’s adverbial theory by clarifying the purposes and uses of the formal framework of the theory.
4. Easy Ontology Without Deflationary Metaontology.Daniel Z. Korman - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
   This is a contribution to a symposium on Amie Thomasson’s Ontology Made Easy (2015). Thomasson defends two deflationary theses: that philosophical questions about the existence of numbers, tables, properties, and other disputed entities can all easily be answered, and that there is something wrong with prolonged debates about whether such objects exist. I argue that the first thesis (properly understood) does not by itself entail the second. Rather, the case for deflationary metaontology rests largely on a controversial doctrine about the possible meanings of ‘object’. I challenge Thomasson's argument for that doctrine, and I make a positive case for the availability of the contested, unrestricted use of ‘object’.