Stephen Barker

I offer a new theory of faultless disagreement, according to which truth is absolute (non-relative) but can still be non-objective. What's relative is truth-aptness: a sentence like ‘Vegemite is tasty’ (V) can be truth-accessible and bivalent in one context but not in another. Within a context in which V fails to be bivalent, we can affirm that there is no issue of truth or falsity about V, still disputants, affirming and denying V, were not at fault, since, in their context of assertion V was bivalent. This theory requires a theory of assertion that is a form of cognitive expressivism.

According to Austin, in uttering 'I hereby X' in a performative we are neither asserting nor saying anything true/false-assessable about what we are doing, our Xing. Still in producing the performative utterance we can be said to say we are Xing. So, we have the production of a declarative sentence, that is perfectly meaningful and not lacking in content in any way, that is nevertheless not produced in an assertion nor open to evaluation as true or false, despite the fact that it says something. In this paper, I argue that Austin’s claim about performatives is correct. I then argue that Austin’s thesis about performatives has radical implications for received ideas about role of truth and truth-conditions in the explanatory enterprise known as ‘semantics’.

Any good theory of truth and meaning should provide an account of truth-apt sentences, that is, the class of sentences that are apt for evaluation as true or false. The classical view, which embraces the force-content distinction (FCD), proposes that truth-apt sentences are force-less propositional representations. I argue that the classical view is untenable. I outline two alternative views: (a) truth-apt sentences are asserted sentences and (b) they are utterances defined by certain inferential practices. I argue these conceptions fail. I then develop an adequate theory using global expressivism (GE). In GE, FCD is repudiated and we formulate a theory of truth-apt sentences using an expressivist treatment of truth and the concept of proto-assertion, that is, sentence utterances conceptually dependent on assertion but not assertions.

Time appears to flow. Our experience of change and our own being in time reveals a relentless motion or passage. This apparent time motion is a profound enigma for currently well-known conceptions of time. I argue that they can neither explain it nor explain it away. This book describes a new theory of time that renders temporal passage fully intelligible. It treats time motion seriously by building in motion as a metaphysically fundamental feature of the physical universe, whose principle form is through higher-dimensional space. This motion-first metaphysics then rejects the orthodox view that motion is explained in terms of space and time, but rather uses space and motion to define time. This approach requires rethinking the physicist’s 4D manifold M. The orthodox view is that M is space-time: a vast concrete 4D block locating all things whose 4th-dimension is time. According to the motion-first metaphysics I develop, M is not space-time but instead a pre-physical aspect of a fundamentally dynamic reality. Time is not M’s 4th dimension. Instead time is the ineluctable motion through the 4th-dimension that all persisting things undergo. I argue that my motion-first metaphysics solves puzzles of time, change, and persistence. It’s also consistent with special relativity—time dilation, length contraction, and relativity of simultaneity—although it’s not consistent with the Minkowskian interpretation of M as spacetime.

Are the sculpture and the mass of gold which permanently makes it up one object or two? In this article, we argue that the monist, who answers ‘one object’, cannot accommodate the asymmetry of material constitution. To say ‘the mass of gold materially constitutes the sculpture, whereas the sculpture does not materially constitute the mass of gold’, the monist must treat ‘materially constitutes’ as an Abelardian predicate, whose denotation is sensitive to the linguistic context in which it appears. We motivate this approach in terms of modal analyses of material constitution, but argue that ultimately it fails. The monist must instead accept a deflationary, symmetrical use of ‘materially constitutes’. We argue that this is a serious cost for her approach

Negative facts get a bad press. One reason for this is that it is not clear what negative facts are. We provide a theory of negative facts on which they are no stranger than positive atomic facts. We show that none of the usual arguments hold water against this account. Negative facts exist in the usual sense of existence and conform to an acceptable Eleatic principle. Furthermore, there are good reasons to want them around, including their roles in causation, chance-making and truth-making, and in constituting holes and edges.

Frege’s distinction between force and sense is a central pillar of modern thinking about meaning. This is the idea that a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One is the proposition P that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it. The other is S’s illocutionary force. The force/sense distinction is associated with another thesis, the embedding principle, that implies that the only content that embeds in compound sentences is propositional content. We argue that both the Force/Sense distinction and the principle of embedding are seriously challenged by figurative language, and irony in particular. We conclude that theorists need to go back to the drawing board about the nature of illocutionary acts.

In this chapter I consider the prospects of globalizing expressivism. Expressivism is a position in the philosophy of language that questions the central role of representation in a theory of meaning or linguistic function. An expressivist about a domain D of discourse proposes that utterances of sentences in D should not be seen, at the level of analysis as representing how things are, but as expression of non-representational states. So, in the domain of value-utterances, the standard idea is that speakers are expressing affective-states, such as approval or disapproval focused on objects or conditions. Global expressivism is the thesis that for all domains of discourse, we treat utterances, at the level of analysis, as expressing non-representational states. I set out several conceptions of how one might formulate this programme. The first involves minimalism about truth and semantic content – and only partially gives up representationalism (viz., the thesis that some utterances express representational states). The second is Price’s conception, which incorporates minimalism, Brandomian inferentalism, and concepts from Carnap, but still clings to representationalism. I then arrive at my favoured third conception, which does not employ minimalism or inferentialism, and eliminates vestiges of representationalism. It does the latter by embracing expressivism about meaning-attribution. Having set out key aspects of the approach I then address the question of metaphysics. What metaphysical conception of reality goes with global expressivism so understood? I argue it implies a form of metametaphysical nihilism. This is that idea that reality lacks any ultimate nature.

I offer a new theory of faultless disagreement, according to which truth is absolute (non-relative) but can still be non-objective. What's relative is truth-aptness: a sentence like ‘Vegemite is tasty’ (V) can be truth-accessible and bivalent in one context but not in another. Within a context in which V fails to be bivalent, we can affirm that there is no issue of truth or falsity about V, still disputants, affirming and denying V, were not at fault, since, in their context of assertion V was bivalent. This theory requires a theory of assertion that is a form of cognitive expressivism.