Francois Recanati

The received view about meteorological predicates like ‘rain’ is that they carry an argument slot for a location which can be filled explicitly or implicitly. The view assumes that ‘rain’, in the absence of an explicit location, demands that the context provide a specific location. In an earlier article in this journal, I provided a counter-example, viz. a context in which ‘it is raining’ receives a location-indefinite interpretation. On the basis of that example, I argued that when there is tacit references to a location, it takes place for pragmatic reasons and casts no light on the semantics of meteorological predicates. Since then, several authors have reanalysed the counter-example, so as to make it compatible with the standard view. I discuss those attempts and argue that my account is superior.

In a recent paper (Linguistics and Philosophy 23, 4, June 2000), Jason Stanley argues that there are no `unarticulated constituents', contrary to what advocates of Truth-conditional pragmatics (TCP) have claimed. All truth-conditional effects of context can be traced to logical form, he says. In this paper I maintain that there are unarticulated constituents, and I defend TCP. Stanley's argument exploits the fact that the alleged unarticulated constituents can be `bound', that is, they can be made to vary with the values introduced by operators in the sentence. I show that Stanley's argument rests on a fallacy, and I provide alternative analyses of the data.

Putnam is known for having demonstated the existence of a new form of context-dependence, namely that which characterizes natural kind terms. Terms like ‘tiger' and ‘water' are indexical, Putnam says, since their conditions of application varies with the context of use — in a suitably broad sense of ‘context'. In this talk I focus on the relation between Putnam's semantics and a body of views I call ‘contextualism'. Contextualism generalizes context-sensitivity : it claims that sentences carry contents only in the context of a speech act. This view was put forward by ordinary language philosophers in the mid-twentieth century, and it has re-surfaced in recent times in the works of philosophers like John Searle, Charles Travis, and myself. In the talk I argue that Putnam's semantics has strong affinities with contextualism.

First person thoughts are the sort of thought one may express by using the first person ; they are also thoughts that are about the thinker of the thought. Neither characterization is ultimately satisfactory. A thought can be about the thinker of the thought by accident, without being a first person thought. The alternative characterization of first person thought in terms of first person sentences also fails, because it is circular : we need the notion of a first person thought to account for the reference rule governing the first person in language. The paper offers a new characterization of first person thought. A first person thought is a thought which deploys the first person concept, where the first person concept is construed as a special kind of ‘mental file’. Mental files are based on, and their reference determined by, epistemically rewarding (ER) relations in which the subject stands to entities in the environment. In the case of the SELF file, the relevant ER relation is identity. This guarantees that the first-person concept refers to the thinker of the thought in which it is deployed.

For Perry and many authors, de se thoughts are a species of de re thought. In this paper, I argue that de se thoughts come in two varieties: explicit and implicit. While explicit de se thoughts can be construed as a variety of de re thought, implicit de se thoughts cannot: their content is thetic, while the content of de re thoughts is categoric. The notion of an implicit de se thought is claimed to play a central role in accounting for the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. Lewis has attempted to unify de re and de se in the opposite direction: by reducing de re to de se . This, however, works only if we internalize the acquaintance relations. I criticize Lewis's internalization strategy on the grounds that it rests on Egocentrism (the view that every occurrent thought is ultimately about the thinker at the time of thinking). In the conclusion, I suggest another way of unifying de re and de se , by extending the implicit/explicit distinction to de re thoughts themselves.